I keep going back to a poem she posted in late May, 2012.
It was a recreation of our meeting at the diner, but bitterly
reinterpreting what had been a special moment for me (and I thought both of us).
She posted the poem at about the same time she sent me a photo
of her hanging off her roof, after I left her at the bar in Hometown.
When I first read the poem, I thought the “you” was
metaphoric, but later realized it was addressed to me.
I was no doubt meant to read it during that week as her reevaluation
of that moment, the talk over coffee, the stabbing the back of my hand with a
fork, the bashing of my head against a wall, telling me that the pain I was feeling
was self-inflicted (and after all this time an apt assessment), though it like
many of the poems I go back to again and again, full of judgement I find difficult
to face.
Thinking back, I should have lived up to my initial
intentions of keeping it noble and pure, an unrealistic theory considering how
attracted I was (and still am) to her.
Yet, I had managed it with other people such as my cyber
nanny (when she still lived in Paterson), to whom I was equally attracted, and
yet knew better than to get involved with. We actually shared a bed in a motel when
we had to visit her boyfriend in jail and I struggled most of the night trying
to contain it. I had a similar reaction during a trip to Cape May shortly
before our poet resigned, and in a half dream state imagined that the moaning from
the other room – and the banging bed against the wall – was her, and I pondered
myself in the male role.
Older in this regard is not always wiser. We set noble
standards we can’t possibly live up to. And so, her poem about doing it all to
myself proves much more accurate than I was willing to admit at the time.
In physics, laws of attraction prove too powerful a force to
resist, and these laws also apply to this as well.
And the more I read this poem and several others bitterly
written, I understand the only way to avoid impending disaster is to steer as
far away from temptation as possible, and hope that fate or whatever doesn’t
drag me back.
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