HR Emailed

I was determined to make space, inner space for a poem. Loss made everything sharp.
 
I suffer from these brief weekends, the tearing up of the roots of love, and from my own inability to behave better under the stress. The poem is about silence, that it is really only there that lovers can know what they know, and there what they know is deep, nourishing, nourishing to the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet.
 
For a little while, it is as if my nakedness were clothed in love.
But then, when I come back, I shiver in my isolation, and must face again, and try to tame the loneliness.

-Mary Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Do you have something to say about how you are unable to "behave better"?
-----------------------------------------
As I write this, your tax payer dollars are paying for me to weep over this too long lunch. I didn’t mean to. I was going to behave today. I rode my bike into work and even dared to use the nonwaterproof mascara. It doesn’t clump as much, and I was going to behave. I was going to call that public health agency, draw up the strategic plan for the executive director and prepare that document for the feds. But then. Then. The HR Director emailed. She is revising our emergency preparedness plan, which, of course, involves updating our emergency contact. 

My desk chair was snatched from beneath me, and I was falling, falling, falling back into the deep, black well of grief. 

Landing at the bottom, I found myself there, nine months ago on orientation day, wearing my lucky purple scarf and gray blazer. I had my great love, my great job, and what was turning into a pretty great fucking life. There was a ring tucked in an underwear drawer and a future down the street at the capitol. I turned the taste of my title over in my mouth and held his beaming proud kiss against my lips. Sean used to call me “Little Ms. All The Things,” because I wanted all the things. And that day, I got them. I had all the things. The little things like the warmth filling my stomach as I lovingly wrote Sean’s name on each beneficiary form and in each emergency contact section. It was the feeling that I would write his name on every form forever thereafter, the only change would be my last name. It was the catalog I was building for him in my head of the day’s details—the view of the capitol’s golden cupola against the mountains, the colors of the 12th floor carpet, the jeans my supervisor wore. And it was the big things. Like the joy I knew he shared with me over this job. The gratitude and astonishment I had that he’d believed in me for all those long, jobless months—long after I stopped believing in me. God, he was so proud of me, and I understood that all future joys would be exponentially expanded as a shared joy. 

I would not ruin that day for her or even me. I would not take it away with any dark foreshadow. I am glad I had that day, but I would also weep at that girl’s feet. She is so tragic, and she has no idea. She doesn’t know that on a hot Thursday, she will sit at the deli and let tears slip conspicuously beneath her sunglasses because she realized she has to change every fucking HR document, deleting that great love with the ring in his underwear drawer from her personnel file. She does not know how she will master the art of walking with her head down to hide the tears or how to dig her fingernails into her palms when she can’t cry in a meeting. She doesn’t know these tricks or know that she needs to know these tricks. She is hundreds of kisses and caresses away from this moment, and I love her for that. I love her as I cannot love me in this moment. Because I am unable to behave. I am unable to walk back into that office and sit at my desk like my heart is intact. Pretend that I don’t have a gaping wound where my heart was. That the fragile scab didn’t just get ripped off 68 minutes ago. 

I will instead have to walk into my supervisor’s office. Negotiating whether I do the sunglasses inside or the hurried walk and avoided eye contact trick. I like to mix them up. And, I will have to do my best to not cry as I explain to her that I’m going to have to work from home for the rest of the day. Because HR emailed, and I am not the girl who wore her lucky purple scarf and a gray blazer. I am not the girl who had all the things.