Itinerantdaughter's Blog

I’ll save my real musings on pleasurable masochism for my dearest pen pal (yes, there IS someone more important than you) but for now, let me just say that there are few things as wrongly right as taking one too many painkillers and reading Autobiography of a Face.

“Afterward I’d lie in bed and concentrate on letting the tremors run their course, allowing them free access to all of me so that, like some bear sniffing me out, they’d gradually grow bored and amble away, leaving me alone and exhausted but still alive. Some pain, like the pain of a needle or the site of an operation, is specific: it announces itself in no uncertain terms. Often I tried to balance the pain out with the rest of my body, a sort of negotiation in which I’d isolate one section. I’d lie there and list to myself the parts that didn’t hurt, trying to feel them, aware that normally I’d have no reason to ‘feel’ my body or know it so intimately.

“I was becoming aware that I was experiencing my body, and the world, differently from other people. For hours I’d lie in bed either at home or in the hospital and run my finger back and forth along the wall or the bedrails beside me, conversing silently with myself in the third person, rationalizing the situation, setting down the basic premises of my secret philosophy, occasionally even telling myself I was lucky, lucky to have this opportunity to know such things. At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets. Other times a sort of physical awareness would take hold of me. Each breath was an important exchange with the world around me, each sensation on my skin a tender brush from a reality so beautiful and so mysterious that I would sometimes find myself squealing with the delight of being alive.”

As I said before, sometimes we get hilarious book proposals at my office.  (A Book Deal-Worthy blog would chronicle just these and then they could be compiled into a book –– but would you have to pay the weirdos royalties?)  Here’s a section of a proposal entitled The Alien Letters, a book of “a series of letters written to an unmarried human by an intelligent visitor from another planet.”  Fiction.  Just FYI.

Letter Forty

Dear human,

The process of falling in love with a married man was sweet.  You at first (for a very brief honeymoon period) carried this sweetness into all other areas of your life.  This was followed by the entrance of discomfort caused mainly by associating your life outside of work with his absence, making your experience bitter-sweet.  As time has progressed, the bitter portion has increased and the sweet portion diminished.  During all of this, your experience at work has remained largely sweet for the obvious reason that he is there.  However, even that is beginning to change.

Because there is absolutely no sense in which he belongs to you, an increasing amount of hurt and pain is occurring in you each time you see him or spend time with him because each sighting throws in your face both the fact that he does not belong to you and the fact that you wish he did.  This mixture is by definition painful.  The more attached to him you have become, the more painful your sightings of him will be.  Thus, though you long for him, you have begun to avoid him when you can.  Instead of taking the hallway where you are most likely to see him, you now take the long way around.  If you see him in the distance, you change courses in an effort to avoid a short, and therefore awkward conversation.  The occasions when you see him but are not able to speak to him are unspeakably awkward and pierce your heart for hours thereafter.  A three-second sighting, especially one where he seemed almost cold, formal, and even distant, puts you on the verge of tears.  You experience untold relief when he is absent from work because his absence gives you rest from the pain of these sightings and the resultant emotional strain.  You feel like you have been released from a prison because in his absence you are free to walk anywhere in the building without fear of seeing him.
The interplay of your varying emotions is, in your mind, being caused by him.  In other words, if it were not for him, you would not be in the pain you are in.  As such, you have actually become angry at him for causing you such distress.  Pain, especially prolonged pain of the type you are experiencing, almost always among you humans turns into anger, and anger always needs an object to be mad at, usually the cause of the pain if it can be identified.  (If it cannot be identified, you humans tend to take your anger out on whoever is most convenient or on whoever you can take it out on and get away with it such as a loved one that you take for granted.)  Since you can identify the cause of your pain and anger as him, you are finding it increasingly difficult to be civil to him.

Your incivility takes the form of being icy cold to him to a degree so obvious that even other coworkers notice, though they pretend not to notice.  Besides your coldness toward him being ultimately motivated by your anger, you have three other motivations, each of which bring their unique bitter taste to the blend.  One, you hope he will notice your coldness and ask you about it.  You wish this not only because you would crave such attention from him but also because you hope that his noticing of your coldness and stiffness would indicate that he ultimately cares about you the way you care about him.  In other words, you suppose that his noticing would prove that he has feelings for you.  Two, you desire to hurt him as payback for hurting you.  Again, in addition to wanting to hurt him for the sake of hurting him, you are also looking for proof of his interest in you by supposing that if he really is hurt by your iciness then he must indeed have something for you, otherwise he would not be hurt.  And three, you hope that by being mean to him your own emotions for him will subside.

After being mean to him for a while you start to feel guilty which in turn moves you to be particularly warm toward him.  Thus you are running hot and cold with him.  Distancing yourself from him also produces fear in you because you do not want your coldness to be the reason that you ultimately missed out on the possibility of having him.  And even apart from all that, you do not want to be the bad guy and allow him to say that the reason it didn’t work out between you two was because of you.  Your current emotional state has sapped any strength you may have had to bear such a burden.

Your resident alien