A GOODE MAN:

They all ways try to turn this into a morality play, sooner or later. The pretense is that had I simply stopped caring about my own being, directing my focus outwards, living for others, altruistically, then I would find a love and solidarity I’d never hitherto imagined. And the cycle then begins again. I find a company that I respect more than I can respect myself. I do not let it frighten me into submission; I simply fall in love with the idea that all its tenets are worthy ideals, even if I might laugh at just how great the margin is by which my fellows fall short of it. I begin to walk on eggshells, priding myself in my patience, following the rules with decorated awkwardness. When we first finished the New Hire Orientation (four hours of sensitivity training, basically) I all most forgot her name. She stood right there, beside me, waiting for the order, and it was not that I spaced on her name but rather I did not dare even to THINK it, lest the Boss heard me. And I reported to him promptly, submerging any suspicion. When I saw her outside again, I had to shake all suspicions about me. I had all so to rationalize, to myself, my own reserve earlier at the Back of the House. I had to believe she saw me, wanted just as desperately to say Hello as I did, but held her tongue for the same reason that she would prize me for holding my own. I went with the flow, letting them assign me to another table. I continued to do this, admiring her from afar each time, making my way about her friends. It all ways had to be this way. I all most had her table a few times. But just as I learned how to find my way around the Front of the House the consequences came. I’d hidden my tracks too well. One of her coworkers took less than kindly to my casual flirtation. The bramble that I used to hide as I approached the Grand Tree became my snare. So I only ever had her serve me once: when she brought me that glass of wine. I heard, in a timid child’s voice, “here is your Murphy, Good Sir.” It was only later that I discovered this to mean “here is your Murphy Goode, Sir.” Murphy Goode was the name of the wine. She was being exceedingly formal. It’s not impossible that she rushed in and out of that encounter owing more to recoil than to reticence. She might have not been shy at all, but rather I repelled her.

It all ways happens this way. I think that I’ve found Solidarity and Virtue. I believe at first that this is only a means to an end. Then just as pragmatism peaks I find myself a sudden martyr. I did not expect the late hours, the injury, both physical and psychological, nor the verbal abuse. It simply happened. So I ran with it, telling myself all the while that this is what a man MUST do for his Family. I never had any real extended family. I thought this must be what it feels like. I was one of the Clan, for lack of a better term.

It all ways follows this formula: you start with altruism, then you fall in love. At least, that’s how the cynics see it. What starts out as service to Others takes on an ulterior motive. Your craving for a taken woman colours everything that you perceive and do. It all becomes a Show for Her, a seemingly self-sacrificing venture that has a single, hidden goal for personal gain. Citing my virginity would not help; it would only serve to prove my desperation and thus set the old example for new critics to follow: the superstition that I am unlovable and would do everyone a service if I stopped trying to change that fact or to feign ignorance of it.

But that is not the whole of it. That’s just a symptom of abuse. Falsely accused of loving someone I was merely flirting with, no one even knowing that the flirtation (though not the person) was simply a means to an end, I internalized again the old notion that I’m forbidden to love. If I cannot love this decoy, a mere temptress to my eye, what can make me worthy of the Goddess?

But that is not the true formula. The true formula is thus: that you start with self-interest, fed up from having your kindness taken advantage of, time and time again. Then you fall in love, and She informs All That You Do. Inspired by her unassailable kindness, her unequivocal beauty and her indominable Spirit, you find a new Role Model. The patience with which you train yourself to wait for her (especially: to wait on you) becomes the pace at which you work. Your work becomes a form of karma yoga: a Service to Shiva. Every motion is imbibed with a tenderness you cultivate that she might one day feel your touch to be a home. And everyone, no matter how rotten, becomes your family so long as they speak well of her.

Can that be called a crime?

Whatever the formula, the outcome is the same. Whether they know the True Identity of your New Muse or not, your love is suspect, since your fellows celebrate self-love so much that any unrequited love is not perceived to be love at all. A narcissist can’t love a woman who will not return his love, so any one that loves him he pretends to love, regardless of his hollow heart, to spite the men who love her, even if they’re friends of his, and to dishonor love and friendship all in one he does nothing to save her from the self-destruction that loving a narcissist is heir to. This, too, seems to be an immutable pattern.

So here I am again: found guilty of self-interested love, falsely accused, for I am not a narcissist, and mine was not self-love but rather love that did not alter when it alteration found. What was that alteration? you might ask. I learned she had a boyfriend. It did not change how I felt at all, except that now I must remind myself that this same “man” laughed at her when she got a hook stuck in her sensitive skin. A gentle man would have removed that hook gently. And I think on her pale skin, which turned red at the slightest fluctuation of temperature. I think of how I asked about it and she spoke of its sensitivity, and I replied, “that’s Good.”

I wish she saw me to be Good as well. But I may never know whether she meant to make a pun on Murphy Goode or not. I’ll never know whether she saw the pattern in the whiteboards in the kitchen: how they all had something to say by allusion to HER, if anyone took the time to unriddle them.

You want gossipers to do their research. At least: you want to BELIEVE they do.

So now I have again to start anew, to feign forgetfulness of my lost love, to write it off as selfishness on my own part, for having had the NERVE to contest a “sacred pact” between her and her loving beau.

But I know that such high-minded thinking is too lofty for this place.

I know that he is probably an alcoholic and a narcissist. I know that she is probably too Murphy Goode for him herself.

And I know that I won’t fall out of love with her. I know that were she not too good for him she would not be with him.

And most importantly: I know now that she’s not too Goode for me.

That’s why I will continue on my path, knowing the true nature of the cycle:

You give all you can for a Love the likes of which men have so forgotten that they mock it. The weak of heart try to use the words of goodness and accountability against you. Laughing inwardly, you take your leave with a broken heart, but one that still bleeds love and sympathy and mercy, gushing adoration episodically.

You all ways were too Murphy Goode for them. May you not be remembered as a whiner, but rather a fine wine.

Dm.A.A.