GETTING RID AND WRITING

A Cathartic Short Story

 She ran the hot water to get it boiling hot. Hot water will bring it to the surface, she thought as she folded a washcloth up tight and soaked it in the blazing stream. If she popped it now, it would not be angry and red by the time she visited her boyfriend.

These things have to be thought through.

It was a good thing she was a Forward Thinker. Imagine the horror of leaving it another day or two—allowing it to get larger and more inflamed. At that point it would be too late to take care of. It would be a pustule-filled wet blanket on the weekend. She had waited too long to see her boyfriend. And she wouldn’t be able to see him again for a while. She could feel the stress of a perfect weekend making her skin more oily.

He was a freshman at a college upstate 2 hours away; she, a junior at home. The age difference might mean something now, but when they were old and in their 30s no one would even care. She packed a few outfits she looked good in and her laciest panties and bra, put her bag in the AMC Hornet and got on the road. She planned to arrive when his classes were out at 2pm.

That night, fumbling in the dark in a drunken fog, he was having trouble getting the key into the dorm room lock. “I can’t find the hole if it doesn’t have hair around it,” he said, and it had taken her a minute to get the joke. She was drunk too, making everything witty and so much more funny. She laughed, feeling included and popular, and part of something inside and dirty. The best. Included is absolutely the best thing to be. She was having fun. This is what people do. She was so glad she had come.

After more beer and a joint, her boyfriend crashed on his dorm bed—not enough room to even turn a phrase but she was fine on the floor. Everyone crashed around 2am in varying places and positions; his roommate passed out lying in the wrong direction on his own little cot. Her head—spinning like a tilt-a-whirl at the State Fair and that constant cottony ringing in her ears—just finally turned off. She dozed for an unknown amount of time.

When she awoke, she wet her lips and rolled off of her numb hip. The floor was cold and hard. The blanket was thin, inadequate. Above her she heard voices.

Her boyfriend’s roommate was whispering. She could hear soft little kisses, saw the shadow of his hand push away a lock of hair from her boyfriend’s sleepy face. She felt sick. 

Hemingway said, “Write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” I can finally write that sentence now.

We are the sum of our scars, and it’s the scars that make us beautiful.

I have vivid snippets of memories from my early childhood education: singing in kindergarten chapel at Kingsport, Tennessee’s Episcopal Church; dreading recess because no one would play with me or even let me on the jungle gym; a very large deciduous tree in the far corner of the fenced-in playground that dropped wildly interesting nuts; something about Three Blind Mice in the basement of that ancient stony place; naps on a mat in warm, filtered afternoon sunlight. 

But these strong memories pale in comparison to the time I insisted on wearing just a shirt and leotards to school. And my mother letting me. 

Oh J. Alfred Prufrock, if you only knew.

In your “Love Song,” you ask if you dare disturb the universe, noting that there is time in a minute for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. That’s one minute I might wish to reverse. I can still feel my awkwardness: the realization dawning on me that I was only half-dressed in a room full of laughing boys and girls, and tugging at that shirttail as if I could somehow stretch it enough to cover my embarrassment.  

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?  

The memory of my own pinning and wriggling—standing in line to go to chapel, and art, and recess, and myriad other activities that day that required me to stand up and be caught not with my pants down, but with my pants completely absent—is forever burned into my frontal lobe where personality hides. There is no spitting that out. There is only living with the scar from the pin’s incision. 

Oh but it’s the same tired tune, J. Alfred--the one all inwardly-driven types sing--quietly, and to themselves so that no one else can hear. I made a bold choice that morning, and I stuck to my decision. My mother allowed me that autonomy, never realizing of course that it would scar me so deeply. Who can know these things? Certainly not my five-year-old self, who, knowing what I know now, might have done as instructed and put on a pair of britches.  

But looking back on my kindergarten experience I realize I learned—or rather, taught myself—that God’s crayon box contains primary colors only. We are free to stay the color we are born. Or we can allow our experiences, decisions, and sometimes sheer will to mix in a neighboring color. Although the boundaries between the three basic, pure colors cannot be breached, we are free to experiment, to soften our edges. We can choose to mix in experiences that change our hue within our primary boundaries. This is our limited palette; there is no changing that basic crayon God wields on each of us. But some change is possible, if we choose to change. How much is entirely up to each individual, and the experiences they draw. 

That early event was scarring, but it moved me—for better or worse—just a nudge along my color wheel. I’ll always be an introvert, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I must always be a pure, primary introvert. I chose not to wear pants one day when I was 5, and it affected me. But I lived through it. I could have retreated into my shell like ragged claws scuttling, but instead I chose to poke my head out and move forward. My choice. My palette.  

Do I dare disturb the universe? I do commiserate with you J. Alfred, my wriggling friend. It’s so much easier, and way more harder, to just stay on that primary color swatch. But there really is just one answer to the question: yes. Yes, let’s.