Thursday, March 23, 2023

Reading the tea leaves May 2013

  

 


A fascinating pattern has emerged as someone began probing poems I posted on my blog back in April 2012, at what would have been the height of my brief association with her.

If she is the one doing the probing, the question is why: Is she being nostalgic for that all-too-brief time of tranquility, or is she searching for something else?

The impression I get is that she is the kind of gal that once she leaves a situation, she never goes back. She moves on.

Although at the same time, I suspect if someone is persistent enough, depending on just how safe she feels. If unthreatened, she might even look back at some old romance with some affection, viewing someone with some regret as if a missed opportunity. This may well be true of her stalker from Brooklyn, when at the time she thought she was stuck “frittering every possible bit of energy away into whatever random task/job/relationship” she decided to “codependently sacrifice” herself, or would spend the rest of her expectedly short life to the concept of carpe diem.

She resigned the job, and yet, it becomes clear she could never separate her ambition from her flirtation, and the fact that she continued to communicate with her stalker long after she left the job (while at the same time accusing him of being a stalker), showed some level of lingering affection for the man – even though she put his stalking to good use in winning over future allies.

There is no way of coming to the same conclusion with me, and the tone of her most recent poems suggest still glowing coals of rage. Which makes her probing of my old poems (if it is her at all) all the more puzzling.

What I neglected to note was her claim in earlier posts that she suffered from heart problems due to the anxiety and stress, which she believes will lead her to live a short life. She also suffers from a contagious variety of cervical cancer (This according to the blogger GA, who learned it from two local attorneys in Hometown, who had contracted the cancer as a result of oral sex).

Her leaving the job with her Brooklyn stalker may have had more to do with the lack of future opportunities the job provided than the man himself – he was a poor manager, tips were down, and the business seemed about to hit the rocks. The same thing would have eventually happened if she had stayed at our office – something she well knew and why she told the office gossip that her job with us was just a stepping stone – perhaps to television or The New York Times.

But she knew she tended to self-destruct when things in her life became too settled –something of a self-deception since calm such as that was never real, an illusion seen from the outside, while chaos reigns within.

New York was no exception. She previously went through the same dilemma.

“I knew in my heart things were not right,” she said. “But I eat myself back into submission with the usual arsenal of excuses.”

It is difficult to know from the outside if the calm she appears to be inside of with her current job is merely the eye of a storm.

Most people learn and grow from experience. Not so much with her. She frequently spoke about “sacrifice,” or blamed the industry, and bolstered herself with the idea that she had to suck it up, a phrase she frequently used.

The fact that she tends to get involved romantically with the bosses at each of these places, suggests that her current failed romance has been with someone in authority, and that she has somehow come around again to that same point where she might need to suck it up or move on.

But unlike her job in New York, which really was a temporary situation while she tried to figure out how she could pursue her life as an artist, the current job really is a trap.

People tended to call her lucky because she has so many talents, but she often burns out even in art.

“I find myself unable to focus,” she said. “I’ve done the singing thing and found out how quickly what you love can turn into what you love to hate.”

Over the years, she did a lot of other things she loved, and in each case somehow managed to love to hate each.

Quoting Camus, she said, “There will always be external circumstances that will bring you down. It’s what you make of it that counts.”

Which brings us back to where she is today, and if she is looking for someone to blame for her current predicament. If I read the tea leaves right, I’m being eyed as her scape goat. I hope I am wrong.

 

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