washwords

From the windows of the car, the slush and rain reflects gray back to me, to the world and back again. I have behaved so poorly. Outrageously, even my therapist agrees. “Why are feelings so important?” she asks me. What else is, I wonder.

I try to stamp down, shut out the pervasive green sea-monster that rises and grows inside me. I try to see it for what it is, a monster, a demon, an addiction – like heroin, she says, that I must resist, that I must quit cold turkey. But something about it is soft and soothing, Muppet-like and reminiscent of girlhood rainy days warmed by books and cozy lights.

So maybe I shouldn’t think of it as a green monster, this omnipotent jealosy, this seething rage. I picture thunderstorms, hurricane me as a colleague once called me after a short rage-filled elevator ride with me. I picture demons, heroin, murderers, poison, venom, steely jagged hurts.

I don’t do it to punish myself. That’s not where the weakness lies. I do it in the hopes of jolting, shaking myself into submission with the horror that these are things my heart contains.

I do it so I can stop. Stop lashing out at the ones I love. Stop judging, presuming the worse, filling with hate and with fear. Stop sabotaging, willfully breaking and twisting the most important and precious of bonds. I do it to stop hurting, hating, spinning, twisting, aching. I do it to stop, to turn off the engines, shut off the motor, curtail spinning wheels, retract all moving parts back into their shell.

I picture the horrors of my heart over and over, in more fantastic and terrifying ways all just to stop moving, clear a path, and try to find the still, calm, deeper me. I do it because I am curious — behind all this swirling, spinning fury, what will I find? I’m afraid to say it outloud but I’m hopeful there’s a stiller stronger loving me in there, a girl I’m sure I once knew.

“ So, journalist, eh?” the guy chewing on the swizzle stick across the table from me was saying to me.

“Yes, yes,” I sighed. I didn’t know well enough then. Didn’t know not to engage this sort of fellow.

He snorted. “Well, I can ask good questions,” he boasted. “Just try me! I bet I can ask better questions than you. Oh, I know – a contest!”

I got that feeling in my throat. I wanted to cry.
But I didn’t. And I didn’t yet know: This isn’ how it’s supposed to feel. If you want to cry within the first few minutes of a date, you shouldn’t stay.
But stay I did.

And I let him ask questions that escalated in their riskiness, in their personal nature, in their shock value.

He asked me all the standard Grade A “Truth and Dare’ throwaways: Where was the first place, the most crazy place, the place you always wanted to? What’s the best lie you ever told? What would you cheat for?

It reminded me of eighth grade, playing scruples with my best friend J and our two best guy friends. Little did I know they’d be the first of many fake boyfriends I’d have throughout my life.

Swizzle Stick’s questions didn’t shock me actually at all, nor did they impress me or particularly pique my interest.

What it did do was annoy me. I felt invaded, intruded upon, for of course, I was.

Then he went to the biggie, a gleam in his eye.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he smirked, “how attracted would you say you are to me, right now?”
He sat back, utterly pleased with himself, oozing pride.
I grimaced, actually flinched. It was that painful.
But I did not leave.

He smiled, almost cruelly, and drummed his fingers infuriatingly on the table top.
“Oh, I can’t answer that. I don’t know,” I stammered.

“No really. Mizz Journalist! Do it, you can say. C’mon.” He pushed, I resisted. It would have been romantic, a mating dance if it weren’t so utterly terrorizing.
“C’mon,” he needled, “Just say a number… 1 to 10, c’mon!”

I squirmed, stared, started, bit my lip to keep the words inside, but still, I didn’t leave.

“Fine, I don’t know, 6.” I’d inflated the number it should go without saying. Substantially. Why, I’m not sure I could say, even now, some several years later.

He nodded. He smiled. He took it all in. “hmm…” The smirking continued.
“Well,” he started, though I hadn’t asked for reciprocation, and certainly didn’t want it. “Well, I would have given you a 9, but… you’re not very confident, so I lowered it. I give you a 7.5.”

I didn’t leave. Still.