LJ Idol Season 7 Week 14 - Don’t Wanna Be My Friend No More
o/` “Everyday I fight a war against the mirror
I can't take the person staring back at me
I'm a hazard to myself
“Don't let me get me
I'm my own worst enemy
It's bad when you annoy yourself, so irritating” o/`
-- “Don’t Let Me Get Me” performed by Pink
No matter how hard I stared, no matter how many times I compared them with the photograph on their neat little brightly colored box, they refused to make sense. The colors and shapes wriggled away as if animated by their own brand of mischief, ran away in cracks and lines.
Cracks and lines, cracks and lines. That's all I can see. There's nothing here for me to make sense of any longer. Sure, I'd gotten a few of the pieces to fit together by chance, had even been lucky enough to find several of the piece already joined to the frame. After that? Nothing! I'd been attempting to work this two thousand piece monstrosity with its squiggles, blotches of color, and cracked lines which evaded my ability to give them any sort of context for hours. “Stupid!” I yanked at my braid in frustration and, in a single childish moment of supreme aggravation, swept the entire jigsaw puzzle on to the floor. I then proceeded to gather up the loose pieces, place them carefully back in the box, and then fling them as far and as hard as I could across the rec room.
I used to love jigsaw puzzles. Some of my earliest and most pleasant memories had been of sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen in those precious few days of Indian summer before the first snows touched the peaks of our little valley and carefully picking through a box of pieces. She had preferred nature scenes --- mountains or loudly colored autumn leaves with rushing creeks, occasionally with a New England church or a castle in the background. I took special pleasure in gathering up the most obvious parts of the scene, sorting out the puzzle pieces, and then carefully fitting them together. We could complete a five hundred piece puzzle in a single afternoon and sometimes we worked several. Other times, she would buy one of the larger ones and we would have several days of contemplative pleasure. Once or twice, a well meaning visitor would gift me with one of those children’s puzzles. Usually they had large pegged pieces with pictures of Disney or Warner Brother characters on them. I would politely accept the gift...and then my grandmother would exchange a smile with me as we put those aside for my baby sister. Nothing but a real puzzle would do for me.
As I grew older, the manufacturers began making puzzles with rounded edges. We bought those too; I delighted in the challenge of making those meaningless seams of individual pieces become a solid, clear photograph. One year, my grandfather bought us a brand new innovation: a 3D puzzle of a famous building. Not only did you have to get the picture right but you also had to align the various cracks together in order to build the monument. We glued that one together and it remained on her dresser in the bedroom, a proud statement of our companionship, until she died. I had asked for it back, but I suppose someone thought it worthless and either gave it away or tossed it because no one could find the thing after the funeral.
Those times were literally gone now, taken from me by a careless night nurse who hadn’t wanted to do her job. Two springs ago, I’d been hospitalized for yet another skin infection. Doctors normally, when I’m admitted, put a big note on my chart regarding the delicacy of my skin owing to the collagen deficiencies. IVs have to be carefully watched because if the flow isn’t just right, they blow. IV antibiotics are some of the strongest mankind can produce and the type I generally have to have is the same type used to treat anthrax. If the IV blows, it can have serious consequences for the patient and can destroy the surrounding tissue when it leaches into it. I complained of pain, and then of a headache, dizziness, and tightness in the chest. The night nurse told me to shut up and gave me an extra dose of IV pain medications. By morning, I had a lump on that arm about the size of a hen’s egg. I also could no longer read numbers, forms, or a calendar. Forms and the calendar were worst; their cracks and lines danced all over, refusing to hold still and take their proper shape. Now, my family physician surmises that I probably had a stroke resulting from clots caused by the IV or from the medication circulating improperly. We’ll never know because my insurance didn’t cover things like CT scans and the other methods used to check for cerebral accidents. I horrified all my friends that evening by eating flawlessly with my right hand; previously I’d so strongly identified as left handed that I would have been hard pressed to remember I had another hand. I even stood at the sink and did the dishes with only that hand!
I don’t know what made me get out the jigsaw puzzles again. Stubbornness and some minor twinkling of hope, I suppose. I had, after a fashion, re-learned how to use the calendar. I’d never read it properly again but I could match up the numbers in the boxes to the words written at the top and come up with the correct date...unless I mixed up my threes and eights or fours and sevens or sixes and nines. I’d learned to use a calculator again with the same method, except I’d just memorized where each number button should be located. In any case, I’d picked possibly the worse possible candidate for this little experiment. The puzzle in question was based on Bev Doolittle’s artwork (my puzzle looks somewhat like this one which is called Pintos and features an optical illusion in which the horses’ markings gradually become indistinguishable from the red rock behind them).
The arc of my throw had been off; a small piece of the frame which I’d been able to put together remained, along with a goodly portion of the loose pieces. Furious, I began scooping them up and tossing them randomly around the room. I’d have stomped on them, torn them into bits too small to be of use if I could have. As I tossed the third handful, a hand shot out and caught the pieces. Diagenou held them in his big hand for a moment and then gently placed them back on the card table. “My, we are in a fine temper,” he remarked, clucking his tongue in disapproval. Had anyone else addressed me at that moment, I’d have let them have it with the sharp edge of my tongue and several improbable descriptions of their lineage and what they could do with their collective ancestors. From this man, however, it effectively deflated my frustration and anger. The embarrassment of having been caught in a childish tantrum combined with an abject sense of failure tasted like hot lead in my mouth. Without looking directly at me, he began picking up the mess I’d made. “Why did you do that? Now you’ll have to put the whole thing together again.”
“I can’t,” I wailed, thoroughly aware that I was whining but unable to stop myself. “The pieces just run away in horrid old cracks and lines. They don’t...make...ANY...damned...SENSE!”
He stopped, his bright green eyes seeming to penetrate my soul. “Well,” Diagenou admitted, “You do seem to have a problem, don’t you?”
“You’re making fun of me,” I accused him, not quite ready to be friends just yet.
“I’m not.” His voice sounded perfectly reasonable and serious but I could see his mouth quirking at the corners. He placed the lid back on the puzzle and put it back on the shelf. “You have to learn to walk before you can run,” he continued reasonably as he perused the other puzzle boxes. Finally, he selected a one hundred piece puzzle meant for small children. I’d only had it in my collection because it featured an an American Eskimo dog and photographs of them on any type of memorabilia were rather rare. “We’ll try this.”
“I’ve put that one together before.” Not in the mood to be charitable but softening under the mute plea in his body language, I sat back down at the card table.
“Then it will be easier for you to set the pieces together.”
It took me almost three weeks to put together that simple one hundred piece child’s puzzle.
When we’d finished it, he went back to the bookshelf on which they were stored and selected a fifteen hundred piece puzzle depicting a painting of a fox hidden in autumn foliage. I started to protest but Diagenou held up a hand, put his finger to my mouth. “No, I don’t mean any insult. Let me show you.” His long, slender fingers dipped into the pieces and I watched him trace each one through his fingers. “You know what an edge feels like even if you can no longer recognize one when you see it.” He held an edge piece between his fingers and handed it to me. “Here, you try it. Run your fingers over it, get a good idea of what the edge feels like.”
“You’re right!” Especially if I closed my eyes, I found I could distinguish easily between edge pieces and other pieces.
Finally, my fingertips located a single edge piece. The crack felt smooth and straight; it didn’t wiggle away or waver. Slowly, I placed it on the table.
“Good.” Diagenou kept his voice low and encouraging, a rare and unusual act of patience from a man who loathed any sort of stupidity. I had the uneasy feeling he’d done this before and vaguely recalled a newspaper clipping he kept at his desk in his room about an agent who had been shot in the head. I wondered if he’d been a friend, if Diagenou had worked with him in this same sort of patient manner, and if the man had recovered. “Now find another and do the same.”
“Not an edge, not an edge...here’s an edge....not an edgenotanedge...edge...not anedge...edge...here’s another...” I chanted that as my mantra while we found as many of the edge pieces as we could in the manner he’d shown me.
In three hours, I had managed to put together a small portion of the frame and a few interior pieces.
When he noticed me becoming confused, fumbling with things I’d picked up in my right hand and faltering when I realized the should have been in the left, Diagenou called a halt. Six hours later, we had the frame together and nothing more. “A moron could have put this together faster,” I muttered. The tears I hadn’t asked for suddenly spilled over onto my lashes, down my cheeks.
His arms went around me in a gentle hug; he kissed each tear as it fell. “A moron didn’t put this together,” he said firmly. “You did, Kitty.”
Over the ensuing weeks, he and I spent as little as half an hour or as long as three hours on that puzzle. Sometimes we sat together in companionable silence, each working on our own section of the puzzle, and other times his large slender fingers guiding mine, helping me to feel the shapes and find their proper places through touch alone. When that failed, he directed me to look at the things I could recognize: patterns, hatch marks, brush strokes, color clusters. He never once lost his temper with me, even during the times when I would get frustrated or flounce off.
The cracks and lines gradually slowed their dance, straightened up and conjoined to form a picture I could recognize. We’re still not finished with the puzzle, will not be for weeks because he insists most of the work be mine, but it’s a start.
Written for therealljidol. Please take the time to vote in the poll when it goes up. Drawing, in lieu of photograph, is by pshaw_raven, Dee’s sister.
I can't take the person staring back at me
I'm a hazard to myself
“Don't let me get me
I'm my own worst enemy
It's bad when you annoy yourself, so irritating” o/`
-- “Don’t Let Me Get Me” performed by Pink
No matter how hard I stared, no matter how many times I compared them with the photograph on their neat little brightly colored box, they refused to make sense. The colors and shapes wriggled away as if animated by their own brand of mischief, ran away in cracks and lines.
Cracks and lines, cracks and lines. That's all I can see. There's nothing here for me to make sense of any longer. Sure, I'd gotten a few of the pieces to fit together by chance, had even been lucky enough to find several of the piece already joined to the frame. After that? Nothing! I'd been attempting to work this two thousand piece monstrosity with its squiggles, blotches of color, and cracked lines which evaded my ability to give them any sort of context for hours. “Stupid!” I yanked at my braid in frustration and, in a single childish moment of supreme aggravation, swept the entire jigsaw puzzle on to the floor. I then proceeded to gather up the loose pieces, place them carefully back in the box, and then fling them as far and as hard as I could across the rec room.
I used to love jigsaw puzzles. Some of my earliest and most pleasant memories had been of sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen in those precious few days of Indian summer before the first snows touched the peaks of our little valley and carefully picking through a box of pieces. She had preferred nature scenes --- mountains or loudly colored autumn leaves with rushing creeks, occasionally with a New England church or a castle in the background. I took special pleasure in gathering up the most obvious parts of the scene, sorting out the puzzle pieces, and then carefully fitting them together. We could complete a five hundred piece puzzle in a single afternoon and sometimes we worked several. Other times, she would buy one of the larger ones and we would have several days of contemplative pleasure. Once or twice, a well meaning visitor would gift me with one of those children’s puzzles. Usually they had large pegged pieces with pictures of Disney or Warner Brother characters on them. I would politely accept the gift...and then my grandmother would exchange a smile with me as we put those aside for my baby sister. Nothing but a real puzzle would do for me.
As I grew older, the manufacturers began making puzzles with rounded edges. We bought those too; I delighted in the challenge of making those meaningless seams of individual pieces become a solid, clear photograph. One year, my grandfather bought us a brand new innovation: a 3D puzzle of a famous building. Not only did you have to get the picture right but you also had to align the various cracks together in order to build the monument. We glued that one together and it remained on her dresser in the bedroom, a proud statement of our companionship, until she died. I had asked for it back, but I suppose someone thought it worthless and either gave it away or tossed it because no one could find the thing after the funeral.
Those times were literally gone now, taken from me by a careless night nurse who hadn’t wanted to do her job. Two springs ago, I’d been hospitalized for yet another skin infection. Doctors normally, when I’m admitted, put a big note on my chart regarding the delicacy of my skin owing to the collagen deficiencies. IVs have to be carefully watched because if the flow isn’t just right, they blow. IV antibiotics are some of the strongest mankind can produce and the type I generally have to have is the same type used to treat anthrax. If the IV blows, it can have serious consequences for the patient and can destroy the surrounding tissue when it leaches into it. I complained of pain, and then of a headache, dizziness, and tightness in the chest. The night nurse told me to shut up and gave me an extra dose of IV pain medications. By morning, I had a lump on that arm about the size of a hen’s egg. I also could no longer read numbers, forms, or a calendar. Forms and the calendar were worst; their cracks and lines danced all over, refusing to hold still and take their proper shape. Now, my family physician surmises that I probably had a stroke resulting from clots caused by the IV or from the medication circulating improperly. We’ll never know because my insurance didn’t cover things like CT scans and the other methods used to check for cerebral accidents. I horrified all my friends that evening by eating flawlessly with my right hand; previously I’d so strongly identified as left handed that I would have been hard pressed to remember I had another hand. I even stood at the sink and did the dishes with only that hand!
I don’t know what made me get out the jigsaw puzzles again. Stubbornness and some minor twinkling of hope, I suppose. I had, after a fashion, re-learned how to use the calendar. I’d never read it properly again but I could match up the numbers in the boxes to the words written at the top and come up with the correct date...unless I mixed up my threes and eights or fours and sevens or sixes and nines. I’d learned to use a calculator again with the same method, except I’d just memorized where each number button should be located. In any case, I’d picked possibly the worse possible candidate for this little experiment. The puzzle in question was based on Bev Doolittle’s artwork (my puzzle looks somewhat like this one which is called Pintos and features an optical illusion in which the horses’ markings gradually become indistinguishable from the red rock behind them).
The arc of my throw had been off; a small piece of the frame which I’d been able to put together remained, along with a goodly portion of the loose pieces. Furious, I began scooping them up and tossing them randomly around the room. I’d have stomped on them, torn them into bits too small to be of use if I could have. As I tossed the third handful, a hand shot out and caught the pieces. Diagenou held them in his big hand for a moment and then gently placed them back on the card table. “My, we are in a fine temper,” he remarked, clucking his tongue in disapproval. Had anyone else addressed me at that moment, I’d have let them have it with the sharp edge of my tongue and several improbable descriptions of their lineage and what they could do with their collective ancestors. From this man, however, it effectively deflated my frustration and anger. The embarrassment of having been caught in a childish tantrum combined with an abject sense of failure tasted like hot lead in my mouth. Without looking directly at me, he began picking up the mess I’d made. “Why did you do that? Now you’ll have to put the whole thing together again.”
“I can’t,” I wailed, thoroughly aware that I was whining but unable to stop myself. “The pieces just run away in horrid old cracks and lines. They don’t...make...ANY...damned...SENSE!”
He stopped, his bright green eyes seeming to penetrate my soul. “Well,” Diagenou admitted, “You do seem to have a problem, don’t you?”
“You’re making fun of me,” I accused him, not quite ready to be friends just yet.
“I’m not.” His voice sounded perfectly reasonable and serious but I could see his mouth quirking at the corners. He placed the lid back on the puzzle and put it back on the shelf. “You have to learn to walk before you can run,” he continued reasonably as he perused the other puzzle boxes. Finally, he selected a one hundred piece puzzle meant for small children. I’d only had it in my collection because it featured an an American Eskimo dog and photographs of them on any type of memorabilia were rather rare. “We’ll try this.”
“I’ve put that one together before.” Not in the mood to be charitable but softening under the mute plea in his body language, I sat back down at the card table.
“Then it will be easier for you to set the pieces together.”
It took me almost three weeks to put together that simple one hundred piece child’s puzzle.
When we’d finished it, he went back to the bookshelf on which they were stored and selected a fifteen hundred piece puzzle depicting a painting of a fox hidden in autumn foliage. I started to protest but Diagenou held up a hand, put his finger to my mouth. “No, I don’t mean any insult. Let me show you.” His long, slender fingers dipped into the pieces and I watched him trace each one through his fingers. “You know what an edge feels like even if you can no longer recognize one when you see it.” He held an edge piece between his fingers and handed it to me. “Here, you try it. Run your fingers over it, get a good idea of what the edge feels like.”
“You’re right!” Especially if I closed my eyes, I found I could distinguish easily between edge pieces and other pieces.
Finally, my fingertips located a single edge piece. The crack felt smooth and straight; it didn’t wiggle away or waver. Slowly, I placed it on the table.
“Good.” Diagenou kept his voice low and encouraging, a rare and unusual act of patience from a man who loathed any sort of stupidity. I had the uneasy feeling he’d done this before and vaguely recalled a newspaper clipping he kept at his desk in his room about an agent who had been shot in the head. I wondered if he’d been a friend, if Diagenou had worked with him in this same sort of patient manner, and if the man had recovered. “Now find another and do the same.”
“Not an edge, not an edge...here’s an edge....not an edgenotanedge...edge...not anedge...edge...here’s another...” I chanted that as my mantra while we found as many of the edge pieces as we could in the manner he’d shown me.
In three hours, I had managed to put together a small portion of the frame and a few interior pieces.
When he noticed me becoming confused, fumbling with things I’d picked up in my right hand and faltering when I realized the should have been in the left, Diagenou called a halt. Six hours later, we had the frame together and nothing more. “A moron could have put this together faster,” I muttered. The tears I hadn’t asked for suddenly spilled over onto my lashes, down my cheeks.
His arms went around me in a gentle hug; he kissed each tear as it fell. “A moron didn’t put this together,” he said firmly. “You did, Kitty.”
Over the ensuing weeks, he and I spent as little as half an hour or as long as three hours on that puzzle. Sometimes we sat together in companionable silence, each working on our own section of the puzzle, and other times his large slender fingers guiding mine, helping me to feel the shapes and find their proper places through touch alone. When that failed, he directed me to look at the things I could recognize: patterns, hatch marks, brush strokes, color clusters. He never once lost his temper with me, even during the times when I would get frustrated or flounce off.
The cracks and lines gradually slowed their dance, straightened up and conjoined to form a picture I could recognize. We’re still not finished with the puzzle, will not be for weeks because he insists most of the work be mine, but it’s a start.
Written for therealljidol. Please take the time to vote in the poll when it goes up. Drawing, in lieu of photograph, is by pshaw_raven, Dee’s sister.