cast iron belly sad
Who's to say I actually know what I'm doing?
I don't, of course.
I suppose it's not an exceptionally swell thing to know you're capable of crying wherever you go. For instance, it's 9AM. I'm sitting in my Brillo pad chair with the broken, involuntarily rotating back, and I could so easily just walk a few feet to the bathroom, pull the squeaking wooden door to a close, slump my back to the floor (gathering cobwebs and multiple globs of dust on the way, back scraping against out-of-style wallpaper), squint my eyes, wrinkle my cheeks, and loosely cry.
My fingers feel like they've been dipped in ice water for an hour. My stomach is on a cramp and sting cycle, looped. The coffee I made before leaving the house feel as thin as the emotional wall I keep between me and the rest of the buzzing, indifferent world.
Yesternight, I spent a good hour on his steps. The pale carpeted steps that lead upstairs and into his room. I was there, perched like an old, forbidding memory. During this hour, we had ourselves a nice screaming match. Well, honestly, the volume of the voices varied considerably, but it was a heated discussion. A fiery argument. A blazing maze of conflict.
Sitting there, making my way from determined standing to exhausted leaning to, eventually, the I-fucking-give-up of plunking my body onto those steps, all I could think was how perfectly this seemed to fit into an idea. The idea being, well, that I could just vividly imagine a marriage counselor, pastel antique chair pulled close to my eyes to promise a closeness that meant words like helping and caring, telling me that this would be the ideal situation to have an argument in. And I can picture that. Really, I can. If the face-to-face arguments are too violent or immediately too hurtful (what with seeing facial expressions, muscles tensed, all of that), why not explode at one another from separate rooms? Surely you can collect yourself and say more, saying more openly, that way.
And that's what happened, at least on my end. The whiny increase his voice took grated my nerves with the persistence of a sharpened paper clip. Hearing the resonation of him banging angrily upon different surfaces frightened me, made the idea of grabbing the gold doorknob and fleeing into the muggy evening seem like a wise and attractive choice.
The more I audibly witnessed his childish rage, the more I was keen on keeping my voice calm and decidedly accepting.
The situation could not at all take on the mature permanence that is supposed to be marriage, though. Considering the argument actually encircled his strengthening dedication to an online video game when I am present, as I am ashamed to admit, it hardly took on the nucleus of a worthy problem. However, the truth of it was, I had come from a fairly stressful day, a day (in which all days mirror) that I am alone for many hours. Now, though I am in the presence of others, seeing them come and go, this does not mean that I am, in any way, accompanied to the point that would be considered happy or likeable by yours truly. For the most part, it's an empty experience.
Most of my experiences are empty, as a matter of fact. My sister is frequently off with her newfound fellow. My best friend (though the beauty is decaying quickly, which is an entirely different matter) has a life dedicated to separate things, an hour away, as she probably very well should. My old roommate, dearest of them all, feels unreachable at most any time and, because of distance, the lovely friendship we could very easily form has been put on hold. So that's that, honestly, and all I've left to depend on is that sole, loyal one. Him.
And so, to come to his house following work to not properly get the selfish attention I crave, it stings. Stings like a goddamned wasp to the throat, and I finally admitted it to him by the end of the entire charade: That I, very weakly, have no one to depend on for any sort of equally enthusiastic communication, caring, any of it, and that, to not receive that from him, shakes me to a point that I don't understand.
Amazingly enough, I said it. And it was hard to say and caused me to cry in the saying of it.
I don't like admitting need.
I'd rather soak my mind in book pages than deal with the everyday.