About a poem written April 7, 2012
She sent the poem via email the day after our drinks at the German bar in early April, trying to explain what had happened, a rare glimpse inside her head, I didn’t fully appreciate at the time., me, searching it out again as the year comes to a close, nostalgic, I suppose, and regretful about my own folly.
“We sat there, and I talked too much, “she wrote. “But something about his eyes always demands it, First work, then the deeper, darker bits of my soul, That hardly anyone -- if anyone ever -- has heard Or cared to hear.”
The poem set the scene so that now, all these months later, I can easily picture it in my head.
“The outdoor light dimmed, and the indoor light glowed, And the people swirled around us, making a cocoon and buzzing, With yuppie nothings, And yet the more there were, The more it was just him and me.”
I remember wondering what was going on in her head, only for her to hand it to me the next day on a silver platter.
“Then the thoughts crept in,” she wrote, “The ones we try to keep down. I saw myself place my hands above his shoulders and onto the top of the chair he sat in, and I straddled his lap. And stared into his eyes, open and pooling blue, while my own dark ones accused him pf making me do it, demanded he explain why and what I cannot help but feel, and how it is I feel so undone and done up all at once.”
What I thought she was thinking as I sipped my German beer never came close to the reality (or perhaps matched my own thinking which I would not admit.
“I saw him pull the shirt over my head and scratch my back as I buried him with me, right there,” she wrote. “Even if it happened, I thought no one would see since they're all so wrapped up in their own entangled finances and empty jobs.”
She apparently forced herself out of the fantasy.
“I pulled myself back to the conversation and forgot the passing of time,” she wrote. ‘’And forgot the thought of the inevitable call back to his life, back to his home, back to his wife, until he paid the bill and moved to go. But I wasn't finished yet. I wanted to stay in our cocoon and rock back and forth on the thought of what I could not do and played it cool as we left the bar and pretended my heart hadn't broken just a little for his leaving for the one, he's committed his life to.”
At this point, her poem stirs up a particular painful memory she would later recount on the telephone, but committed to her email as well
“Going home to an empty bed when you want someone in it is hard,” she wrote. “So, I didn't go home but went out, and was given an absurd alternative that satisfied nothing, but distracted me for a while. In my wine-and-denial haze, as some strange man on probation, with no idea how to empathize with, to care for, or to please a woman, did things while I watched, amused, but uncaring, and I wondered if he fucked his wife that way, and was he doing it now? And if, If we broke our ‘high road’ pledge, unlike so many before, would he make me come?”
Reading it again here, the pain and attraction of it, the foolishness at my being jealous of the man she’d picked up after our parting still stings, not jealousy, but regret, sadness at my own stupidity, and vaguely wishing I had it to do all over again, and how different it might have come out.
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