She hooked herself to people who disappointed her.
Case in point, there had been a person once that she would have written about thus:
“I know an extraordinary person, a mountain of a man.”
It became, over time, harder to write such things. Maybe it wasn’t fair of her to require otherworldliness of the people who touched her. She expected them to perpetually move her. If someone impressed themselves upon her heart, she required that they march in place there, to deepen the imprint. When they simply walked off or away, she would wait–she would wait a long time. Sometimes they came back, but more often, they would find new people to inspire or care for, and she would feel the loss very deeply. It was not only the loss of the person, it was the loss of the image, it was the loss of the feelings the person had inspired.
It was hard to conclude that people with whom she traveled particular eras of life could forget her, or could sever themselves from the quality of the connection: so many laughs, so many insights, so much investment. For what? She supposed the purpose of such experiences had their own lifetimes, and it occurred to her that for others, this was adequate. She realized quite suddenly that she was perhaps unusual in wishing to be forever stirred by her relationships. And she wanted to appreciate the people who had been writ so heavy-handedly into her history, but had somehow, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, skated outward and away from her. She watched their departure, perplexed.
It was as if the mountain that had once loomed so large before her became, for better or for worse, an unreachable, far-away dot, a place she only remembered visiting.
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mary june brown 