Ordinarily, nothing makes her bristle with anger or triggers her stubbornness more quickly than being told she couldn't have what she wanted, unless it was being told that her choices in life hadn't been the best, unless it was being told that she would screw up the rest of her life (according to who?) if she wasn't careful, unless it was being told that she had an addiction issue, or an attitude problem, or a problem with motivation, or with men.
In the recent past, his well-meaning and gentle insistence of an alternate course would have jammed down the detonation plunger, not on all these issues, but on enough of them to have guaranteed an explosion of respectable magnitude.
During the past two years, however, she had spent a great many hours in late-night self-analysis, if only because her circumstances had given her so much time for contemplation that she couldn't avoid shining a light in a few of the rooms in her heart. Until then, she had long resisted such far-reaching explorations, perhaps out of fear that she'd find a haunted house within herself. A house inhabited by monsters crouched behind doors, wearing the faces of those she has loved or those she has been unable to. She'd found a few monsters, all right, but she'd been more disturbed by the discovery that in the mansion of her soul, a greater number of rooms than not were unfurnished spaces, neglected and empty. Places that had been forgotten. That feeling that something should be in those rooms; something happy, something sad, something important to her struggle, but no longer accessible.
Since childhood, her defenses against this bewildering life had been anger, self-recrimination and periodically, total retreat.
Carry those defenses long enough and you forget where they came from in the first place, they become as reflexive and unthinking an action as the touching of a new scar or a sore tooth.
But when you reach a certain age, a certain point, you learn things about yourself - you learn that you're not quite what other people always told you. And you learn how to be you, and like that person, for better or worse.
She sometimes denies her pain. Out of fear, out of pride, gritting her teeth in a heroic refusal to concede that certain people, certain memories, certain choices have enough power to resurface and hurt her. She sometimes feeds it. Sometimes she can't help but throw more fuel on the fire.
But any rational person knows that these tactics are like a summer storm; they blow in, they blow out.
And she has to remind herself that not everybody is out to get us. Our lives are cluttered with people who wound us in small ways. We suffer some inevitable aches because we are vulnerable people living in a crazy world where fragile spirits sometimes collide.
Her regret sometimes threatens to overwhelm her, which, frankly wasn't all that hard to do. On a good day, she feels guilty for things that most people (she imagines) don't give a second thought. Not giving up her seat on the bus, not picking up that garbage in the lobby, killing a moth trapped between the screens, knowing someone needed a kind word not given. Guilt had always been a key feature of her life. Periodically, she feels guilty for things she knew for a fact had nothing to do with her. Hiroshima. The impending extinction of a species. The terrible suffering of war. Sometimes, she feels like the only person in the world who could say, "This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you," and really mean it. A little vacation to The Realm of Regret, perched daintily on her favorite pile of ashes and sporting the latest designs in sackcloth.
This isn't so much about what she wanted or whether she was self-destructive, or whether she would be able to pull her life out of the fire into which she herself had cast it. It was more about emotional survival. Having found her own balance, the battle now was to stay steady on the knife edge.
And stop torturing herself.
Jan 29/2004