Little Weirds(24)

So, yes, it has been a hard time and nobody could say differently. But it occurs to me as this long day ends—and I can hardly make myself stay up past six PM because I’m too busted up in my heart, because my brain has the posture of an old couch, because I try to imagine the blood in my arms and all I can imagine is air being blasted through pipes made of paper . . . It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.

And then, at the end of this day, in the start of another night, at the first lip-lick of this appetite for hearing myself clearly, it really hits me: I never really want to argue with anyone ever again, nor am I under any sort of obligation to do so.

It occurs to me that I just never want to argue with a single person ever again and I will do anything I can to prevent it. Will I discuss? Yes. And will I disagree? Yes, I will also do that. I will also most likely feel classic lava-flows of anger.

But it is suddenly clear: I know what I want to hear when I hear myself in this life, and I am feeling very certain that there is absolutely no good reason to ever be disrespectful, no matter how upset you are. I do not need to hear bullying voices ever again and there is no reason to ever do that sort of emotional violence to anyone. There is no good rationale behind calling names or being tricky or cutting or scary or to say a ton of swears. That was never my style, but I let other people do it to me, and then I did something to them, too. And now, no.

I recall losing myself to eruptions of temper, and I deeply regret it all, and I regret it in a new way. It occurs to me that a rude and crude struggle is not anything that I can even connect to anymore.

It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire. It occurs to me that I can have every single feeling I need to have without ever trying to overpower someone or win something.

It occurs to me that if anyone is ever here again by my side I will do my best, and if that doesn’t work out, I will leave. I will not do my half-best and stay for a ridiculous amount of time.

It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.

And then it occurs to me that it is never too late to write yourself a good little personal creed, and that finding a creed for yourself is about gathering a set of rules that supports your self-respect and your community. It occurs to me that even though I feel very much at sea, I am noticing that I am finally mature enough to develop a creed and to live by it, and that this will no doubt cause me great satisfaction and give me exquisite, lacy-patterned strength in my spirit.

Yes, it has been a long day, and I am not at my best, but I’m like someone limping away from a fight that she won by just a hair. I may even be playing dead just so they don’t try to find me. I’m going toward a land that I have defended but not even lived in yet. I am banged up and I can’t see well and I’m stumbling too fast for someone so tired, but I am the one to live in the land now and I am the one to write the creed and when I wake up tomorrow, I will know that today was the day that I knew and felt all of the hard things, and that I was visited by many astounding pains but that I also realized the truth: It is finally the time for a creed, and this will change everything.





The Code of Hammurabi

I am sitting in the room in my house where I’ve put the television in a big wicker cabinet so that I don’t ever have to see the television. I enjoy watching the TV, but also I think that it is an ugly object. I cringe when I see the TV loitering like a dumbass, incorrect in its placement next to my books and tender hanging plants and thoughtfully chosen textiles. But here I am, sitting in front of it. I am watching a documentary that anyone can find and watch. I have not dug deep into a subculture to find it. It was right here when I turned on the thing and clicked on the other thing.

And the world is certainly scary because suddenly everything is computer and computers and internet stuff, but there is still some good to extract from it, like this documentary I am watching.

I have Thai food that is so spicy that I start to sweat and breathe in and out like how ladies do Lamaze breathing while having a baby in a movie in the 1980s. I ordered it with the vague notion that it might be really nice to just blow my colon out once and for all. It might be nice to live life as a big empty whistling network of inner caves. But now I see that I am just bloating myself with salt and fusing my insides together with oils that I am not genetically inclined to process.

I think, “If my ancient dog gets even a lick of this curry, his hair-fur will fall off of his body like when you blow on a dandelion. And then he will throw up a small trickle of yellow. And then he will die. And then I will have nobody at all including the many different men who have held this dog to whom I have said, This is amazing. He really likes you! When what I really mean is