You think you're one of a special breed, Part three

Continued from here.

I don't want to reach. Or push. I enjoy this lack of angst. This calm. Things that would have caused me major emotional upsets a few months ago now glance off me like I'm wearing armor.

Another friend, another conversation. This time about love and commitment. About freedom and recognizing your limitations. Like when you're good at the front end of a relationship, but fizzle when the expectations become too much and people get hurt. About being honest with yourself and with potential lovers. About how understandings crumble.

It doesn't matter what a woman says. She wants to be the one who makes you want to change. She has to believe she's special. If you can't quit the habit of getting in, then you have to be braced for what comes with getting out. And maybe you care too much or you don't care enough. Either way, you're caught in the ripple of emotion. It's unavoidable.

We want. We want. We want - what?

There's never a good time to break someone's heart.

I remember, but I can't recover the feeling. The broken heart. The suffering and self-loathing. It's out of reach. Maybe it's the anti-depressants. Maybe it's time. Maybe it's an unremembered blow to the head.

I'm reading Augusten Burroughs' This Is How - Help for the Self, Proven Aid in Overcoming
Shyness, Grief, Molestation, Disease, Fatness, Lushery, Spinsterhood, Decrepitude, & More
For Young and Old Alike. In the first three essays alone, Burroughs writes of letting yourself feel your feelings and calling them what they are. Anger, fear, hate, pain, joy, happiness, love.

Burroughs nails that self-help trope affirmation to the wall with one word. Bullshit. He beseeches the reader to stop lying to herself/himself and to others. If you've pasted on a smile for the benefit of others, Burroughs wants you to wipe that fucking smile from your face. It's doing more harm than good.

He, too, speaks of long marriages.

Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grow into a brittle barnacle of hatred.

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

brittle barnacle of hatred

Raise your hand if you've seen that phrase play out. The pebble in the shoe becomes a boulder you can't leapfrog, can't quite ignore, can't quite wish away.

Okay, hands down.

During my dreadful commute, I'm listening to Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays Farther Away. In it, he recounts his 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College titled Pain Won't Kill You. He also writes of his friend David Foster Wallace who, he concludes, was bored and thus suicidal. I'm being facile, of course. But that's the gist. Enough of it, at least. His point in both essays is that we have to experience our feelings because the alternative is what?

Numbness? Zombie-like calm? (I just typed clam instead of calm. Zombie Clams from the Zen Zone - a recipe for life as a reformed rager. This could be the title of what I don't do next.)

What is this? A conspiracy of library books? Franzen and Burroughs - pushers of feelings. The bastards.

Here I sit all counter-intuitive wearing all black on a sunny day. But my toenails are painted purple. There may be hope for me yet, Doctor Freud.

Mustering all the hypocrisy I could, I gave each of the children the "Your feelings of sadness are natural in a time of grief"speech. I took the day off work and spent time with Sophie who'd watched as Morris was born during hurricane season 2004. Now she'd experience his death. We cried together and talked about what we could have done differently to have perhaps saved him. We didn't know how sick he was. We pulled on our matching mother/daughter hairshirts and left the house to find something to keep Sophie busy.

When we reached the ice cream eating stage of grief, we finally indulged in some lighter thoughts. We laughed about Morris's kookier habits. How he was so spoiled as a kitten that he never learned to cover his leavings. The three older cats did it for him. How he didn't say much, but when he did, he spoke with an earnestness unusual to ginger tabbies who are typically wisecrackers. How he would trap the kids under his bulk and breathe in their faces.

When we started to cover the self-blaming territory again, I told Sophie we'd have to knock it off or I'd be in a corner cutting myself. She wiped away the one tear that slipped down her lashes and announced "I'm never having pets when I'm an adult. This hurts too much."

I pushed the hair back from her face, touched her soft cheek and felt it still damp. Her deep brown eyes were so sad. This is her first real loss. It almost feels like my own first real loss. As another friend put it, "The death of a cat who is like family hits you harder than the death of some family members because they're more a part of your every day life."

I finally allowed myself to feel the pain, too. To point at it and think what I'd been holding back. I wanted my fluffy boy back.  I wanted to walk through the door and see him on the silver metal table and say "Hey, bud." I wanted to see him waddle quickly across the room as Nathan called him Tub Tub. I wanted to see him make the great leap onto the dining room table only to slide to the other end and come skidding to a stop just in time.

Most of all, I wanted another day so we could see sooner that he was critical. I wanted another day to save him.

I suddenly wanted to rant and rave and kick something across the room. Break glass, beat my fists and let out the sobs I've choked back for days. Not the silent tears I hadn't been able to control, but the heavy, heaving sobs that make your head ache and wear you out. Those I'd been able to control. Funny how that works.

Instead, I took a deep breath, popped what was left of my ice cream cone into my mouth and savored the crunch of it. I looked at Sophie's bowed head, her hands folded together as if in prayer, but I knew she wasn't praying. Earlier in the day, she'd told me how she wished she could really believe in god and heaven so that she could imagine Morris somewhere besides just gone.

The sun was blotted out by a cloud and she gave a little shudder. In front of her, her cup of Superman ice cream melted into a tie-dyed puddle. I reached out and she took my hand.

Love and pain. Forever linked.