Friday, October 18, 2024

The impossibility of taking the high road april 7, 2014

  

it is not exactly nostalgic that makes me go back to poems she emailed me 2 years ago but a sense of needing to be reminded of what transpired then the time and all the experience seems to have blurred.

And how impossible and unfair to her to try to take what we called “the high road,” in the midst of the intensity of lust.

Two years ago-- exactly to the day -- she sent me a poem explaining her brief flirtation with the man on probation from the bar which by text she described as working out something sex.

The poem was remarkable in several senses that it reminded me of just what transpired then and the fact that we had pledged to take the high road when in fact that became violated quickly but at the time we were celibate and what prompted her apparently to seek out the other man was my violating that pledge with a kiss

What became clear is that I wanted to use her in much the same way other men had, yet was unwilling to surrender what I had, and yet expected her to live up to unrealistic promises neither of us could keep (and most likely I never intended to keep.)

Her phone talks about our time at the bar – the second bar in Hometown, not the German bar where we had started out -- and how we sat there and she claimed to talk too much

She said something about my eyes demanded it.

First we spoke about work then when into deeper darker bits of her soul that hardly anyone if anyone ever had heard or cared to hear.

I think now two years later, that aspect of our relationship was sincere. I legitimately wanted to know everything about her – and later got scared when she gave me exactly what I asked for. This became the nugget of my betraying her still later, when she opened up her soul, trusting me perhaps in a way she’d not trusted anyone previously.

We were seated in one of the tables outside the bar in the semi dark while the indoor lights glowed and people, she said, swirled around us, making a cocoon and buzzing all with yuppie nothings and yet more of them there were the more it was just the two of us, isolated and protected.

the interaction, of course, could not help us from thinking what we should not have thought because of our “high road pledge,” which could not keep down the intense attraction we both felt towards each other.

She said she saw herself placing her hands above my shoulders and straddling my lap, staring into my blue eyes (I must have been wearing blue that day because my eyes change color to reflect what I wear) while I started into dark eyes.

She said my eyes made her fantasize and make demands on her.

then it's a confusing phraseology she appeared to come undone about all of these, and yet felt as if it was the right thing to do, and expanded on a fantasy I had already had, but had left unspoken about pulling up her shirt over her head, scratching at her back, burying my face between her breasts --right there in the bar, in the public, even though no one would see she thought since they're other people all wrapped up at their own in tangled finances and empty jobs

At which point she forced herself out of the fantasy and back to the conversation, time passing but not the eventual call home back to my life, back to my home, back to my wife and then I paid the bill and we moved on.

It is remarkable how insightful she was that early in what transpired, and how she understood the impossibility of it, when I foolishly assumed otherwise.

What she really wanted was someone who could come home with her and spend the night, holding her, making love to her, sharing something special, all made impossible by the call home. She could never get what she needed most from this regardless of what tender feelings existed.

Even then, she didn’t want the talk to end. She wanted to stay in the cocoon and rock back and forth, but played it cool as we left the bar, pretending her heart hadn't broken just a little for my leaving for to return to the one I was committed to while she was condemned to go home to an empty bed when she really wanted someone to be in it.

All this was a build up to explain why she later wound up with another man and to help ease the shock I felt later when she told me about it over the phone.

The fact that she told me about it at all is shocking. She did not be so honest. She apparently believed that the trust we had created would allow her to confess what was really not a transgression at all.

She called the man an alternative who really didn't satisfy everything but it distracted her for a while and in a haze of wine and denial she spoke about the strange man on probation who had no idea how to emphasize with he,r to care for or to please a woman

She described a kind of out-of-body experience where that he did things while she watched amused but uncaring.

Then her thoughts focusing on me wondering if I fucking my wife at the very moment she was fucking him.

And she wondered what would happen if we broke our high road pledge

reading this 2 years later makes a lot more sense to me than it did at the time, when I was confused, not yet realizing that we or dancing on the edge of something and that we were playing with emotional and hormonal Dynamite that was bound to explode in some way or another and that her affair -- which was her affair and one she had every right to be involved with -- was a way of diffusing the bomb before it went off

ultimately of course there is the same problem that she would later encounter with her affair of the mind in that the then she seems to fall in love with have lives elsewhere and ultimately she is left alone and needs to fill that space somehow even if it's meaningless

I did not understand that at the time and it is taken 2 years of following her life through poetry to fully comprehend this need and her right to pursue her own happiness

It makes me wonder about the struggle over the last year from that moment in the sun until she finally surrendered to realize whoever she is in love with now will not be coming back into her life and how empty she must feel, facing crises like a eating disorder without some real love to support her.


email to Al Sullivan

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