Poem of the Week #4

Yes, I know…I missed last week. So I decided to bring it back with a vengeance! Tragically long, pathetically awesome, insignificantly human. Huh?

Here is the ebb and flow of how it comes out of me when I am going through it. I will give it you in order of how it went down during this attempt.

Her name was Michelle. At first I didn’t think she was anything special but the more I looked at her and talked with her the more I liked her. She was on the UVSC Dance team. That really is only important because of what happened.

Ok…so I like this girl. As I said, she had grown on me quite a bit and I developed this thing for her. It was a crush. I won’t call it anything more or less than that. It was a crush. I pursued it as such.

I wrote this poem at the onset of what was happening. I was torn because I liked her but she was only 18 and I was 24…younger than my younger sister…I vowed to never date an 18 year old because I found that between 18-20 girls grow up a lot…most of them anyways. That is not to say that getting into a relationship at 18 is a bad thing. It worked for my little sister Krista. She just had her 2nd baby a couple weeks ago. Happily married for 4 years.

Back to the story. Didn’t really know what I was getting into. I knew I was starting to like her but she was mostly a mystery to me. That is when I wrote Empty Shells. It was a play on words obviously, her name Michelle, and the ideas of not having established any sort of real relationship yet.

As time progresses, maybe a week or so, I was torn. I wanted something to happen but I didn’t want to get involved. My feeling is that I don’t want to take away that opportunity for them to mature and grow…I guess I could be a notch on their belt…probably wouldn’t mind.

I wrote Crushed. One of the last lines in there, “relationships aren't found, they're made." That's what she told me once in relation to some other topic but I took it to heart.

Then I took it a step closer/deeper. My buddy Spencer was digging on this other girl on the dance team and he was a little more bout it than I was. He convinced me, though it didn’t take much, to go to the National Championships in Daytona Beach Florida. It was a big surprise. We fly down secretly, and just show up before their first performance and start cheering like crazy. They were all totally floored. It was pretty awesome.

The trip was a lot of fun but didn’t get any real vibes from her despite my travels. Spencer and I talked about it and on the flight home and I wrote Forever Away. It was inspired by a time when her and a couple of friends came over to our ballin hotel room and hung out of a few hours. We were there on my bed chit chatting and eventually I think the girls fell asleep. She was right there next to me and I couldn’t make the connection.

A couple of weeks later, after a couple dates, I invited her and her friend that Spencer was interested in up to my cabin in Park City and cooked them an amazing Birthday meal. I don’t know what I made besides steak but if you’ve ever had a steak of mine…well, who really needs anything else. For those haters and skeptics, I had gotten permission from my parents to have ladies up there unsupervised. It was a trust thing because when I first asked they met me with extreme caution and said no way. I told them that if I was going to be having sex with chicks up at the cabin (which I think was their main concern) I wasn’t going to call them and ask permission to have them up there. I would just go and do it. Also the fact that I wasn’t inviting just one girl up but two was probably comforting. There’s safety in numbers or something. Sure, I have skills, major skills, and that is why I wrote Game. That’s not part of this story. Consider it a bonus.

So yeah, a couple of weeks later I get on a plane to fly to New Hampshire to visit my sister Brittany and my parents who were out there at the time. I get on the plane and I have this crazy feeling inside me. I didn’t like it, very unsettling. I felt like I had something to lose, something I wanted to stick around for. I wrote Fear and Trembling before take off.

Then, while I was up in the garage/loft/fly fishing design center/Cottage Road Designs central I wrote 5/28/05 9:39pm Eastern. Obviously the time I wrote the poem. A prophetic vision into what was about to happen up my return.

I got home and figured it all out. It was exactly as I had written. This wasn’t self-fulfilling prophecy; my actions or lack thereof didn’t make this happen. It’s just how it was. So in a desperate whimsical plea, I fashioned The Dissolution Proclamation. It was a poem that pled my case for some kind of a relationship even though it probably wouldn’t work out; having the little pieces, between forging the relationship and breaking it off, seemed like it was worth having a relationship.

And then it was over. I had gotten into it more than I had initially planned. I changed the name in my phone to ‘Her’ because I didn’t like seeing that name any more. Probably 9 months ago I walked passed her in the Salt Lake Airport with a dude and a ring on her finger. It caught me off guard and all I said was ‘hey!’ That’s really all there was to say.