this imploding heart

You're gonna say you miss me

Sometimes it's hard for me to tell exactly how I'm feeling.

This has been coming up a lot lately as a general subject at home. When you're in the heat of uncertainty, the only place you want to be is SOMEWHERE. So you write notes that declare your love or hatred and deliver them, hesitantly, in the rain. Because then the ball is out of your hands. Done. Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

So sometimes, when I'm walking home by myself in the middle of the night, everything in me wants to scratch nasty words into front doors with my keys. Or to break in and turn all the furniture upside down and microwave all the dairy products and leave them rotting on the kitchen floor.

The walking home by myself in the middle of the night me thinks that sort of thing is a great solution to feeling bad. That particular version of me also wishes she could spit flesh-rotting acid from her incisors, and has a hard time not grabbing people and shaking them until their noses bleed. That particular version of me is not a good long-term decision maker.

The biggest problem with making big emotional decisions is that once the act is done, you kind of have to commit to the emotion. You can't get less angry later, because by then you've already carved a few holes in kitchen tables and hung a few pieces of roadkill in a few livingrooms, and while your anger may have diminished, the effects of those actions have not. You can't get back the note that declares your unyeilding stalkeresque devotion, even if you've lost interest in the recipient.

Trial and error in these situations has established a necessary action-censor. The action censor is the voice in my head that says "Yes, gettting shitfaced and making a screaming public spectacle would feel pretty good right now. However, anything you say in your shitfaced spectacle has to be justified and discussed *tomorrow* in an actual sober discussion, and you're probably going to cry and want to take some things back simply because talking about them doesn't do any good. Additionally, are you sure you're going to be mad enough tomorrow to want to talk about them at all?"

And generally, talking about it tomorrow always sounds really exhausting. Especially since I just put all that effort into the sawing and screaming and microwaving.

Posted by Sonya at August 24, 2004 09:12 AM