What Do I Know?

“You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?”

Now, there’s a question you don’t get asked often. Even worse, there’s a catch: it’s not something you can answer in one or two words.

Pretty easy to formulate it, though. You find a girl and you realize she cries over pictures of cute puppies or the thousandth rewatch of Love and Other Drugs. You discover she cried for 4 days out of the 6 that you were away on field work. You look back to that one fight you had and you realize how petty it was. How she’s a child. You’re 4 months in and then you realize maybe this isn’t what you signed up for. You knew she was sad, but you didn’t know just how much.

Funny how some sentiments resonate through the stories we tell of other people. “Hey, you know,” you started telling me while in the middle of discussing a friend’s failing relationship. “He knew she was sad. I mean, he said he expected this.” You paused after this. I realize now you were trying to find the next line’s least damaging form. “He just didn’t expect her to be this sad. You know what I mean?”

I do know.

Still, I can’t help but think that maybe the only time we mean what we say is when we’re not using words of our own. We write love letters and somewhere down that letter, there’s always a quote or an homage from a book you like or, at least, read out of boredom. We get into fights and write long, winded messages on the technological apparatus afforded us and, still, we find ways to use the words of other people. We write prose and still we quote Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Parker. Maybe, when we write, we’re not meant to make legacies of our own the way they have, because we only speak in borrowed words.

So. You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?

The short answer is no. I wouldn’t know happiness otherwise. The long answer, however, is yes, because number one, to have a “long answer” is the only justification for an even longer explanation.

See, this girl, she cries watching Love and Other Drugs because, in the gritty reality, sick people are difficult to be with. This girl, she cries over puppies because they make her happy. Her temperament is melancholic. Her primary response is to cry. She would not know herself otherwise.

This girl, she’s emotional. She can’t make rational decisions when it’s her heart that carries all the weight and not her brains. For all her acclaimed smarts, she sure can be pretty stupid. You find a girl, you see something in her — only God knows what — and you decide that, hey, this doesn’t seem so bad. She doesn’t look that sad.

But five months down the road and you realize she is. You won’t allow her to put words in your mouth or put assumed regret somewhere in you, but she knows. You won’t say, but maybe at some point, it was what you were thinking.

See, this girl, she absorbs the sadness of other people. She breathes in the dark of other people and carries them as her own. It’s a black pit she keeps filling. She doesn’t tell. She doesn’t open up. Not as much as she used to, at least.

You give her power over you, this piece of shit we call love, and you know you’re only signing up for the sadness. So you do your best and ask her you ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes? in an attempt to find the reason you’re involved in this madness.

She wishes she could control it. You find out that she can’t. You put up with it. You think she’s a child. You think she’ll grow up. But you’ll grow white hair and acquire a limp and she still won’t get past the six-year-old that thrives inside her. You give her attention and you’re only watering the seed of a child who won’t grow.

And then, one day, you won’t do any of this. You won’t ask, you won’t give her the time of the day. You’re tired and you just want to sleep.

But you get a poem. You find it in the mail.

She says she’s sorry.

Always,

Claire

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