Prose Piece

What did it mean that she hadn’t written about him? The entire span of time that she’d known him, even before they were an ‘item’, she hadn’t put pen to paper – not in any real way at least. Journal ended at some point in August – she hadn’t even thought about opening it. Well, she’d thought about opening it. And there had been moments when she’d felt like writing, but just didn’t have it on her. The slim leather-bound journal had long been demoted from constant purse companion to bedside table drawer. So, maybe there was a chance for redemption there.
But, no poetry? If you can even call them poems. She has no intellectual pretensions about there e.e.cummings-wannabe, structure-less, unstudied purgings. They had just been a constant in her life – a way of focusing her most intense feelings on paper. She was in no way prolific; no more than ten or so poems per year. But, still.
She had written more last year. And, as usual, she had felt the urge to write with the peaks and goings-on of her relationship at the time. But her pen became mute once things started getting really bad. It was as though she couldn’t face herself at that point – she was keeping the blinders on, goddammit. And, as always, in retrospect, she thought, “If only I’d forced myself to write, I probably would’ve produced my best stuff”.
“Maybe,” she thought, “in the microcosm of me, last summer was Adorno’s Holocaust, after which there can be no more poetry.
Okay, maybe that’s pushing it a little too far.
And how ‘grad student’ of you to allude to Adorno in relation to your love life.”
But, if there had to be a ‘lowest of the low’, last summer was definitely it. She had been this destroyed person. The fool.
“You fool.”
Even now, that echo resounded inside her head. It had been her refrain – while on the bus, while staring out the office window, while jogging. It went well with the slapping of her running shoes against the pavement: “you-fool-you-fool”. She wondered if other people cried while jogging.
But, that’s over. She had ‘come out the other side’, as she liked to put it.
And now there was S, who was wonderful and sweet and caring (and, of course, the opposite of K). She had been entirely open (okay, almost entirely open) about her baggage when she and S stated dating. She had even said, in the initial stages, “I want to make sure that I’m dating you, S, and not just ‘not-K’”.
And, somehow, it has worked out. No crises. No drama. And she was really, truly in it for him.
Human resiliency is really so impressive. Again, it is clear here that she is living the cushy, middle-class, North American life. No, she is not thinking of resiliency in the face of, say, poverty or natural disaster or, I don’t know, life in a war zone. Rather, she is thinking of how her spirit somehow picked up all the pieces and healed from last summer’s heartbreak.
She still occasionally thought of him. But had no desire to see him. It hurt to think of how stupid she’d been. How enamoured she’d been of him. How, deep down, she’d known the difference between them at the beginning.
She remembers asking herself, “Am I not able to read him? Or is there just nothing there to read?” And wasn’t that just the moral of the story: his shallow and selfish nature.
Okay, and the fact that he just didn’t love her back.
“You fool”.