Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“Get off my back. Today was a big day for everyone in the world. Can we please just celebrate that? All you ever think about are your own feelings.” This was Brian’s classic response if I complained too much about something he found trivial. It never failed to unhinge me.

“We are not fucking talking about Obama right now. Don’t you fucking hide behind the first-black-president bullshit. He is half white! And if you think he’s really going to change anything, you’re just naïve.”

This wasn’t exactly what I meant to say. I was excited about seeing a black family in the White House; I was excited to have a president who spoke in eloquent paragraphs. But I was cautious. What I meant was that power shifted continually back and forth between the two parties without society changing in any concrete way, that political battles were just a distraction from actual problems facing actual humans, so that people who really wanted to be a force for good became activists, not president. I had been awash in thoughts like this all day. I would have liked someone to discuss them with.

“You are unbelievably negative,” Brian said. “Finally something good happens in our country and you can’t just let me be happy about it.”

“I am not negative! You just don’t want to accept basic facts about reality.”

“I guess now you’re going to tell me I could die at any time.” This had become a (minor, I’d thought) point of contention between us, how frequently I urged Brian to make decisions based on the fact that this could be the last day of his life. The words were theatrical, but I was genuinely encouraging him to move away from materialist evaluations of good and bad. Which may have been just a touch self-righteous. But I wasn’t evaluating myself right then; I was expressing myself.

“You are going to die, Brian. We all are. Get used to it!” He was carrying a jar of salsa and the bag of chips toward our bedroom. “You can’t spend your whole life ignoring anything that makes you uncomfortable.” He closed the door to the bedroom and pushed in the lock. “Like the fact that you’re an incredibly selfish lover,” I shouted into the closed door.

As I was walking away, the door flew open. Brian grabbed my arm. “You are a crazy bitch, Elsie. I feel really fucking sorry for you.” He yanked down on my arm with each word. “You freak out when you don’t have an orgasm. That’s not normal. That’s fucking crazy. You need to see a shrink.” He released my arm and marched to our front door. “Get the fuck out. I’m sick of your shit. Just leave me the fuck alone.” Stunned, I stepped into the hallway. Brian tossed my coat after me and slammed the door. A moment later, it reopened a crack. Keys flew at my feet.

I walked across the street to the snowy park and screamed. Once I was hoarse, freezing, and spent, I went home, feeling something like relief that Brian had lost it. It made the tension between us explicit. Now we would be able to really talk about it.

Brian was sleeping in the living room, his long legs draped over the end of our small couch. He would be so apologetic in the morning. Only when I got up the next day did I notice his two suitcases waiting by the front door.

—

He got ready for work quickly, without speaking to me. I was sitting on the couch, staring at the suitcases, asking him to please please talk to me. The skin around my eyes was soggy and purple. Finally he took a seat on the edge of the couch, careful not to touch me. “So last night I saw a side of myself that I never want to see again.” This was the first time I’d heard Brian frankly admit to an emotional struggle. I reached out to touch his face. He recoiled, hunching his shoulders. “Let me get this out. You make me feel crazy.” He was speaking to the floor. “I’ve always been a calm person. I don’t lose my temper. I’m really even keel. Everybody knows that about me.”

“Honey, it’s okay to—”

“And I’m not going to take a chance on that happening again. What happened last night. I cannot be with someone who makes me behave that way.”

I put a hand on his thigh. He stiffened. “Honey, please, it’s okay to lose your temper once in a while — it shows you care — if we could just talk about what we each did wrong—”

“That kind of thinking is exactly why I cannot be with you anymore. It’s like you think we live in a war zone. Like every fucking thing matters.” He closed his eyes and took a breath. “Stop. You’re not going to make me angry. I’m not doing this anymore. I don’t want every day to be possibly the last day of my life.” He looked up and spoke to our silhouettes, reflected in the shiny black surface of his flat-screen TV. “I just want my days to be normal days.” He wanted me to move out at the end of the month. He would pay for movers and a broker’s fee. He would stay with a buddy until I had cleared out.

“I don’t even know what a broker is,” I did not say out loud, making him laugh at my worldly incompetence, because I was crying too hard.

A psychologist would call abandonment my “trigger” feeling. I begged Brian not to leave. I promised to be good. I sobbed that I couldn’t live without him. I acted every bit as pathetic and desperate as I felt. But then, acting the way I felt had never endeared me to Brian. He pulled his jacket out of my grip, said he was sorry but there was absolutely no way, none at all, he was decided. I stood openmouthed at the window after he left, watching him fit his suitcases into the back of a taxi.

—

I moved into a cheap basement apartment I heard about through a coworker; she technically had a room there, but spent all of her time at her boyfriend’s. Buddhists say shock is a helpful state: It stops the mind. I bought used furniture from sidewalk sales, unpacked my books and notebooks, hung up my thrift-store dresses. But making the bed aggressively one morning, I tore a small hole in the bottom of my fitted sheet. The ability to act without thought wore off at that moment. The hole grew larger night by night. I would wake up in the dark with my feet caught in the hole. Sometimes I told myself that I made mistakes with Brian because I was not meant for stability. Other times I imagined our reunion — Brian at last effusive, me at last calm and content. In the predawn hours, various such lies wrestled each other at the edge of a cliff, until they all fell off, tangled in each other.

In a forest in India two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha explained pain to a group of men who had devoted their lives to noticing what happened when they sat very still. He said something like this: “Imagine a man is pierced with an arrow. The man feels pain. The man cannot avoid this pain. Imagine this man is pierced by a second arrow. His pain increases twofold. The first arrow is inevitable but the second arrow is a choice. It is the man’s hatred of the first arrow.” I reread this parable on the Internet one early morning to get myself to stop pacing. My head was spinning an endless tale about how pain was the enemy attacking my heart and my head was going to be the hero vanquishing the enemy, it just had to figure out the best tactics, the right weapons, the correct configuration. But Heart’s pain and Head’s story communicate on different frequencies. So Head cannot help Heart, try as it might, and this trying was the clamor that made bearable pain unbearable. I understood this after I reread the parable. If this understanding helped at all — and it might have — my head was not aware of it.

I started taking a hodgepodge of counterindicated pills before bed, which permitted me to remain for hours in the desert between wakefulness and sleep. I was startled out of this state one night by the sound of a man’s angry voice in my basement apartment. Seconds later, I was standing naked in the concrete backyard. My fan was on high, facing the wall — I needed the loud hum of white noise to doze off — so I couldn’t hear deeper into my apartment. My purse had recently been ripped off my shoulder while I waited with a man I’d just met to get into a seedy club. The purse had held my keys and several forms of ID. I had not gotten the locks changed. I ran back inside the apartment to grab my phone off my bedside table, dialed 911, gave the dispatcher my address.