The silent treatment
27 August 2011 05:44 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I was meting out my punishment to the man behind the camera. He wasn’t committed enough. He wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do. My needs were paramount, his needs were hidden, and so I spent that trip in a pretty California town pouting and silent.
Yesterday it was more of the same, a continuation of a game of no-speak, of withdrawal. I didn’t need to stomp my feet or tear at my hair as I screamed. Instead I kept my distance, kept quiet and tidy and far away, until I realized that I wasn’t having any fun. I was punishing someone else and punishing myself, too, and what sort of outcome did I expect from this anyway? It wasn’t an effective method, it was childish, and dulling.
What relief, to let go of the game, to be able to be there without a need to disappear or punish or put the whole interaction on the other participant.
On a long-ago night in a small Michigan town by the side of the lake, I sat with someone else’s family in a vacation house living room. They wanted to play cards (earlier it was croquet) and I had decided a long time ago that I was not a player of cards or croquet or charades or mass Monopoly. It was me against them, asserting my individuality. Being a pill but wanted to be loved for it. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t loveable. I just wasn’t able to meet them on their own terms. It had to be on mine, all of it, another test in the wasp’s nest, in this strange place with its accepting snobs. They were willing to take me in, but I wasn’t willing to take them on.
I sat reading a book as someone dealt. Outside it was crickets and stars. The light in the living room drowned out the night noises. I wasn’t able to listen. I should have dropped my book and walked to the table. I should have smiled on that trip to Santa Barbara and reached out my hand to the one who loved me. At least I figured out my childishness yesterday before nightfall, but I’m afraid I’ll have to recognize it again and again before I get it right, before I acknowledge the need and separate myself from it. Another process to churn through.
From the prompt "Ah, now I get it."
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: Not smiling in Santa Barbara, 2000?.
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