A full year after all of the insanity started, I’m only beginning to put the pieces together, and how I have misread so much over the whole of it, sometimes wary of traps that never existed.
This is not to say that she isn’t a player. She knows how to make the system work, but seems after all the pain expressed, all of the restless nights, all of the hamster in her brain mornings, she pays a dear price for trying to get ahead.
And sometimes, when love comes – as it appears to have over the last month or so – it comes with a booby trap, that causes the whole thing to self-destruct.
Sometimes, I mistook her as a maser game player, someone who could work the system and get what she wants from it, when it seems she is scrambling all the time to put together the pieces of a puzzle without knowing what the puzzle picture looks like and so ends up with a picture like nothing she ever figured on in her head, and she ends up with something less than she had in the first place.
While I sometimes feared she might be laying a mine field for me to stumble upon, I suspect she probably no longer thinks about me at all, except when I inadvertently stumble into her world, and all the rage and fear she felt, all the locking and unlocking of doors, comes rushing back into her head.
I don’t even think she blames me for ruining her life, just for being a stubborn obstacle, a pestilent fool who gummed up what could have been something special for her.
It almost bruised my ego to think I’m not unimportant, but I suspect that she absolutely meant what she said in that poem last summer when she granted me absolution and then told me to go away.
I do believe that there were zingers in some of the poems in early fall, but as time went on, and she got on with her life, even those vanished.
I’m sure she knows I read her poems, and again, I get the sense that she is throwing out these pieces like messages in bottles, not for anyone in particular to read but for someone who might get it.
I keep thinking of the line from the poem last year which she wrote about me, and how she said, “Don’t try to save me.”
She doesn’t want to be the fairy princess rescued by a knight in shining armor, she wants to be the knight who rescues herself. She needs to be in control of things, even when she also needs to have the kind of tender contact that comes with love. She’s scared to stop and smell the roses, knowing that she always gets punctured by the thorns. In some ways, I was one of those thorns, eventually plunked out and cast aside, but always remembered as something painful.
Over time, I’ve come to realize just how powerful a force she is, but also how she tended to mix her personal life with he professional, not just in our office, but in all the places she’s been employed, and so she has no real retreat except back into head when relationships go sour.
Sometimes, it’s about love at all, but ambition as she works things out as she works her way up to a position where she feels important. She flatly said she didn’t love the chef, and her poem back in September or August talked about her only having loved four times in her life, the rest, I think, sort of fit into the working it out category.
This is not a moral judgement. She is doing what she thinks she needs to survive, climbing each painful rung using whatever tools god gave her, trickling up to a place she thinks she belongs.
She was always bragging to the gossips at our office about how her job with us was only a stepping stone to something else, as they all seemed to be, only with no real end in sight, needing something more to fill this craving inside her, but it is insatiable, and ultimately self-destructive.
Now, she has fallen in love again, and at a bad time, and there is nothing anybody can do, and little she can do for herself, but ride it out, and wait to resurrect as she always has in the past, and she finds a new pathway to success, and a new way to trickle up in some other institution. It will not be the one she is working at now, maybe not the next or the one after that, but eventually, she will rise like cream to the top, and maybe, just maybe, finally find happiness.
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