Doctor's Visit

He uses a red felt tip pen to circle what's wrong with me.  Circle, circle, circle, draw a bleeding line from pictogram to symptom.  Everything is stress related.  Sounds like a clever play on that Foer novel title.

He asks, "Why so stressed?" 

I say, "How long is this appointment?" 

Can I tell a stranger, doctor or no, exactly what it feels like to be rejected by your family?  What it's like to be ignored, to have people who share your blood pretend that you do not exist?

Instead, I say, "Work," though he's not listening anyway.  He's back to underlining with the fuzzy tip of the cardinal marker.

Four Little Words

I'm taking a Creative Writing class and here's one of my completed assignments.  The instructions were to dialogue a conversation where one party can only speak, and one can only think or have a physical reaction.  It's called "Four Little Words".

Four Little Words

"Do you still love me?"

She sat curled on the couch, arms folded, and contemplated his question.  Buying time, she pulled on a strand of her hair, and wound it round and round her index finger. 

"Well...do you?"

She didn't know what to say.  She looked at the floor, shrugged.  Her feet were falling asleep--it had been a long conversation--but she was afraid to move, to draw even more attention to her person.  She felt as if nothing placed more of a spotlight on a person than the yes or no question she had just been asked.

"How can you just shrug?  Are you kidding me?  Seven years together, and you just shrug?"

She shrugged again and instantly regretted it.  How childish she felt, sitting in her fluffy bunny slippers, shrugging at important questions, feeling like she wasn't quite ready to be the adult that this conversation suggested she was.

"Seriously, I can't sit here all day.  I'll go if don't love me, I'll stay if you do.  We can work through this if you want to work through this, but I won't stick around trying to make something work with a person who clearly wishes that it won't."

She wished the TV were still on.  He had made her turn it off earlier when he noticed that all she could do was stare at the muted characters on the screen.  If he had guessed that she was wishing she were them, that she were in the big box where nothing was real, where life was performed in front of green screen that digitally imposed life and character, then he was right.  She brushed at her eyes, then wished she hadn't.  She didn't want him to think she was shedding tears over him--them.  She sighed, opened her mouth to speak, the stopped.  She would not say those words to any person.  In her opinion, people should only hear when they are loved, not when they are not.

"What am I supposed to do?  I can't work with you when you're like this."

She hated when he talked like that, like he was her boss and she the bad employee.  She began picking at a string on her pajama pants.

"So...that's it?  Nothing?  You're going to sit there and say nothing?"

She nodded.  She wouldn't say it, no matter how much he prodded, no matter how much he needed the "closure".  If you can't say something nice, she thought, then took a deep breath.

9/8/9, Part Deux

Another excerpt from my little book:

This book is my Twitter account when I forget my damn phone.  It might also be my Twitter account if my fucking house burns down--animals inside--because I didnt' turn off my stupid straightener.  The stupid pink thing that melts brown holes in white Formica.

I hate that I've been forgetting everything lately:  names, events, faces..."I think I saw you--".  The paranoid hypochondriac in me imagines the worst...I have early onset Alzheimer's, a tumor, a rare disease.  The kind of nasty illness that will cause people to remark about how brave I am.  "What a survivor."  And really, I'd still just be me.  Kind of insecure, but grossly overconfident in my own mediocrity, living day to day like anyone else.  I wouldn't suddenly be a "better" person...just someone who is a little pudgy, flat chested, and oh yeah, NOW I'M DYING.

Silly.

9/8/9

I carry little notebooks with me to jot random thoughts.  Here's one from 9/8/9:

There are some days when I am quite sure I couldn't handle the pain of some of life's little incidents.  I think of people who must watch a best friend and lover meet and fall in love themselves.  While the practical side of me thinks that of course, I'll cross that sad bridge when I come to it, the softer underbelly side of me, the side I hide and protect at all costs still hurts at the lingering memory of the last pain it went through.  The old twinge of a torn ligament.  Recalling the exact moment it happened--pop, pop, pop--the pain minus the actual pain, you know?  Snap, twist, scream...the memory is enough.

What's the Problem

I don't have a bad work ethic, I mostly just don't care.  Maybe I'm jaded, but I don't find myself really BELIEVING in a lot of things these days.  Perhaps I've lost some passion for life; I'm not doing anything important.

(I blame the television.  And the kids with the clothes and the drinking of the alcohol.  And the drugs.  Wait, just to clarify, I am not doing drugs.  I blame those who are, because seriously, they are really screwing up things.) 

What I've discovered in life is that I'm often on a different page than others.  If I'm passionate about plaid, everyone else is passionate about stripes.  It's hard to be excited when you're dining as a party of one.

Or maybe, just maybe, I don't have a good work ethic and I'm lazy.  And scared.  A horrible combination; it means I'll never leave the couch for fear it won't be there when I get back.

As a separate but somewhat related thought, is it bad that I voiced the other day that I'm okay sticking with work I don't love if it affords me the time to do the things I actually do love?  It just seems that since those words were uttered, my "things I love" time has died a quiet death.

A LITTLE LIKE MY SOUL.

I kid, I kid...sort of.