Sonnet #5: Katie

Your strength, your pride,

Your independence held my breath,

Yet all my love for you soon died,

For all you had once to give, there was nothing left.

You never cared, you remained stoic, strong,

With lance and sword and dagger I constantly swung,

Yet not a single mark did I leave among

Your armored plates, nor did I mark you with my tongue

As I preached and prayed and beseeched,

All the words I spoke and times I tried,

You never let a single one reach

And in the end, my love for you all but died.

You found another and only silence grew

Of all the fruits I tried to grow in you….

ON KATIE

Then

Junior year, from the woodwork emerges the southern-drawling Katie P……a strong girl, a solid girl, the kind of girl who got teased for her Georgian accent all the time but never let it bother her for a moment. She was too tough for the insults, or at least she carried herself that way.

She stood up for me when the rest of them would just ridicule and push me around. She was about the only one who really used her voice….but a fat lot of good it did all in the end. Still, there was an adoration for her sticking up for me and it grew as we spent more time with each other.

She passed notes. That was the cutest thing….always writing letters back and forth…..and I tried so hard to love her, but she just was always a few steps too distant. She had problems…..problems in the past with men and things and I never really discovered what those were…but she was always too unwilling to think with her heart for even a second. She was just too strong.

We went and saw a lot of movies together, that’s about all I really do with my girlfriends….because I’m not creative and don’t have enough financial backing in the end to really spoil them all that much.

But the things I remember most about Katie were all the little surprises I tried to leave with her. There was the rose(that one failed because it was a Friday and she wasn’t there..so it died.) There was the little stuffed Easter Bunny……there was the little Beanie Baby Dog that I gave her…..

And then there was Spring Fling, which was the beginning of the end. First of all, dinner had not gone as planned and she had dragged me along with her girlfriends….some date. She then ended up accompanying her best friend Amy more of the night because Amy had no date…..so yeah, wonderful.

The build-up came when I danced with her and tried to look at her. Katie and most girls, have this problem about when they’re looked at…they worry. Because all of them have this stupid-thing ingrained into them that tells them that even the guys that obviously love them think they’re ugly. Well, it made her uncomfortable and I told her that I wasn’t going to stop looking at her because there would be no point. She yelled at me and so finally I stopped; I was pissed too. She saw this and didn’t like it, so she thought it best to emotionally heal the wound by clocking me. It didn’t work.

The rest of the night was a disaster and in the end, we stopped seeing each other later down the line. We apologized but, then I got my greatest role, Snoopy at the Red Barn and she didn’t even bother to show up. Ten performances and not one where she came…..

And that ended it for me.

Now

I called Katie once, called her cell phone because I had the number. We talked for awhile….and then I realized that we had nothing to talk about.

Katie was fun to be with and everything…but she and I had no similar tastes….and that didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t have worked in the end. I don’t have a problem listening with interest….even dealing with things I have no interest in. I have the ability to make parallels….

But the fact is, unless there is a desire or some reward for why I should be interested, like actually caring about the person….I can’t find it. And Katie really bothered me by the way she acted. She treated me as if I was just like all the rest.

And if there is one penultimate thing that will make me angry and lose interest in you as well as make me dislike you, it’s treating me the same way you treat other people just because you don’t want to get hurt. People who don’t trust anyone because some have lied in the past, people who insult everyone because there were those in the past who insulted them…I don’t like it.

The fact of the matter is I am not the same as the others as anyone and everyone knows….and just because you have a built in, almost mechanical reaction does not mean that you are excused for it. In fact, you should struggle to get over it…..