dangerous compassions

I call you / from the comet's cradle

Saturday, March 21, 2020

no bus drivers allowed

I was kind of mystified.  The white guy on the zoom yesterday, giving me condolences on the death of my mom.  Then I realized--it was just his excuse for him to talk about his own mom dying.

He said how it was 25 years ago.  She stopped treatment, at the end, which he didn't know until later because he was traveling in Germany.  He said how it was so difficult, the loss of a loved one, so much time to recover, but then he was divorced and bankrupt soon after, and it led to clinical depression.  How his sister took it much harder...

I was like, why are you telling me this?  It was hurting me.  His story flowing on me, phrase by phrase, like gross dark blue lava.  Ugh.  Get your ideas off me.  Get your past off me.  I don't want anything about you in my mind.

Something about the clinicalness of the depression.  A doctor said my feelings are real, so you have to look at them and admit they're real.

He was explaining how it was, like that was supposed to help me, but he doesn't know me, has no idea of my life, who I am, who my mom was.  I felt rigid, closed, and angry.

I was harmed, but I couldn't stop him.  I wish I could have said, "Hey, will you stop?  I really didn't want any comment on my share."  Sometime it's hard to ask for what I need in the moment.

"You're a jackass of pain," I would have liked to have told him.  How about, "You're everything I hate about humans."  As he talked, I felt hatred toward him, and it was like he was digging himself into a hole.  But maybe he didn't know that.

Or he was getting farther and farther from me, like his computer chair on its little black plasticy wheels was rolling farther and farther away, down a long far distance, so he was getting tiny in my sight and his voice more quiet.  He was trying to connect with me or heal something about his own mother loss pain, but the result was the opposite.  By hurting me, he was getting more alone.

I woke up in the night and wanted to sort my socks.  I need some black socks, and I wondered if there were black socks hiding on the bottom part of the pile, in the socks / chonies / bra shelf of my clothesshelf.

Ming woke up.  I cuddled his warm, half-asleep body.  "I need to get up," he told me.

"Why?" I asked.

"Bad dreams.  Bad bus driver dreams."

"Ok," I said.  "How did the bad dreams get there?"

"Bus drivers," he said.

Ps, I have almost no black socks.  Now I know.

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