How much harder can I make it for you to get through to me?
I do not want you to flood me with your
pity or with your love.
Telling people about your vices and misgivings is supposed to make you feel better.
It’s supposed to make you feel like a weight is being lifted off of your shoulders.
When I told you how I felt today, maybe I was expecting you to acknowledge me and
commemorate my woes with clicks and hums of sympathy. Maybe I was expecting you
to roll your eyes and evade my invitation for you to nurture me.
When I told you how I felt today,
and you heard me,
and you cursed what hurt me,
I didn’t feel better.
You listened and you clicked and you hummed and you did everything correctly,
but I still felt worse.
But you and I, we’re a team. Partners in crime, inseparable. Maybe you’re the surgeon
and I’m the one who hands you the scalpel.
The surgery begins with me in the operating room. You and I are standing over my
body from the past, which is naked, vulnerable, exposed.
My body from the past, which isn’t conscious anymore,
which can’t see me or you looking down on it with determination.
You are determined to fix me, and I just want it to be over with.
You look my past up and you look my past down, searching for a place to make an
incision. You know where to start, you’ve done this all before, but you’re following
procedure. You find what you’re looking for, and you preface the cut, my cut, with a
dark and broken line of ink.
Watch carefully, you suggest, and I wish I didn’t have to.
Scalpel, you demand, and so I hand it to you and you drag the blade across my
breaking skin. It begins to bleed, and suddenly I am whipped back into the past. Now,
I am on the table, conscious, and there is only you and I in this room. The one who
held the scalpel is nowhere to be found.
I want to cry because it hurts, but I don’t want to tell you because I know that in the
end I should feel better. So I let you cut me in the nicest way that you can.
You put the scalpel away and ask me how I’m feeling. I tell you every detail, I tell you
that it stings, and you apologize and urge me to tell you more. I tell you, and you nod
and nod and with every nod, you sting me a little more.
I know you don’t mean to, so I don’t say another word.