Back in early March I was going through the end of a quasi-breakup. I only call it a quasi-breakup because the person who I was breaking up with was never more than a quasi-boyfriend. At the time, I was wallowing in self pity, convinced that things hadn't worked out because something about me made me inherently unloveable. And I found this poem that made me thing of him. (Bear in mind that I've never been a lover of poetry. I rarely ever "got" it, and I found most of it incredily trite.)
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
More than being a quasi-boyfriend, the person who I write of was my best friend. And I felt I'd lost him. Not only lost him, but lost the game. After a year, my shining wonderfulness hadn't won him over.
It's been almost a year-and-a-half since the Quasi-Boyfriend Debacle began. Lots of things have happened. I moved on. I graduated from school. I started seeing someone new. (Though not in that order.) I hung out with quasi-ex-boyfriend this evening for the first time in a month. And though I hate to admit it, I didn't realize until now just how much I missed him.
This cannot be a good thing.
