Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

“I know what you mean,” she said. “Sometimes I’m with a guy and I think, ‘I love this person. This is it .’ But who I love is who I am when I’m with him, and it has almost nothing to do with him. It’s me having an excuse to just do myself one more time, proving once again I’m bright and I’m funny and I’m powerful and that I can . That I still know how to pour blood in their shark pools.”

“I envy people meeting me for the first time,” he said. “That first meeting is everything, because I can watch their eyes and see it all happen, and I want to be them. I want to meet somebody like me.”

“What I do,” she said, “is, as soon as I know they’re devoted, I start to find fault with them. It’s not that I find fault with them, really. It’s the Sleeping Giant in my system who wakes up with a ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum!’ and says, ‘Yecchh! Look at that hair .’ Or, ‘Oh my God, did you hear the stupid thing he said?’ The Sleeping Giant who knows no pity is hungry for faults, he hunts them like Easter eggs. But the Giant does this. I like them. I feel bad that the Giant is gonna do it. There’s something in me that wants to warn them, ‘Please don’t be stupid,’ like people can help it. And then the Giant says, ‘He’s not good enough.’ And the thing is, I truly—the Sleeping Giant doesn’t—but I truly care about people. Now, sometimes I don’t show compassion but, I mean, I walk around with it. I’m devastated when teams lose in sports. I want to kill myself when they show the faces of the losing team. I know how it feels. I mean, I can barely squash bugs unless I feel directly threatened.”

“My problem is, I only know how to need needy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody who was all right. They could be wearing a sign, ‘I have no problems, you can believe me,’ and I wouldn’t even see them.”

“The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure,” she said. “My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they’re not there. Once you get this routine thing going, you have to take a lot of vacations, so there’s a constant renewal or harking back. When you see them, it’s like your favorite song that was number one that you almost got sick of. It’s been off the radio for a while, and then you hear it one day and it’s like, ‘Oh, greeaatt! How great to hear this again!’ That’s people for me.”

“To me, it’s finding yourself in everybody,” he said. “But not enough of you to stay with any one person. There’s so much of yourself, you’re so many-sided. I had a guy in India come up to me on his skateboard and say, ‘My brother, my brother.’ It haunted me that he called me his brother, and then I thought, ‘Yes. Yes! I see that, of course .’ And so if I can find me in a leper … I’m looking for myself and I find me everywhere. Just not enough to make a difference.”

“I don’t know what I want to find anymore,” she said. “I’ve gotten so involved in searching. I’ve done it for so long it does me. The genesis was truly to find someone, was truly to make an impact, to bond. The difference now is that since I’ve never found it, I proceed as if I never will. Now I’m just into looking, not finding. Winning, not the prize. And the prize is the winning, maybe just the three minutes when you’ve actually won. That’s why the sweetness of the sexual contact is perfect, but it can only be a disappointment afterward. Because all you wanted to do was get there, not be there. All you wanted to do was want, but not have. As soon as you fuck, it’s over. As soon as you fuck. ”

“You should see my house,” he said. “I think of it as my bear cave. I like to keep it sort of damp and cool and dark. I’m a creature of habit, that’s why I liked cocaine. There was such a heavy ritual attached to it. So without it, I’ve intensified my rituals in other areas. They’re not all fun, either. I don’t like brushing my teeth, for example—it seems to just hold up the whole process—but I do it anyway. If I waited to like everything I did, I don’t know that I would ever do anything, except talk about what I wasn’t gonna do. So now I’ve decided I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. I don’t have to want to, I just have to go. So I show up. I do love to shave, though. I love to clip my beard and put after-shave on it. And I love the exercise guy to come over. I have a certain terry-cloth robe I wear in the morning after my shower—”

“The Robe Warrior,” she said.

“—and,” he said, “I have another one with another kind of material, I don’t even know what it is, that I wear at night. I have certain sheets that I adore . Pratesi. Italian sheets, the softest, softest sheets. I used to think I would love to loan my sheets out to a clean Norwegian family for three years, and then they’d give them back all beaten in. But now I buy them like that. You know, and I have my alarm clock, and everything is just so. I know it sounds anal, but I take real pleasure in the details of my life, in just putting things where they belong. I guess I am anal. It just gives me a great deal of pleasure. You should see my house.”

“You’re not in a high-risk group, are you?” she said.

“That’s very funny,” he said.

“Remember at our last session when you said that maybe I shouldn’t date for a while? Until we’d worked more on my awareness in this area? Well, how long do you think ‘for a while’ is?

“Not that I’ve been dating, but I just wondered how long till you think it’s okay? I mean, I know it’s not okay yet, I haven’t been dating, but I did go out with somebody. A couple of… three times. I tried to call you—well, I wanted to call you, but you were out of town. So I figured there wouldn’t be any big harm in going on a little date.

“The thing is, he’s another interesting guy, and that’s what I’m drawn to. I know boring men are the ones to go for, but all I can see is the light glinting off the edges of the interesting ones. And, of course, ‘interesting’ means ‘problems.’ I don’t even think, ‘This time it’s going to be different’ anymore. I think, ‘This time it’ll be the same, in a different way.’

“Anyway, my friend Andrea set me up with him. He’s a producer, very successful and attractive and all that. I met him for dinner and we had a nice time. He’s very intense—between him and me there wasn’t a whole lot of dead air. The thing about this guy is, I found him not dissimilar to me. We have a similar attack, similar appetites. Well, he’s more into the sexual appetite thing. I’ve never been good in that area, as you know. I always feel I’m out of my element. I don’t know what I’m doing there. Every time I’m in sex, I feel like, ‘How did I end up here?’ That’s why I like to avoid it as much as possible.

“So I met him and we had dinner, and I really felt like he understood me, or at least like he might if he ever stopped talking. I mean, this guy was like the testosterone version of me, and I’m the testosterone version of me, so it was really weird. It was like being with more of myself. You’d think I’d have had enough of myself, but anyway, we had a nice time, and then he wanted me to see his house. I guess I should have known…

“And I didn’t even have contraception. What was I going to do, wear my diaphragm to the restaurant? It’s so embarrassing when they know you knew it was going to be sex. It’s like, sometimes I try to be contemporary and modern, and on some level I just don’t agree with anything I’m doing. So I told him I wasn’t comfortable having sex with people I’d just met, and he seemed to get it. He said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’