And if the lights were out
Could you even bear
To kiss her full on the mouth
(or anywhere ?) Morrissey, November Spawned a Monster
When she was about 25, one of her closest male friends told her "You're fairly hot, it's just your personality that sucks." And shortly after that another one said "Whenever you flirt with someone it's not clear if you're serious or if you're mocking them. You're a real ice queen." The monster, she decided, was inside. But the inside is never so inside. In fact, she began to disbelieve that there was even a clear boundary between the inside and the outside. The monster showed itself in both places. No, it was more that the monster was her, all of her. It showed her that there was no boundary. What she always thought of her inside: her intelligence, her skepticism...it was all impressed upon her body as clearly as her wide nose, her high check bones, her eyes....maybe especially her eyes.
As she grew older, she got to know her monster. Of course, the monster was herself but she still slipped into thinking of it as something other as if there was someone nicer, prettier, more normal tucked away into her body. But she knew that her monster did not hide anything at all. But she also knew that her monster's sin was the sin of freakishness. She/the monster lived life with a critical eye. She/the monster questioned everything, took nothing at face value, and had a hard time faking anything. She/the monster were totally abnormal even amongst the most deviant groups. She/the monster did everything with more passion, more intensity, and when she/the monster crashed they burned harder than almost everyone else.
What people rejected was not so simple to pinpoint. She knew she was not physically ugly and she knew that her personality was not so horrible. But she also knew that she frightened people. Her simple unwillingness to play the game, to look a certain way, to back down on her opinions, to not not avoid arguments. All this made her an extremely uncomfortable person to be around. And the thought of intimacy with her scared the shit out of nearly everyone she met. Her love life was a story of intense one night stands, painful love affairs that fizzled out due to an early expenditure of energy, or (just once) a plain boring attempts at a normalcy. And even these encounters were few. After the one sad attempt, she grew to accept that she was not willing to put her monster to sleep for companionship.
9 comments:
i love it. About your previous post, i have to confess that my case was no different -girls didn´t like me or i didin´t like them enough. on the other hand i have to admit that i loved to be by myself, so their absence made no real harm. Thank you for your pre-previous post, you really are "a master of storytelling"
big kiss
where did "she" (or "you" find so many weak people?
Well she is not really me but of course I think that all writing is autobiographical...(how cryptic is that?). Weak...I don't know if I saw most of the people in my life as weak really. And really fiction is such an extreme view of everything so most of the people I knew were just hiding their monsters a bit better than I. I'm not sure if that's weak or not...
That's really my problem, you know, I just never could hide it well. I tried to but everything that I did seemed a tad bit off.
And to some extent I did attract weak men. And that's..well let's say I was cruel and bitchy. I didn't really attract weak men, I preyed on them to be honest. And to be fair to myself it was due largely to my insecurity. Once I realized this, and began to try to live life on a more compassionate basis, I did stop. And then I meet H...I have a happy ending where as she won't. Don't know if that answers your question...
Argel,
The kicker for me was that while I like to be alone, and I am not a "loner" per se. I actually like being around people and in social settings, etc.
Are we back to Freud, then? Monsters inside?
ooh! your last paragraph sums up a lot of my interpersonal struggles very well.
"Her simple unwillingness to play the game, to look a certain way, to back down on her opinions, to not not avoid arguments."
"After the one sad attempt, she grew to accept that she was not willing to put her monster to sleep for companionship."
after your last post I had a vivid dream of you trying on prosthetic noses to see if you could outwardly make yourself be the "ugly" character you are describing. Kind of like you were going to act out this story in a pantomime or something. The noses were outrageous but you were not satisfied that the point would be made and kept trying on bigger and bigger ones. The metal ridge that held them on to your face was leaving a deep purple ridge.
What a dream! And it makes sense when I think (and know others) who tried so hard to be ugly, to be anti everything.
John..no not Freud. I don't think there are monsters inside or outside...in fact, i'm not sure if there really are monsters but it makes a good metaphor for what I'm trying to work out. I think that I'm thinking more Foucaultian here. I think that it's hard to place where our "monsters" lie. In fact, I don't think the monsters are bad. It wasn't the monster that made her prey...it was the lack of understanding and accepting her monster. Argh, I feel like I"m sounding like an insane person!
Not insane ... just tangled up in a metaphor ...
I spend my life tanged in metaphors...
Post a Comment