He can’t even say her name he’s that upset, emailing me late Wednesday to tell me she’s resigned.
The news stunned me even though I had expected it and explained the intense bitterness she’d had during the Tuesday meeting, and the other owners solum tone.
I felt intensely guilty, thinking I had pushed things too far with her about RR, and began to second guess myself about what I had assumed had gone on since last March, when all this madness began.
At the same time, I felt a little roadkill, having been run over several times over the course of the summer and finally feeling as it would not happen again. Yet, I also felt even with her gone, there would never be peace for me again in the office.
He mentioned her replacement in his email, which clearly indicated that she had given noticed long enough ago for management to have sought out someone to fill in almost the moment she left.
When I followed up with a phone call, he was even less coherent, and clearly had not been included in the information loop, finding out about her leaving only when he got into the office.
Even she hadn’t warned him more than a bit of a shock since it is clear now just how much in love with her, he is, and how much her leaving hurt him.
It was worse than just a romantic break up.
She had made him feel important, even needed, in an office that otherwise used and abused him. She went to him for guidance, fulfilling a craving he’d had to play the role of mentor. With her leaving, he must feel an intense emptiness he won’t likely find a way to fill again, or at least, not in the same way.
Hearing his on the verge of tears, I realized just how sincere he had been in this otherwise dark world full of ambition and pain. He was indeed, the one pure thing in all of this, an innocent, who saw himself as worldly when in fact he was the most vulnerable of us all.
What I learned from him, however, is that she wouldn’t be leaving for another week, and so this will extend his pain and perhaps my paranoia, the fear of something else that might transpire before she is physically gone, one last trick of fate that might explode out of the either at the very last moment just when all else seemed resolved.
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