Packing heat
I like to pretend that I don’t get angry, that it’s all modulation and reasonableness and no drama (oh, God forbid the drama, which translates into inconvenient emotion). Sure, there are flare ups, sudden explosions of short shouted words, bitter and small as they leave my mouth. Yes, there are times when I navigate my grocery cart around the morons and the clueless in the Berkeley Bowl that I might, just might, want to slam my cart into someone, knock them to the ground or at the very least leave a nasty bruise on their yoga- and Pilates-muscled thigh.
But yesterday I realized that I had been a ticking time bomb, a powder keg waiting for a spark, a heady mixture of really pissed off and really sad and the tears intermingled with the tooth grinding and I woke up this morning with a headache and memories of random dreams, of the old classmate with the black Mini, of the old love interest who showed up and stripped down to his boxers, made himself at home in the living room reading the New York Times.
Ah, but I dance away from the topic even now. Nice girls – sweet girls – don’t get angry. What is it about anger that scares us so much? When I was little, my mother was explosive, a shouting, glass-tossing, running out of the house like a maniac angry person. This was my emotional incubator, a place where insults were regularly traded during moments of hotheadedness. Not a functional model, but neither is ignoring anger or controlling it to the point that it is as if it never existed.
I want to feel this anger, to ride it, to let it dissipate slowly, slowly as I heal or change or get used to the new landscape of my life. But I feel guilty about it, too, because anger usually has a target and my target doesn’t seem to be able to take it. The anger enters this person and does its internal damage. It smashes and destroys and brings on paralyzing guilt. It clears the shelves and drinks all the whiskey. It was precisely this dynamic that made me tamp down the anger in the first place, but the dynamic has been rendered meaningless. It matters less now, and so my anger is back. With a vengeance.
It’s packing heat. It doesn’t care who it tramples. It hates itself at the same time, a bully without a home, a feeling without a use, the furnace of pain personified, directed, because without a direction the anger has nowhere to go but inward. It pummels me, or I pummel myself, because the anger and I are one, we dance together, her and me. She’s my skin, my teeth, the glint in my eye when I walk down the street.
From the prompt "It makes me mad."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ElRobboz.