If you move, you sink Aug. 3, 2012

  

Two days after getting bushwhacked by her family, she posted a short but poignant poem that on first reading seemed like she was taking a victory lap.

It essentially seemed to say, “The more you fight, the more you lose.”

And in my initial journal entry I called it “a parting shot and a victory trot now that she’s finally backed me into a corner from which I cannot escape.”

In this earlier reading of her poem I said, “She seems exuberant, even kindly, giving me a nod as if to say, now that she has control, we can finally have peace.”

The poem surprised me because I assumed once I surrendered, she would shut down everything and I would cease to exist.

The whole point of the conflict for me from the start was not to have the door slammed in my face when I believed I did nothing to deserve it (although I clearly did things since as knee jerk reaction.)

Mary Ann, my oldest friend and a poet living out west, believes much of the conflict on her end is less about isolating me than controlling me, forcing me to abide by her wishes.

I’m not sure I agree, although I do believe the whole affair is about control, though I do expect she might still punish me for the hurt I caused her – real or imagined.

She will certainly keep me at arm’s length, and – as Mary Ann suggests – might use other people to get at me, flirting with other men in the office as if to say, “This is what you could have had, but you blew it.”

But I suspect the flirting has nothing to do with me. And I think she’s more worried about what I might do next, especially since I haven’t post anything recently on my blog except for a musical video “Helpless.” She most likely checks in on my blog to make certain I’m living up to our new arrangement.

Since there is nothing on the blog about her, I wonder if she’s disappointed?

After having read her most recent poem several times over the last two days, I’ve begun to question my original reaction to it. The poem does not seem to be gloating as I first assumed, but rather a kindly message of sage advice about accepting the inevitable – since she had made it clear more than once since May that there is no future, and we have ended up ultimately where we were destined to, perhaps made worse by my resisting it.

The metaphor of life as quick sand is apt, and when reading the poem again this time, I get a tone less of hostility than of sad regret. Why struggle for something that can never exist?

If you’re caught in quick sand, the more you struggle the faster you sink, and the more pointless resistance is. Better just to let it happen. The quick sand always wins anyway.

I prefer this second reading in that it shows a kindlier side of her, which is not as ruthless as her poems of rage. The tone is sad regret at my inability to understand in the first place and sadness that the whole mess has gone as far as it has, when it was clear from the start how it would all end.


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