• the unreliable narrator •

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if we stay swimming here forever we will never be free

Saturday 9 September 2006 | I like a cookie

Via Sitemeter, some entertaining Google searches that have brought stray Internet wanderers to our perfidious doors:

• “alison bechdel”
• “DBT THERAPIST FAYETTEVILLE” (the all-caps underscore a familiar desperation, but sadly the only thing about Fayetteville mentioned here is that they have an MFA program)
• “finland sauna lesbian” (possibly my favorite)
• “quit job and go backpacking” (?!)
• “the unreliable narrator” (we’re on the first page!)
• “unreliable narrator” (we’re on the third page.)
• “wenomadmen”
• “what are the effects of unreliable narrator” (well, lemme tell ya, honey…)
• “whiteboard cleaner”

…and last of all, dear reader, but certainly not least, one that has me literally shaking all over like a leaf and wishing I had never seen the Ring:

Continent: North America
Country: United States
State: Colorado
City: Boulder
Operating System: Macintosh OSX
Browser: Firefox
Time of Visit: Sep 2 2006 12:20:04 am
Last Page View: Sep 2 2006 1:14:34 am
Visit Length: 54 minutes 30 seconds
Page Views: 99
Referring URL: http://search.blogger.com
Visit Entry Page: http://theunreliable…net/narration/?p=226
Visit Exit Page: http://theunreliable…usten-burroughs-dry/

Oh, the race of men, who above all else desire power. Well, it was inevitable, both that he would seek and that I would find—and hey, I think in some distant clinical corner of my mind, at least he’s using Firefox. (Which reminds me of Kitta’s hilarious guide on how to completely freak out and thereby get rid of telemarkers—all through proselytizing contra IE! It’s so crazy it’s brilliant.)

If I know him at all, which I did, he was livid. Absolutely door-slamming, furniture-throwing, car-turning-over furious. On the other hand, he only read for an hour, so maybe he didn’t hang around long enough to read anything particularly infuriating? (Um—99 page views, dear?) On the other hand, maybe the visit length is only 54 minutes because he assaulted the Mac with his ballpoint pen and got kicked out of the computer lab.

But I’ve changed him from Voldemort back to the Young Monk! And I’m working my little corpus callosum off on forgiveness! What more could he want? (Perhaps an absence of distinctly gory details about my liaison with the Brujo, for starters….) And anyway that was a whole week ago so he might not have read about the forgiveness then. And he probably just thinks I’m a romance-addicted slut anyway.

Or, on an implausible third hand, maybe he couldn’t care less about the whole thing, because he’s and undergraduate again in a new college town and because he has moved on.

Trembling thighs and uncontrollable hand tremors and inability to catch breath and pounding heart and cold sweat and every nauseating infuriating symptom in that old book.

Though I must also admit that even now, when I contemplate the demise of the midget shack, as read by the B. in the New Mexican last week, I start laughing even in the midst of this old-school bordering-on-borderline panic attack: “The City Council on Monday cleared the way for a property owner on Santa Fe Avenue to demolish a shack that had once been home to Della’s Restaurant. The shack had been held together with an assortment of materials, including duct tape, according to a city report.”

Oh, his retro-hipster dishevelled blond hair. Oh, knowing instantly that the fawning author of the article was also young and pretty. Oh, leaning against the wall over the recycling bin gasping for air and fighting nausea because his face was above the fucking fold and was I ever going to be able to get away from this, the copyeditor’s sympathetic hand on my shoulder, “Yeah, I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t see that.” Oh, his pretty head. Oh, the depths of my denial and the fool I made of myself, Stacy to his Wayne, Emma Bovary to his Rodolphe. Oh, his sickening pity. Oh, my heart on a fork being dragged through the gravel all over town. Oh, having given away all the pieces of me I had to give and to watch them twisted and turned and eventually tossed aside with every expression of disgust. Oh.

Well, that happened.

I’m clamping my jaw closed to keep my teeth from chattering, but I’m also trying not to laugh, and I think it might be a miracle, albeit a full year later: I’m okay. Shit. I’m okay, I’m actually okay. I’m not throwing up, I’m not losing 20 pounds, I’m not reading nothing but Dickinson and Tsvetaeva and wearing all black and waiting for the earth to swallow me. That was the worst fucking breakup I’ve ever been through, followed by losing the Librarian all over again, followed by Eloise dying, followed by getting sacked from two jobs, followed by Maman dying, all surrounded by an affective disorder that would make lesser men crumple, and I’m—

(I’m about to break into “I Will Survive,” is what I’m about to do.)

When I reported tearfully to the DBT that the Monk had said that the reasons he’d broken up with me were the same reasons he didn’t want to be my friend—that he didn’t want a friend who’d hesitate about helping him out—that his friends were generous and caring—to my surprise and faint horror the DBT grinned. “Well, why didn’t you tell him: ‘That’s great—I’m so glad you have such generous friends. Maybe they can give you a hundred bucks!’ ” Both of us giggling, me simultaneously asozzle. I laugh as much as I cry now; maybe laugh more, even at my first overdraft in almost 20 years, courtesy of Heath Ledger and the Brokeback-induced equivalent of drunk dialing.

So the Brujo and I stand in the rain on his favorite Zozobra-watching hill Thursday night, me wearing a useless garbage bag, rain cascading down my collar, us both shivering and stamping our feet and occasionally booming “Torch the puppet!” (him) and more faintly, “…please?” (me, mock-plaintive, aiming for maximum comic effect). Our desire for said torching motivated in large part by our desire to get out of the freezing rain and GO HOME. And sure enough, they do try to torch the puppet—who refuses to catch fire. The tequila-fueled screams of “Burn him!” begin to die down into an uneasy hush, as one by one we all fall silent, wondering, waiting. “God, wouldn’t that just be the best,” I say with hollow joviality. “Imagine what would happen if this were the Year Zozobra Wouldn’t Burn. The whole town, we’d all just crawl back to our houses and wait for the end of the world.”

Anxious on the hillside, wet hands under armpits for warmth, I find myself talking about last year’s Zozobra experience (though I’d told myself beforehand I wouldn’t bring it up), how the Monk and I were already in the throes of what I somehow didn’t recognize as a well-underway breakup. The triple whammy of my sins that night: I was supposed to have dressed differently and to look quote less depressed. (But I’d thought I looked really nice! I was wearing a skirt and everything. And yeah I’d worn it the day before but it wasn’t like I’d slept in it.) (The Brujo makes angry noises.) Next, I was supposed to have shrugged that criticism off and not have had instant, raw tears spring to my eyes. (The B. goes dangerously silent.) Finally, after that correction was conveyed to me, I wasn’t supposed to be upset about it either, and I definitely wasn’t supposed to go completely silent. “But I felt so completely defeated, and I thought if I said anything, that would have been the wrong thing to say too. It was that point at the end of a relationship where you just can’t do anything right. I thought being silent until we could talk later was skillful. But later I found out it hadn’t been, I guess.”

By this point the Brujo can contain himself no longer and begins, vehemently and with plosive expletives, to pronounce his negative impressions of my ex. When I pipe up as I invariably do, attempting to ameliorate said impressions with some feeble rigamarole that sounds lame even to my ears, like, “Well, but you don’t know how hard it was to be around me, I was hysterical and crazy and scary and so forth,” he turns fiercely toward me, blue eyes snapping. “Quit defending him. I don’t care how mentally ill you were. He was using you as a punching bag, it wasn’t your fault, and if I ever see him I’ll want to kick him into next Thursday.”

“Well, but right at the end we were kind of caught up together in the whole crowd-chanting, Three-Minutes-Hate, Leni-Riefenstahl kind of thing, and he had his arms around me, and it was okay again, for a while.” A pause. “Then it sort of wasn’t.” Another pause.

I abandon my efforts to try to make whole what had been profoundly broken. The Young Monk calling me again and again at work, infuriated and hurt when I couldn’t talk; checking up on me, wanting to know where I’d been; when I was late coming back from my godmother’s, as I’d warned him I probably would be, finding him on the porch pacing and smoking and angry, where were you. The way the cords seemed to be drawing tighter and tighter. When I checked out Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, I hid it from him and wisely so, because he was plenty angry when he did come across it.

I think about my first Zozobra, in 1988, with the short tough macho guy in a brown leather jacket who would deflower me later that weekend. I think about various Zozobras with the Physicist, him miserable, me placating like crazy to (of course) absolutely no avail. I think about short cocky tough guys in leather jackets, about long lanky British guys in suede jackets with just as many control issues, but more passive-aggressive ways of stonewalling and slamming the door on your fingers—either way you wind up tiptoeing and trying not to clatter the dishes against each other. When it finally wasn’t just once a day that I said or did something wrong, but every hour. Then several times an hour. Then with every sentence. Just waiting to set it off, holding my breath like a World War II sapper.

The Brujo abruptly leans over and kisses me tenderly on my frozen cheek. As abruptly, I let go of the bramble-bomb, give up the work of defusing it (“stop trying to make sense of crazy behavior”), be where I am.

His navy blue woolen peacoat beaded with rain. Menthol smoke spiralling windward. His strong, thin pianist’s hand tight around mine.

We watch together as the magnesium fuses trying pitifully to ignite Zozobra sputter out, first one and then the other. Gradually the fireworks, prematurely spouting silver and gold into the clouds, subside as well. We all hold our breaths.

Then, spectacularly, the pit crew solve the problem with ingenious simplicity: They just blow up Zozobra’s head—which is supposed to come last in the event, as the pièce de résistance—and he promptly burns merrily and immediately to the ground. The fireworks resume joyously, everyone hollers wildly, and my companion and I head without formalities straight down the hill to the car. “If we’ll watch Zozobra in this weather,” he says with amusement and also a trifle grimly, “we really are locals.” We go back to my place, strip, put on bathrobes, throw soggy clothes on the heaters, eat pear-apple crumble, and permit matters to progress. Around midnight we pull it together and head for his place, warmed and sleepy and affectionate.

Graced. When a year ago I saw, if at all, only as if through a pinhole. Only darkly. With rushing gapes the flapping ghosts sucking backward and departing leaving vacuum, Samhain always hard for me, the light dimming (but now: Apollo!) and the air thinning.

Even today, too many vulnerability factors and a grey dismal morning, the Brujo peering suspiciously out through the curtains: “What the fuck? It’s like Vancouver.” A small stack attack of small jealousies, low blood-sugar and no Apollo time, asking him to take me home with an unsteady voice, trying not to lose it and cry—but why? He wouldn’t mind. Instead I tootle waveringly up and down the axis of “inhibited grieving” and “crisis-generating behavior,” clamping it all down, hoping he’ll read my mind and somehow rescue me from myself, offer what I can’t manage to ask for (and he does offer, but it seems tepid to my weevil-shrieked ear, I don’t think he really means it, he’s only saying it to be nice and secretly can’t wait to get shut of me, the proof of its half-heartedness is that it’s not repeated, so instead I) bite my disappointment back until I get inside the door and then collapse and howl on the kitchen floor, old-school style again, as I haven’t done in months and months and months. The DBT out of town and Mandarin packing. Dragging myself to the piano, playing two-handed Hanon, forcing ragged sobbing breath to slow and regulate and deepen. Not adding a horse on top of a horse by beating myself up, literally, how dare you feel hurt you freaking wingnut, just letting it be bad enough that I feel hurt.

Broken-hearted; broken. I have so little faith in my right to have feelings, especially big messy ones (which aren’t so big or messy when I don’t try to strangle them before they’re even born). I probably will remain so for years yet. I’m still, more days than not, what I would have called in that other world “a total mess.” But finally anyone who would be displeased with that mode of being is gone from my life, by force or by choice. Space. Cleared air. Or as a woman in group said last week, simply: those who matter don’t care, and those who care don’t matter. Around me, I can’t see anyone who wants me to be some way other than how I am. The bittersweet double-bind sheds like a worn-out husk, day by day, with tears and nightmares and careful recapitulation and watching, observing and describing non-judgmentally and waking up somewhere safe in the morning and without danger. And I can permit myself to be what I am—not a witch to burn or a crazy woman to sit on or a stupid bitch to slap and bruise or a demanding oversexed American to hide from or a self-engrossed, emotional Zen student to whip into shape—just another garden-variety underemployed, uninsured, somewhat sensitive romantic poet. Nothing special. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.

I invited that retraumatization. I was ignorant and I didn’t know (how could I not have known? I didn’t know) what our games could do to me. Or to him. We didn’t know, we didn’t know from Stockholm. Sometimes I fear for his next lover. What will happen the first time she crosses him, has a feeling that scares him, wants something he doesn’t. What will happen the second time. The twentieth. The fiftieth. What behaviorists call reinforcers. I taught him by example that it was okay to treat an intimate like that, with impatience, blame, scorn, dictating the terms, behaving so that when he didn’t get his way I would eventually give in, thus reinforcing the behavior, sending the message: anger works. He may carry that lesson under his skin to the next woman or man. I did him a grave disservice, letting him think that being pushy and controlling and critical were acceptable ways to be.

But when you’re a big puzzle piece that reads “I don’t deserve to feel any of my feelings, and because I think that, I’m a doormat!” and you walk around the world thusly labelled, you’re bound to find another puzzle piece reading “Great, I’m an asshole, and I’m not okay with your feelings or mine either!” and then there you are.

Or, were. There I was, then. Past tense, dear heart; past tense.

Am I ready to let go of telling the story; needing to convince myself that I wasn’t disgusting or evil or pathetic or ridiculous or scary; subtly soliciting support, commisseration, vilification, strategic deployment of plosives. Am I ready to be done—not on the Librarian’s time scale or the Buddha’s or the weevils’ or the Young Monk’s or Jesus’s—but mine? To unhand my own retraumatizing, unclutch my victim status and my grievance story?

2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.

Because thank God it all happened the way it did, or I might still be completely enmired in self-hatred, instead of only bogged down. Thanks to the Young Monk’s meteoritic rise and fall, his initial dazzling love and acceptance turning to anger and dissatisfaction, I had it put right in front of my face, that questing, nuzzling puzzle piece. He unwittingly enacted what I could then use for underhanded dialectic, a way to approach self-validation without throwing myself underneath a pine sapling sobbing drunkenly, I tried, I tried, I’m sorry, I tried. Only to pick my way down a frozen riverbed later and hate myself even more.

3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”

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