GOING OVER THE LINE
C Ra McGuirt
i just got off the phone with this woman
who'd been a casual friend of mine:
no major bond beyond some conversations
about attempting to be real
& poets.
we smiled&hugged when we met in the clubs,
& whenever i had a party,
i'd call&invite her&her man
just as a matter of normal
casual friendship.
around christmas, she stopped returning my calls,
& when i met her in the clubs
she had up an invisible wall. i wondered,
but not exceedingly.
then last night, we met again,&i didn't try for a hug:
i'd already accepted the message that
she&her man wanted to back off from me,
but i went for a reasonable handshake,
like i'd give to anyone,
& i got a limp wrist
& a hollywood smile.
i sat down knowing where i stood
pissed off&puzzled, though slightly amused
by the fact that her man, who's been giving me
hard honest handshakes for several years
had held back just exactly like her,
as if he'd been specifically instructed
not to give me too much of their
precious personal energy.
at my table, waiting to read,
i wrote her a note, which said, basically:
'i've been your friend when you need one,
& the rest of the time, i've left you alone.
i don't understand what you're doing, or why,
but you have my number.'
she called up this afternoon to inform me
in a voice which sounded like selling tupperware
that i'd been very valuable for a while
after she'd broken up with her famous music husband
& was going through typical emotional hell,
but that she was much, much better now,
& that my services as a crutch
were simply no longer needed.
she went on to explain that she'd tried
just so terribly, terribly hard
to make me come to understand
that she had decided that we didn't really
have anything in common after all anymore,
(without, you know, actually being FORCED
to come out&say: 'get lost; i don't need you,')
& considered her coldess as sort of a kindness
to spare me the dismaying news
that i didn't really quite fit in
with the decor of her new life.
i was a painting she'd grown tired of
& taken down,&she simply could NOT
understand how i could be crazy enough
to feel i'd been USED,&to call HER a
user.
'YOU WENT OVER THE LINE', she intoned.
i've heard her use this line before,
usually in conjunction with some talk
of the hundred of invisible BOUNDARIES
she carries about,&of which one must be quite careful
never to cross (although you can't see them),
because if you step over one just once,
there will come a quiet&chilly explosion,
& you will be on your way out,
as i found.
'YOU WENT OVER THE LINE':
the way that she says it you almost expect
Agents of Dreadful Retribution
to swoop down&beat you, at the least,
or maybe even bear you away
to some severe place where they teach
stern lessons to crossers of LINES like me.
i told her that since i'd already
GONE OVER THE LINE,
i might as well just go all the way,
& said that strictly in my subjective opinion
she was a neurotic phony,
& i didn't give a damn
about her LINES.
she hung up in anger,&i suppose
that's the end of something i didn't need
to begin with,
unless it all happened
to give me THESE
lines...
such a CRAZY thing?
