Car Wreck, Dec. 26, 2012

I know this looks scary as all get out.  I think I will forever be reminded of this day and know that it was just chance that in all that spinning on the icy highway that both impacts with the big truck and the semi never smashed on the driver’s side… All I can assume is that if it had, I’d at the very least have a mangled left leg.  Instead, I walked away with bruises.  Bruises… I can live with that.  And I do.  I still get a little shaken up thinking about someone being a nutjob speeding through an intersection when I’m unlucky enough to be crossing through… But it hasn’t happened yet.

I miss Emmylou.  I love that blue car.  But red Lucinda will work.  Not only is that name a reference to my poetry collection, but it just dawned on me the storyline almost echoes the succession of cars.  In the poems, mother Claire dies at the hands of a violent resentful husband who then also abandons his daughter Lucinda.  Lucinda grows up to marry another farmer man who attempts the same failed ideas of her father, more resentment and anger taken out on her.  But instead of falling to the same fate as her mother, she packs up and leaves him.  Lucinda not only survives, but she is stronger.
Oh, see that CD on the dash on the left? It was Iron and Wine’s “Kiss Each Other Clean.” It wasn’t as scratched up as it would seem to be.  It was in the visor over my head. Ray LaMontagne’s “Till The Sun Turns Black” was playing in the CD player at the time of wreck. I managed to recover all my CDs after the wreck.  Including the John Fullbright disc that was still in the visor pocket. Oh music, music, music…

I still wonder about the statue I saw in the cemetery that was alongside the highway where the wreck happened.  As I was trying to think of who and how to call someone I noticed it across the snow-covered field. I stared at it for a few seconds, grew calm, and everything after that seemed to just fall into place.  I cannot seem to find any pictures of the cemetery that shows that far left side clear enough… to see if that was really a statue or if I imagined something else.

intensities

On my lengthy drive the other day it dawned on me the similarities of three intense crushes I have had, and intense is not a word to be taken lightly or consider exaggerated.

The first of these involved someone I had only met two weeks before I moved out of state.  We worked together. I went out to eat with her a few times, hung out at her apartment a few times, and only really got to know a few detailed pieces of her history, much of her life still being untold and somewhat guarded.  I took a job out of state, moved there, and several months followed with an intensity of having missed out on 1) at least sharing with her that I had this crush on her, intense admiration and adoration for someone who probably didn’t have the same kind of feelings for me, and 2) having realized these feelings existed within me too late. I do not think, though, that it was anything similar on her part.  I cried often after I moved. I felt out of place and unsure of what I had allowed myself to feel and to miss.

The second was a crush on a fellow poet ten years my junior. It came on rather slowly, but once I recognized it, the welling of admiration for all that was him consumed me.  I caged the feelings. I valued the slow growing friendship we had, the tiny bits of his personal history he shared candidly but also without lengthy telling.  Bits of emotion, passion, masked with cynicism and pretended nonchalance.  At times the intensity of my feelings for him declared that I would wait all my life for him to realize we were meant to be together.  I’d wait, not force or push the matter. Wait.  But a another job taking me out of state, him moving to an even more distant state, every other week phone calls fading into monthly calls, every other month calls, once a season calls, and now… I’m not sure when I might hear his voice again.  Sometimes I called him, more often he called me to catch up, share something he’d read, written, thought out, listened to, watched.  He introduced me to David Gray over the phone when he was in Maine.  See, bits of him while forever be scattered throughout my day in little reminders like that.  I cannot think of David Gray without thinking of who introduced me to his music.  But he’s a protective personality.  Private.  Anything personal and intimate that he shared with me in the slightest of detail I felt was a show to trust and goodness, I wasn’t about to blab what was told to me to anyone else. I felt I was a valued friend. A confidant, however small the little bits might be.  And now, I’ve come to accept there is no need to wait.  And all this distance and time.  Love, yes, but waiting, no.  If I saw him tomorrow, talked together at length, shared some moments… I can’t say it wouldn’t all flood right back — it probably would — but I don’t believe I’ll see him again for a long time to come.  So… about 6 years.  Yes, 6 years is long enough to wait and to say, enough.

And now, thinking on this long drive, I think earlier this year I might’ve had a self-preservation moment.  I think I realized that an admiration for another friend had grown so much and so intensely that it was becoming a little too much to admit to myself, but most importantly, to not admit or express to this friend.  It would make things strange, awkward, and most certainly unrequited.  I don’t see this friend having similar feelings for me at all.  And she’s brightly beautiful inside, which is what has attracted me to all these individuals.  Passionate, emotional though with hesitation.  True caring.  Also, a very private individual, guarded, and shares only with whom she trusts, which I think includes me.  And so looking back, I think my weird distancing was in fact some weird way of guarding myself, but at the same time I berated myself for withdrawing without explanation, and also missing the friendship I saw forming.  I don’t think I have entirely broken that thread though, and soon it will be repaired.  However, again, I am sure intensity of admiration will swell up again and

I’ll have to continue to smile through it.

But that’s okay, because the friendship is worth it.  Some people you don’t want to lose their presence in your life.