Do you know me at all June 15, 2013

 

 

Looking back to a poem she posted in late April 2012; I realize she had already expressed some doubts about what transpired between us.

This is brought out in my journal entry on social engineering. She clearly thought she knew me and what I was about from her research, something she did with other people in the past and again with the temporary boss who she apparently planned as my replacement.

Yet she was surprised by what transpired afterwards.

Instinctively, I knew she was manipulating me, and my gut reaction was to pull away. She also confused me or at least my response to her did. Had I been wiser, the way our temporary boss was wise, I would have accepted her affection for as long as she gave it and then quietly fallen into the less intense role as one of her friends, like her husband did. like the author who wrote about her career as a teacher did. I might even have continued as of her working things out of affairs and enjoyed all she had to offer.

But as time proved, I was unwise and more than once I came to regret the fact that I had alienated her rather than appreciating what she had to offer.

This poem in late April clearly indicates her own doubts about me even before the real painful fireworks that came after my abandoning her at the bar and she appears to have already moved on from me, taking aim at our temporary boss as a better option.

“You think you know a person,” she wrote, after having gathered as much information as possible, birthday, job, quotes, home, etch, even a photo or two.

“Knowledge collected in coffees, where stories, highlights, expression, fears emerge into a three-dimension form, maybe an insight or two.”

But there are other things like betrayals, quirks, denials anxieties and the glimpse into the fourth dimension, as well.

And as the poem suggests she came to realize just how little she really knew me, and it was too late to go back and start all over.

The use of terms like “Three Dimension” and “Fourth Dimension” may be an allusion to the one-eyed jack poem she wrote about me a month earlier, and an allusion to time and reality, her putting together pieces of a puzzle that turns out not to be what she expected, and this sense of possibly wasting time in this pursuit.

Told in three stanzas, the poem starts out with outlining her social engineering pattern, researching her intended target -- i.e., my book on her bed replaced later by a book written by our temporary boss, as well as all the other research on the internet she did to evaluate each of us before making her move.

Only, each of us came off with a different reaction. I got nervous, feeling manipulated, where as our temporary boss reacted more the way she expected, sympathetic, welcoming, not at all suspicious.

His was a legitimate reaction, not at all put on, as he fell madly in love with her and how much she appeared to need him – she becoming the cub reporter for him the way she tried to be with me, playing up to that part of him which needed someone like she pretended to be.

Had I been wiser, I might have pretended to go along with her agenda, acting out the role of mentor to a whom who I knew then as I know even better now, was a far better writer than I was, and no more needed my guidance than a sighter person needs a seeing eye dog.

Looking back, I realize that she had already moved on when I still thought we were together. Had I read this poem more carefully I might have realized sooner she no longer had to use for me, and I might have avoided some of the mistakes I made later, especially my confiding in our temporary boss about her.

I had mistakenly assumed he was as suspicious about her as I was.

Maybe suspicious is the wrong word. wary fits better.

But he was smitten and even later when it all began to unravel, he did his best to protect his fragile relationship with her.

He even cried later when he learned about her resignation, missing her more than a mere mentor would.

Her poem, however, is about her mistakenly believing she knew what I was all about, which may be why she was shocked later at some of my foolhardy reactions, my intense jealousy in regard to her moving on to the temporary boss and the owner.

As it turns out she didn't know me at all.

 

   2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

 

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