The Way I See It

November 25-December 25, 1999

During Thanksgiving in Indiana, I visited the library daily and sent emails to Cathy. She was sad because she couldn't be with Andy. I tried to comfort her, to be her friend. I couldn't force her not to love him and love me, but I could love her and let the chips fall where they may. I phoned a few times from Indiana and we talked for hours. Our conversations had gotten better since my heart was broken. We were really connecting.

On December 9, Andy 'allowed' me to visit her for a friendly outing at the river. He hadn't been paying much attention to her and she told me it would sometimes be days between his emails. He told her he had friends he did things with and had a social life to tend to. I found that strange because when I was in love I would hardly be able to take myself away from that person. Did he sound like someone who was in love? Not to me.

The river was fantastic. We walked up and down it and laughed and teased each other. It ended up with us sitting on the dock leaning against each other and writing a nasty poem together (it was pretty repulsive I must say). That feeling I'd had at her shop a few weeks earlier still seemed there. I felt she was still attracted to me. I had a chance, maybe even better than one in a million. Just to see if I was imagining things, before she got in the car for the short drive up to her house, I grabbed her and gave her a big kiss. She didn't fight me.

When I returned to Yorktown two hours later, she sent me an email saying she felt bad that she let me do that and she loved Andy. Our communications became strained and on the night of my 34th birthday, it got bad. I let out my emotions again. We were supposed to meet for my birthday but it didn't happen. Yet another birthday alone. I was so sad.

The next day I told her I was going away for a while. I knew I couldn't keep communicating with her when I felt this way about her. I needed to back off or I'd die from depression, or just have explosive diarrhea. For the record, that has never happened to me, but there's always a first time. I wanted to find myself again. I'd been to paradise, but I'd never been to me.

Horsey is about to give Lunch a shower>>>

Anyway, I knew in my heart Andy didn't love her and the only way to prove that to her was for me to disappear. She'd see what it was like without me around and that Andy wasn't there for her at all. She'd miss me instead of him and be forced to decide which one she wanted. I was forcing her hand.

It was actually a good time, and some of my most productive times when it came to poetry. I wrote Still , a melancholy account of me missing Cathy after she died (I was thinking of her leaving for Boston), which was really just four instant messages I'd sent to someone when I was drunk that I later found when I was deleting message history. Who woulda thunk?
I wrote Twelve, a super mushy piece that was a finished version of an earlier unfinished piece called Eleventh Hour, another super mushy piece. And then, two of my all-time favorites-- Gussy (the tap dancing blue whale), the anti-mush poem. I wrote most of that while in the bath tub. And on Christmas day, I wrote This Day is Done, a very melancholy piece about me crashing my bicycle on the Blue Ridge Parkway and dying on the side of the road, and what would be going through my mind. It was a real fear I had back when I was married and used to drive up there alone to race up and down the mountains at crazy speeds. It was meant to be more of a Don Quixote than a Vincent van Gogh piece. My co-workers knew I was going through some serious emotional strain and depression, and when I sent out a poem that began and ended with "It's a good day to die", my phone was ringing off the hook with my boss ordering me to go be with someone. I told him I didn't want to kill myself. Geez!

Besides, I still loved Moo. Still.

The amazing Moo will ride a horsey without using her paws...almost>>>