After more than a year, many of the events that took place
have blended together in one large smear of memory that even my daily journal
struggles to make sense of.
My poetry journal tends to reflect many of the incidents
better – at least in their emotional impact yet doesn’t really give details any
more than her poetry blog does her experiences.
I can probably break down the whole thing into periods, such
as that melting pot of memory just after her first text back in March 2012 –
not exactly a happy period, but less contentious, when I suspected I was being
manipulated – “I’m really into you,” she said – to that period when I had
fallen out of grace and she had moved on to our former temporary boss, and
eventually the owner, though to lay out what happened in any kind of chronological
order was beyond me even then, and now impossible to break out except for how I
might have felt, such as the realization at some point in early May 2012 that
everything was over, and I unwisely did not accept it, making matters worse.
I had no real way to understand what was transpiring, and
even now, it seems like a fog out of which particularly things appear more
clearly than others, though without any logical sense.
If there was a rime or reason, I spent the better part of
the last year trying to find it, and still do not believe I fully understand
what transpired, coming up with various theories, some of which may be true,
although most only scratching the surface of a complex personality I may never
fully comprehend, a soul that switches shells too often to pin down.
Part of all this was the fog I walked around in, both during
the good times and especially the bad, though the most vivid moments were those
with extreme emotions, most often negative, but not always – the boat ride,
even the time at the diner (although her angry poem had me banging my own head
against a brick wall or stabbing the back of my hand with a fork.)
Over the whole of it, I wrote a lot in my poetry journal, only
a portion of which actually made it into my blog (thanks to my cyber nanny) and
which I’ve recently gone back to in an attempt to reassemble events, though
poetry is not reality, and there are moments of confusion that made recovering memory
impossible.
As I said, some moments stand out even out of the fog, such
as those times at the bars, the first kiss, my seeking advice from our temporary
boss, then sabotaging him out of jealousy.
Abandoning her at the bar stands out vividly and so even my
poetry notebook has such painful recollections, I’ll never forget it, the smell
of the place, the look on couple at the bar next to us, my jealousy at the
attention she gave the bartender, my stupid mistake of bringing her a card and
candy, which she hated (not yet wise enough to know she dislikes such ostentatious
symbolic gestures the way many intelligent people hate Hallmark cards.)
All this comes ahead of the one year anniversary of perhaps
my biggest and most painful blunder, when I texted her on her birthday and got
bushwacked by her brother, father, mother in law and such, the text of which I
copied into my journal verbatim, still painful to read, and yet a lesson in
humility – and the aftermath, the quick sand and compassion poems in which she
seemed to show mercy on me, despite may clear violation of her space.
It is a lesson well if painfully learned, with the full
knowledge that I most likely will never speak to her again, not even – or perhaps
especially – to offer happy wishes she’ll never believe or accept.
My journals – regular journal, poetry journal and the other
odd journals I tend to keep – served as solace for me, where I could write my
way out of the pain and stupidity, a record of my own foolishness as well as an
exploration into her, one of the still great mysteries of the universe.
Her poetry and her music have served as an inspiration for
me, a challenge to understand the first, and the immense pleasure of listening
to the second. These are true treasures, ones that will eventually she will
eventually cease, though I know I will return again and again to them, if not
for comfort, then to better understand what it is that happened to both of us
over this period of our lives.
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