We come back to where she was last fall, if for different reasons, down and out, not in Paris, but in her own misery.
So, it is not surprising that she would post a poem to her oldest and dearest friend in Haverton, apparently someone she always turns to when her world falls apart, someone I went into more detail in journal entry last fall and mentioned in previous journal about her searching out my website.
This is a friend she grew up with, greatly admires, and has come to trust.
This explains the drastic shift in tone from her previous poem, trading extreme bitterness for intense tenderness and affection.
She has nowhere else to go, so she goes home – not to her biological family, but to someone as closer or closer than her biological brother.
This poem is a lot like a letter home (even though by all indications, she actually made the trip to see him).
She is playing off the old cliché of “a penny for your thoughts” converting this to how much of a collection of pennies she’d have for each time she thought of him.
She’s poor so she can’t afford much more than a penny for “every time I think of you or see you or witness you in your endless, beautiful action.”
He has quiet moments, too, she says, but these are rare, since he has so many things he can do, thinks that serve to protect him against the ills of the world.
She calls him “more than perfect” just the way he is, how he expresses in affection “inside the crease of his brow,” and how he bears the burden of others (including hers), a broad-shouldered Atlas, who is weary with the effort, but tells himself he loves doing it.
She mentions how his voice changes when he lets his defenses down, exposing how scared he sometimes gets, and tends to deny “the fact that you have needs and wants,” which he reluctantly begins to accept – if only to make her happy.
This passage suggests (and perhaps I read too much into it) that her relationship with him is not completely platonic, and while they are friends of the most sincere sort, they may also comfort each other physically, something she may encourage out of sympathy and legitimate compassion.
She admires his humility as well as his talent, knowing he could boast or seek material success, and yet does not. She notes how deep in grease his life is (working some fast-food place as noted in my journal last fall), serving people, and how he will sometimes stop, lie down in the strangest places, such as the floor “where those you serve have sprung from.”
This is an odd expression, perhaps implying that he’s better than the people he serves.
She admires, too, his odd gestures, fingers to face when he is thoughtful and when he thinks nobody is looking.
The intensity of her admiration comes partly because he is someone who is always there for her when she needs him most and comes at a time when she is down and out in a way she hasn’t been in years. She needs him to reassure her again.
Yet surprisingly, her breakdown differs from some of those she suffered in the past. She is still employed. She has not fled to some remote location. She still lives where she lives.
It is hear heart that needs repairing, and she is reaching out to the one person she is confident can repair her.
Although the tone of the poem is extremely positive, it clearly shows she had hit rock bottom.
She apparently wrote this after having gone out to see him last week, and come home with the still-warm feelings of having see him, a letter of gratitude, although it is uncertain how long she can maintain he temporary repair with all of the mounting pressure of her job and her shattered love life.
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