Nothing to be done
Apr. 1st, 2005 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyCan you be in love for twenty-five years? I rather think not. Still, a passion that is a quarter of a century old can still attach itself to the memory of that person. Twenty-five years is a long time. No one is who they were then.
There was, there was, and yet there was not, there once was a girl named Angela.
We went to high school together. She was doing her level best to seduce me, and I was so innocent that I never noticed. I had led a very sheltered life, due to crazy fundamentalist parents. Anga was the least conventional person I knew, a constant font of brilliant new ideas, a poet, and a beauty. She had a full Italian figure, and black, black hair down to her waist. I never knew I was in love.
I moved far away for my senior year of high school. (Not my fault.) Time and space did what time and space always do, and we fell out of touch.
About ten years ago, I found her phone number (I don't remember how), and called her. She was at a very good university at the time and had a husband and three kids. This was ten years ago, so my memory is certainly incomplete in some places and simply wrong in others. I remember her being surprised, and I remember her saying that she would never deny me. She told me that she had, of course, told her husband about me. I heard a faint stress in her voice, as if her husband disapproved of me, or her past, or perhaps both. It felt as if I was a potential point of marital conflict. She had three kids and had returned to traditional Catholicism. That last flabbergasted me, but every conversation I've ever had with her flabbergasted me. Her voice was so sweet. It was gentle and musical, sweeter than I remembered. Faulty memory, or change? Who knows. She said she'd call; she never did.
She's been on my mind, recently. I don't know why, the brain does tricky things when you're not watching it. Come to think of it, it will do tricky things when you are watching it. There was google, and there was my curiosity, and I still knew how to spell her last name. She might well be using her married name, in which google would do me no good at all, but what the heck?
I found an Angela who was an instructor at a different university. Her focus appeared to be pollution in Pittsburgh, with emphasis on how it interacted with class and gender. The school we were in together was in Pittsburgh. It seemed almost a certainty that this was the same woman. I was still in love with the high school girl of twenty-five years ago. I had missed her, on and off, these past years, sometimes intensely. I knew that a lot of time had passed, and that she might not want to talk to me at all. I was encouraged by the fact that an old friend, out of touch for about the same period of time, was delighted to hear from me, and we maintain an intermittent correspondence via email.
I sent email to the address listed on the university webpage, asking if she were the Angela I went to high school with, and giving my contact information. I got no response. Now, patience is not my virtue. I waited a little more than three weeks before I sent a follow-up. During that three weeks, I had been looking at the scholarship that was available on the net. The person in question had been at Notre Dame at the right time, had a stint at CMU at the right time, and in the correct specialty, and I became more and more sure that it was Anga. Based on the number of times her work was referenced, it seemed that her academic career was going well.
I sent a follow-up email that said that if she wasn't the Angela that I'd gone to school with, I'd eat my hat.
I got back a message saying, Yes it's me, but I don't have time to get into a correspondence. (Note the lack of the comforting words, "right now." This is a go away message.) She said that she had three kids, a job, stage-4 breast cancer, a husband who worked 60 hours a week, and a dissertation to turn into a book.
I looked it up. The five year survival rate for stage four breast cancer is 16%.
Yes, she's too busy to pay any attention to me. She will never have time. I won't ever hear from her, again. I know I sound bitter, hell, I am bitter, but she's not being unfair. She's living her life, which is what people are supposed to do. It would be bloody ridiculous for her to drop everything to pay attention to me. She really doesn't have that much time. I'm grief-stricken, but it's mostly for me. Angela, Angela has her friends and her family and whatever comfort that they can afford. Me, I'm really nothing but a complication. Has she even thought of me in the last ten years? I don't know. It matters to me, but I'll never know.
When she dies, it's unlikely that anyone will think to tell me. I won't be able to attend the funeral, I won't even know where to leave flowers. Odd, how selfish grief can make us. I keep on thinking, She'll die alone. But of course, she won't. It's me who's alone, and I'm not the one who's dying.
I last saw her in 1981. There are pictures of her in the year book, and a long, strange message in the year book which I was never able to quite decipher. I guess I'll go back again, and try once more.
We wrote in silver ink, back when silver ink was hard to find, and could only be used with dip pens because it clogged fountain pens. Gel pens had never even been thought of. We were passionate about Bob Dylan, and spoke in what was almost a secret language, comprised entirely of quotes from his songs, most of them quotes from Blood on the Tracks. She explained to me what S&M was, I'd never heard the term before. We would go to the Cathedral of Learning, and be moved by the poetry of the main floor, which was two stories tall and looked like an American's fantasy of castle, on steroids. She wrote strange poetry, and I let her see mine.
We would skip down the halls of school, holding hands. One of my teachers suggested that, perhaps, people might get the wrong idea. I said, "But it's only skipping." Mary Ruth decided that her job description did not include explaining lesbianism to a preacher's kid who was obviously entirely oblivious. Angela dragged me into Forensics, I don't know how. I dragged her into the SCA.
One of the very last nights I was in Pittsburgh, before moving to (God help me) Iowa, I stayed over at her place, the one and only time ever. We lay on a blanket underneath the stars, and she fed me strawberries and champagne. It was very romantic, but it never occurred to me that she was courting me. It's still one of my sweetest memories. She looked beautiful under the stars.
There was, there was, and yet there was not, there once was a girl named Angela.
We went to high school together. She was doing her level best to seduce me, and I was so innocent that I never noticed. I had led a very sheltered life, due to crazy fundamentalist parents. Anga was the least conventional person I knew, a constant font of brilliant new ideas, a poet, and a beauty. She had a full Italian figure, and black, black hair down to her waist. I never knew I was in love.
I moved far away for my senior year of high school. (Not my fault.) Time and space did what time and space always do, and we fell out of touch.
About ten years ago, I found her phone number (I don't remember how), and called her. She was at a very good university at the time and had a husband and three kids. This was ten years ago, so my memory is certainly incomplete in some places and simply wrong in others. I remember her being surprised, and I remember her saying that she would never deny me. She told me that she had, of course, told her husband about me. I heard a faint stress in her voice, as if her husband disapproved of me, or her past, or perhaps both. It felt as if I was a potential point of marital conflict. She had three kids and had returned to traditional Catholicism. That last flabbergasted me, but every conversation I've ever had with her flabbergasted me. Her voice was so sweet. It was gentle and musical, sweeter than I remembered. Faulty memory, or change? Who knows. She said she'd call; she never did.
She's been on my mind, recently. I don't know why, the brain does tricky things when you're not watching it. Come to think of it, it will do tricky things when you are watching it. There was google, and there was my curiosity, and I still knew how to spell her last name. She might well be using her married name, in which google would do me no good at all, but what the heck?
I found an Angela who was an instructor at a different university. Her focus appeared to be pollution in Pittsburgh, with emphasis on how it interacted with class and gender. The school we were in together was in Pittsburgh. It seemed almost a certainty that this was the same woman. I was still in love with the high school girl of twenty-five years ago. I had missed her, on and off, these past years, sometimes intensely. I knew that a lot of time had passed, and that she might not want to talk to me at all. I was encouraged by the fact that an old friend, out of touch for about the same period of time, was delighted to hear from me, and we maintain an intermittent correspondence via email.
I sent email to the address listed on the university webpage, asking if she were the Angela I went to high school with, and giving my contact information. I got no response. Now, patience is not my virtue. I waited a little more than three weeks before I sent a follow-up. During that three weeks, I had been looking at the scholarship that was available on the net. The person in question had been at Notre Dame at the right time, had a stint at CMU at the right time, and in the correct specialty, and I became more and more sure that it was Anga. Based on the number of times her work was referenced, it seemed that her academic career was going well.
I sent a follow-up email that said that if she wasn't the Angela that I'd gone to school with, I'd eat my hat.
I got back a message saying, Yes it's me, but I don't have time to get into a correspondence. (Note the lack of the comforting words, "right now." This is a go away message.) She said that she had three kids, a job, stage-4 breast cancer, a husband who worked 60 hours a week, and a dissertation to turn into a book.
I looked it up. The five year survival rate for stage four breast cancer is 16%.
Yes, she's too busy to pay any attention to me. She will never have time. I won't ever hear from her, again. I know I sound bitter, hell, I am bitter, but she's not being unfair. She's living her life, which is what people are supposed to do. It would be bloody ridiculous for her to drop everything to pay attention to me. She really doesn't have that much time. I'm grief-stricken, but it's mostly for me. Angela, Angela has her friends and her family and whatever comfort that they can afford. Me, I'm really nothing but a complication. Has she even thought of me in the last ten years? I don't know. It matters to me, but I'll never know.
When she dies, it's unlikely that anyone will think to tell me. I won't be able to attend the funeral, I won't even know where to leave flowers. Odd, how selfish grief can make us. I keep on thinking, She'll die alone. But of course, she won't. It's me who's alone, and I'm not the one who's dying.
I last saw her in 1981. There are pictures of her in the year book, and a long, strange message in the year book which I was never able to quite decipher. I guess I'll go back again, and try once more.
We wrote in silver ink, back when silver ink was hard to find, and could only be used with dip pens because it clogged fountain pens. Gel pens had never even been thought of. We were passionate about Bob Dylan, and spoke in what was almost a secret language, comprised entirely of quotes from his songs, most of them quotes from Blood on the Tracks. She explained to me what S&M was, I'd never heard the term before. We would go to the Cathedral of Learning, and be moved by the poetry of the main floor, which was two stories tall and looked like an American's fantasy of castle, on steroids. She wrote strange poetry, and I let her see mine.
We would skip down the halls of school, holding hands. One of my teachers suggested that, perhaps, people might get the wrong idea. I said, "But it's only skipping." Mary Ruth decided that her job description did not include explaining lesbianism to a preacher's kid who was obviously entirely oblivious. Angela dragged me into Forensics, I don't know how. I dragged her into the SCA.
One of the very last nights I was in Pittsburgh, before moving to (God help me) Iowa, I stayed over at her place, the one and only time ever. We lay on a blanket underneath the stars, and she fed me strawberries and champagne. It was very romantic, but it never occurred to me that she was courting me. It's still one of my sweetest memories. She looked beautiful under the stars.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-01 11:46 pm (UTC)And don't, for God's sake, don't tell me she's going to a better world. She's dying. Endit.
I don't want hugs, and I don't want sympathy, I want it to Not Happen.
I lied about the hugs.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 12:32 am (UTC)Time doesn't heal all wounds. I'm worried to death about the man who used to be the little boy I loved in kindergarten, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop the suckage on that one, and it's not even half the suckage you've got with yours here. So. I think you're allowed to be irrational sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 12:37 am (UTC)Sympathy.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 05:50 am (UTC)I lied about the sympathy, too. I just deal very badly with the usual aphorisms. Things won't work out ok, it's not for the best, I'm not sure she knows that I care, and there's no reason to believe she still cares about me. I'm not being pessimistic, honest. I'm just dealing with the text as written. It'd be nice to add little back stories with no support, but that's only fanfic, and this is real life. Most of the time, we don't get to see the end of the story. I think that this is one of the reasons that fiction is so satisfying. In real life, we're always coming in in the middle and leaving before the end.
Re: Nothing to be done
Date: 2005-04-02 07:03 am (UTC)my inner fixer keeps wanting to make suggestions, *sigh*. i think if i were in that position, i'd write her; a good-bye letter, in which í'd say the sorts of things i'd like her to know before she dies, a letter that might give her a small piece of you to take with her. no demands for a correspondence, just a message from your heart.
dying is damn hard, for the person who's dying, for the ones left behind. i believe in communication making things a little easier.
Re: Nothing to be done
Date: 2005-04-02 07:55 am (UTC)The fact is, this isn't about her, it's all about me. I'm all I know. She's a stranger. Whether or not she lost anything when we lost touch, I do not know. I only know what I lost. Why on earth does she need to know that, now?
Communication doesn't always make things easier. Sometimes, you just want people to leave you the hell alone. If she wants me, she knows where to find me. The chances of that happening are somewhat less than that of an asteroid hitting the earth in the next 45 minutes.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 12:56 pm (UTC)Hugs, if you'll take 'em.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 02:40 pm (UTC)There's a Marge Piercy poem about divorce where she says to the husband who's leaving her that he isn't taking their past with him, he's taking their potential future, the floor he didn't tile, the holiday they didn't take in Bermuda, the mornings they didn't wake up huddled together the next winter, the jam she didn't make and he didn't eat from the trees in the house they were selling because of the divorce. The past was untouchable, it was the future that was unravelling, but the past, which was supposed to be a road that led to the future, it had turned into a cul-de-sac.
Likewise, what's dying with Angela isn't your connection in Pittsburgh twenty-five years ago, which still means what it always meant, whatever that is, it's the potential future in which that unresolved episode becomes resolved, in which the uncontexted could have been given context. The past was open, now it's closing. That's really sad. I can see from her point of view she's getting on with what she has left of her life. In the same circumstances maybe you wouldn't have energy for her either. (It seems to me that she's made it quite plain she doesn't.) But from your point of view, there's a half-open bud that might have flowered and now is dead, and that really is sad and hard to cope with -- harder to cope with as it is than if you'd googled and found she'd died years ago. You're just going to have to cherish it without closure, because that's all there's going to be. I'm so sorry.
*hug* again, and I really wish there were better comfort.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 04:08 pm (UTC)It can be sad the way things change. It's not always sad, though.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-02 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 12:52 pm (UTC)