Little Weirds(12)

Touch vs. Smack

I don’t want to smack anything on the ass and say LET’S GO.



I want to touch something on the side of the face and say WILL YOU PLEASE TAKE ME?





I Died: Listening

I died.

Oh, god! I did die!

Some man was standing right in the middle of the room talking about how he knew that now was the time for men to listen, and he was proud to say that he knew how to listen but strangely he kept talking for so long and I was the one who was listening and so then what happened was that my head twisted around on my neck and faced the wall.

But that didn’t seem to bother him and it certainly didn’t stop him because I guess he was on a roll? And then he just walked around to the other side of me and kept talking, and what he was saying was so obvious but backward and wrong, but to tell him that would have caused a big bust-up.

And even though my head was on backwards and my brain felt, you know, not at its best, I was still aware that two very bad choices were being shoved at me: Tell him that he’s right or at least on the right track and therefore lie and also abandon myself and cause more damage by letting his ignorance and monologue go on forever, or tell him NO, he is not even close to correct, that the fact that he is pontificating and instructing and not actually conversing is a sign that he does not even remotely understand. But then after saying that I would have to weather the storm of his humiliation and frustration, and somehow end up feeling bad about myself, like I should have been gentler and treated him like a child who simply doesn’t know any better.

Or should I have been grateful that he was interested in talking about listening at all? But then again, he was demanding to be treated like a man who does know how to listen, while he was asking me to only listen to him and lie to him and maybe give him a prize? And I was so chilled by the reality of having to choose between bad and worse that my heart became flash-frozen and then it cracked in half and so what I’m saying is that basically my heart broke almost right away.

I thought, “Oh, great. Now I’ve got a backwards head and a broken thingy.”

I tried to sit very still but inside of me the blood couldn’t go around because there was no working heart to pump it, and he was still talking, even still, and what happened then was that my backwards head, which was already under a fair amount of stress from facing the wrong side of my body and only offered a bad view, which was the man, mostly the man, and then the wall—well, my backwards head sort of tore off at the neck and dangled down, just hung there for quite a while, which was unsightly and embarrassing.

Oh no! I didn’t want to look ugly!

The man was getting irritated because I guess I was making a face and rolling my eyes, but what was hard about that was that my head was dangling upside down and so my eyeballs were, to be fair, rolling around. He started to ask tense, defensive questions to which the answer was clearly supposed to be “No, no, the problem is not you, it’s other worse men who do crimes and things like that,” even though it was him and it is probably all of us. All.

As my eyes rolled back in my head and I saw into my own mind, I caught a glimpse of some old messages scrawled on the walls in there, and I thought, “The bad thing has gotten into all of us and we all need to get it out of us.” And when I started to think about how it is certainly all of us that have a bit of this bad thing in us, the shards of my frozen heart really began to prick at me, and my dangling head became as heavy as a wrecking ball.

And then my head just completely disengaged from the rest of me. It fell off and it bonked down onto the floor. I felt it roll slightly away but I didn’t know how far it had gone and that was stressful because I wanted to have some control over my head.

I didn’t want to be rude by kneeling down and feeling around on the floor for the head, because that might make it seem like I was distracted or not listening, and the man was already so strangely angry even though I was the one falling to pieces and everything he was saying was in favor of keeping himself together and also never changing.

Even though everything he was saying was being said to dismantle and delegitimize the humane system I believed in, the one that demands equal rights and good old-fashioned empathy, the one that would strip him of his excessive privileges, the one that celebrates things being various, multi, plural, open, and requires him to explore being truly vulnerable. I wanted him to understand that “being vulnerable” is a different thing for everyone, is a developed and specific skill involving personally specific actions that are terrifying.

But I couldn’t really get a word in edgewise, as they say.

I really did feel concerned about where my head might be and I could feel my blood as it stalled inside of myself. I was taking a breath maybe every three minutes and I started to worry that, you know, this was not going to work out for me, because that’s just not enough. It’s nowhere near the amount of breaths that he was getting to suck in and snort out.

But then again, I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t being attentive, because recently I had let the man in on the terrible secret, which is that many men interrupt and disregard women and do it religiously and don’t even notice that they’re doing it but also gain power by doing it even if they do it without thinking, without what I guess you would call “consideration.” And so now if I ever interrupted the man, he would tell me in my own language how painful it is to be interrupted. He would explain, in a voice that sounded so much like my own, how I am not considerate, even though I am considering a lot.