Only the innocent October 12, 2012

  

He can’t even say her name he’s that upset, emailing me late Wednesday to tell me she’s resigned.

The news stunned me even though I had expected it and explained the intense bitterness she’d had during the Tuesday meeting, and the other owners solum tone.

I felt intensely guilty, thinking I had pushed things too far with her about RR, and began to second guess myself about what I had assumed had gone on since last March, when all this madness began.

At the same time, I felt a little roadkill, having been run over several times over the course of the summer and finally feeling as it would not happen again. Yet, I also felt even with her gone, there would never be peace for me again in the office.

He mentioned her replacement in his email, which clearly indicated that she had given noticed long enough ago for management to have sought out someone to fill in almost the moment she left.

When I followed up with a phone call, he was even less coherent, and clearly had not been included in the information loop, finding out about her leaving only when he got into the office.

Even she hadn’t warned him more than a bit of a shock since it is clear now just how much in love with her, he is, and how much her leaving hurt him.

It was worse than just a romantic break up.

She had made him feel important, even needed, in an office that otherwise used and abused him. She went to him for guidance, fulfilling a craving he’d had to play the role of mentor. With her leaving, he must feel an intense emptiness he won’t likely find a way to fill again, or at least, not in the same way.

Hearing his on the verge of tears, I realized just how sincere he had been in this otherwise dark world full of ambition and pain. He was indeed, the one pure thing in all of this, an innocent, who saw himself as worldly when in fact he was the most vulnerable of us all.

What I learned from him, however, is that she wouldn’t be leaving for another week, and so this will extend his pain and perhaps my paranoia, the fear of something else that might transpire before she is physically gone, one last trick of fate that might explode out of the either at the very last moment just when all else seemed resolved.

 

  2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swimming with sharks Nov. 3, 2012

Image
  She’s personal, not political. So, this new arrangement is really all about strange bedfellows, that group of political opportunists that have aligned themselves with the virgin mayor, getting themselves well placed for later profits. She’s never played that game before and may be a little out of her depth when it comes to those kinds of maneuvers. They may also read her wrong as well. She puts on a good act, and they may actually think she’s better connected than she really is. No doubt, they want her to help them do their political dirty work and may be surprised to find she doesn’t know how. This may not be true for the mayor who is nearly as naïve as she is, someone who fell into office because his opponent last year was so unpopular – not just with the people but with other powers, such as the congressman, the little man and the neighboring mayor. Unfortunately, his ineptitude politically has alienated at least two of those three, possibly all of them. But he h...
Read more

Almost famous March 3, 2013

Image
    Her latest post on her personal Facebook page still bemoans her lack of fame., saying that she feels as if she has no place in this world. She expresses jealousy of those who have succeeded and get to live the luxurious life – as referred to in that 2003 poem about change of perspective. She wants to be one of the jet set, and get to shuffled ahead of the crowd, even though as that poem pointed out, she used to hate those kinds of people. The fact that she can’t get there (or perhaps back to it) despite all of her talent and how she had done to achieve really, really frustrates her. She just doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a formula for success. I feel sorry for her, partly because if she can’t get what she wants with all of the talent she has, and her ability to work her way up (trickle up) in whatever structure she finds herself in, it is possible she may never get there, having some fundamental flaw that keeps her from finding the right door and the ...
Read more

A man in a fog July 26, 2012

Image
  The male owner has picked up a new habit during the weekly staff meetings he hadn’t had previously, checking his cell phone’s messaging app -- more so this week and I wonder if it has anything to do with her not being at the meeting. She was out on some assignment she had discussed with him earlier and perhaps texted him to keep him apprised of her progress. Looking back to earlier this year, his behavior mirrors mine from back then, as if he’s anxious for the next message to arrive, regardless of what it says. He seemed very distracted by it, even to the point of missing what we reported and forcing him to have us repeat what we said. Having read the synopsis of my journal, he should have had fair warning and found a way to avoid the fog I walked around in – but clearly, he seems as out of touch as I was at that stage. A few times during the meeting, I found him staring hard at me, as if trying to read something from my expression, or perhaps he feels a bit threatened....
Read more