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The painful memory of her abrupt disappearance--spirited away by her dad the small-town grifter, and another man who turned out to be the father of her middle child (she has three kids by three dads)--still haunts me and replays in my mind. Even tonight, I continue to mutter to myself, almost enjoying the bittersweet hollowness I feel inside, for I do love her, and the near literary quality of irony inherent in the incident that sparked my arrest and our still-running order of no contact.
Only the day before, she had expressed such a sweet sympathy over my three pending court cases. The judge on one case had been continually threatening me with thirty days for contempt. "I'm worried about your going to jail. What will I do?" she moaned, as we lay together in afterglow. It was only hours later that she proceeded to lay upon my back another criminal court case for domestic abuse--Aggravated Domestic Abuse Causing Physical Injury and Mental Illness--and then left me utterly alone
and totally broke, isolated in a rented house only a block away from her parents' house, where she had fled--stranded there because I had sold my car to refund her gambling losses. There I remained, half-crazy from the separation, and facing even more jail time for allegedly--how darkly ironic--for fracturing her pinkie finger.
We were pinkie pals you see, two clinodactylic souls zigzagging a crooked path to God knows where. In self-critical reflection, I asked myself the usual questions: How could I let myself fall for such a sociopath? Pinkie pal or not, she had plenty of baggage: three kids, no real skills, a telling lack of grammar, and a taste for popular culture of the underclass--but somehow, her honesty redeemed everything in my mind, and our time together was not only wildly erotic, it was pleasant even in its most humdrum aspects. Did she have a kind heart under the glitter?
My thoughts of her abate for no more than a few minutes, and then some association reinvigorates the pain, like last night. There I sat, mooning over her misspelled pronouncement on her MyFace profile that she was through with me, she was "sso over pinky pal, over, over him and will never trust him again"--and suddenly I was plunged into the despair again: lost love, oh baby where is your kindness when I need it, where is my car and money and sanity? I gave everything, and suddenly I'm ready to end it all again. My rational mind knows that you will destroy me in the end. I've fallen in love with a literal femme fatale. Poof, just like that she was gone from my world, and I haven’t so much as caught a glimpse of her since. I wasn't the first she had run through the wringer.
But she found ways to spend time with her last guy, the big strong marine T--, after his protective order came into effect. I listened to her spin out strangely fond memories of how he had to pick up cans alongside of the road to buy gasoline just to make the drive and see her, and how he'd duck down in her car until she had cleared the precincts of her dreary little town of Terra and they could resume life as a couple openly again, and how she'd begun to hate him when they moved in together. I guess I don't rate, because she hasn't stirred a muscle to see me. So it's over. It's almost a relief. But when her website draws me back again, I notice that she's changed it, and removed her taunting words--she loves me again, she had decided--she'll always love her pinkie pal, and suddenly I begin to understand the intensity of emotional reversal all the pop songs sing about. I have come to understand the solid underpinning of these clichés, because I have become one myself--a sorry, clichéd lonely heart.
Maybe I have been playing the victim so I can find out if this woman will really be worth the commitment I'd wanted to make. Or maybe she's been playing the tractable archetypical blonde bimbo, while all the while plying me with an irresistible love that in reality is a very sophisticated spring-trap put together by an insane genius. After all, I never actually fell in love before--at least not with the abandonment she's inspired in me. I'm in a very vulnerable state. When I think objectively, I see that like the songs all say, I have lost all--no exaggeration either. I have lost my job, my car, my wife, my money, friends, family, and any feelings of confidence that I ever held. Maybe all these things have been preordained to teach me a lesson in honesty, and respect for the lyrics of pop songs.
But . . . is it significant that she encouraged our move into the very same rental house in which she and her last fiancé, T--, had moved, and then gone through an eerily familiar scenario just months before? He went nutty with a lot of loaded weapons, intimating murderous intentions. He had to be locked up and institutionalized too, and had come back for more even after that. Strangely, she began to call me by his name as soon as we'd rented the house. So to him, too, tortured thinking about her remained preferable to rehabilitating his heart. I think about scoring tonight with some complacent mouseburger, but feel no spark. I want her. This offbeat melancholy entertains me and makes me feel somehow, alive. Even if offered my pick of any ordinary mouseburger in the world, even served up with white buns still steaming from the grill, and splayed open-faced on clean linen--still, I cannot forsake my memory of . . .her.
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