Biting the bullet May 10, 2013

 


After weeks of whining, she finally told herself to top, leaping back onto the treadmill to keep herself occupied.

The romance – as intense as it once was – is clearly dead, if not buried, and she clearly has decided to get on with her life.

“It’s not like you hadn’t expected this to fall apart in your face anyway,” she writes in her latest post.

She is making lemonade now that life has handed her yet one more lemon.

Her salvation comes with routine, keeping her pace going, trying desperately to catch her breath.

She has another side of her life, a public side, duties to perform, people to shore up, pledges to honor, disasters to avert – a bit of hyperbole perhaps and yet always a cure for personal misery – especially if she takes the stance that other people have deeper troubles than she does.

The lemonade comes with the fact that she is not alone; she has people who care about her, people who help keep her from falling.

A slew of people she hadn’t expected to hold her upright, and “a calm hand to whisk a bit of the burden” off her tired back.

“So, today, stop whining,” she writes. “So, you fell apart…keep trying and reverse the curse by working it your way.”

What is missing from the whole love arc, from the heated intensity of the affair’s beginning to the ashes of its run, is the concept of blame.

She does not appear to blame him for the failure of the romance (an incredibly noble gesture considering just how devasted she must feel. If she blames anybody, she blames herself which from my perspective would be a horrible mistake. Or as Forrest Gump might point out, “shit happens.”

As she points out in an earlier and much more bitter poem, she needs to rise up out of the ashes and restore herself, much like the Phoenix in a Harry Potter movie, and as with Harry Potter, she has people who love and she had responsibilities to attend to.

Unlike poems she aimed at me last summer, she is not attacking – and in the subtext even suggests lingering tenderness for the man who used to be her lover, even though the whole thing fell apart.

Through this series of poems anyone reading these poems saw the fatal flaw almost from the start, whether he was a married man or merely engaged (as her last poem hinted), even if she didn’t see the flaw herself, the idea that he already had a life that he would have to surrender in order to be with her, and as suggested, when the time came, the moment when they could have joined together as a couple, she stalled.

He may have raised doubts that shook her. But there was also the idea she might lose personal identity, at which point all was lost, and each poem shows the slow and steady spiral downward, a love that despite pleading and other of her efforts, could not be saved.

This pome makes it clear she is ready to finally bite the bullet and move on, a powerful conclusion to an amazing romance.


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