How do you say, “I'd like to finish your class, but trying not to want to kill myself seems to be a full time job?”
I wonder if I'm not doing something right, or if I'm just irreconcilably broken. Maybe that crucial part was knocked off long ago, like the rear view mirror came off that Cadillac when your teenage son backed it in too close to the mailbox. Or the time he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he tried to rebuild the engine.
Some days I wake in the morning and my skin feels tauntingly intact. I would give anything just to be held, but my craving for someone to take a baseball bat or a knife to my back seems like a more honest version of the same desire. So I do the dishes; try not to cry, shake it off. Keep moving. Get dressed. Do something else. Fight. Remember to want to fight. Try, at least, to remember.
It's tempting to just tell her to give me a fail, leave it with everything else in the wreckage behind me. There's legitimacy here; I am trying, really, to build something new. New things need space to grow. The idea of tapping out is liberating, but also, angry and frustrating and sad. I love this work; I don't just like it. It uses me, all the intellectual muscle built up from years of reading useless crap that was never going to be any good to me if I was a physicist or a dancer. It's about taking the things I was inexorably drawn to, almost against my will, and weaving them into something useful and beautiful and real. I don't want to loose it forever.
3 comments:
I think there is an emoticon for what you want to say. The emoticon for "Your mother was crushed to death in a trash compactor and cursed your name in her dying breath" is this: ][>:=~+
What's your humor like these days? They say laughter is the best medicine. I don't know who they are though, but that's beside the point. I dunno, I like laughing more than doing the dishes.
As for irreconcilably broken? Hmm... I doubt that, but I couldn't tell. However, that is an interestng neuroscientific question. I would really tend to think that the manipulability of the mind is such that many minds could be fixed, including yours, the issue is just trade-offs.
I dunno if my comment really says anything though. I dunno, how would you respond to another person's note that starts off by saying: "How do you say, “I'd like to finish your class, but trying not to want to kill myself seems to be a full time job?”"?
I dunno, I would think that an interesting question to pose to yourself, as there is nothing wrong with writing a note like this, but it is an interesting question.
That being said, I don't think I would take a knife to your back. I mean, it is just a terrible way to go about things. If I were going to kill you with a knife, I would try to make it into a cultic ritual sacrifice kind of theme. I mean, when murdering someone, you still have to show some style. Maybe even chanting Ia ia Cthulhu ftagn while the person is tied to a table decorated with occult symbols. I dunno, how would you kill a willing person, assuming you were going to do it?
Hopefully I am not too annoying here. :)
Awe. You are right about the humor thing.
I don't particularly want someone to kill me; in fact, I don't even want someone to come along and break my ribs. The impulse, though--towards the second one--is there, regardless of the fact that I exercise volition in avoiding it. Poor self esteem, I guess; that's what they say in DARE.
Oh, I interpreted this: "my craving for someone to take a baseball bat or a knife to my back seems like a more honest version of the same desire" as "kill".
DARE? Drug Abuse Resistance Education? Sorry, had that program come to my school when growing up, so I think of it first.
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