The Brownings

It seems slightly crazy (in the best possible way) that Robert Browning began his introductory letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning like this:
I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too.

I wish I'd had time to read all of their letters and in their proper order, but because I didn't I scanned the pages impatiently for anything that looked particularly dramatic and promising, and discovered that by page 38 they were both calling one another "dearest" and unabashedly proclaiming their love. I sort of wish I had known about the Brownings when I was 14, because it would've been nice to have known that such a relationship had existed and could exist, that it was possible to have creative collaboration and (for girls who wanted to be writers to have) happy endings. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't have wasted quite so much time sunk in stupid fantasies about being Ted and Sylvia.

Deflated

Lately I’ve been wondering an awful lot about how we (“we” meaning you and me and everybody else) get to the point of convincing ourselves that certain pieces of our personality are inflexible, immobile. Mountains not to be moved. I mean those pieces that we don’t like, the ones that we don’t even have any real proof of being unchangeable (other than the flimsy excuse of inertia). Seriously. What’s going on there?
Not so long ago I was reading the journal of someone I know (or maybe it’d be more accurate to say someone I used to know or may one day know again), and came across a part in which this person declared that he was worried that he had some inherent capacity to always be sad or dissatisfied or something equally despondent. My first reaction (which I’m sure would have surprised him very much) was to want to tell him that I somehow deep down did not believe this, that I thought he was made of something stronger than this. Truthfully I’m not sure what I was basing this on, and I’m not even sure if I’m right. But how does he know he’s right, either? It seems pretty terrible to be sentenced to thinking of yourself as being one particular way forever, to be convinced of your inability to alter that, for (perhaps) no reason other than familiarity and habit. History can tell you about the future, but it’s not really supposed to predict it, right?

Maybe it’s unfair to use someone else as an example, though, so I will tell you this: I’ve been really afraid, for as far back as my memory will crawl, of wearing people out, of exhausting their good opinions of me, of being left because I was “too much work.” This has happened all too often, though (at least, as far as I know. What other possible reasons would people have decided, "Nope... can't talk to you anymore..."). So what created this fear, and why is it so instinctive? Why does it continue to linger and how the fuck do I get rid of it?

Lately, my heartbeat seems so conspicuous.

childhood fears:

moving to mexico
not growing up (1)
car accidents
junior high school
cancer (and diabetes)
Unsolved Mysteries
being buried alive (2)
ocean


grown up fears: (3)

being mediocre (4)
making bad decisions
bad teeth (5)
getting old alone
Roe vs. Wade being overturned
not being understood (6)
“writer’s block” (7)
ocean


____________________________

1. This led to a self-imposed cartoon ban at age 10 for fear that if I didn’t stop watching them then, I’d end up being 35 years old and still watching DuckTales or something.

2. Okay, I was a creepy little kid. Maybe I read too many Poe stories? I remember thinking that a glass casket like Snow White’s was the way to go. You know, just in case.

3. Relatively speaking here.

4. e.g., Of Human Bondage

5. This may or may not have something to do with the childhood memory of being punished for having perfectly straight teeth. Seriously.

6. e.g., The Catcher in the Rye

7. Fuck me.

Flaucinaucinihilpilification

I’m all kinds of out of sorts today. I’m not sure that sentence even makes sense, but I’m going with it anyway.

I am at the coffee shop down the street from where I live and it is very very busy and noisy and it is making me fantastically agitated. I have my laptop out and my mom on the phone through my ear-peice. I’m pretty sure I’ll catch on fire shortly as penance for attempting to be technologically advanced. Well, at least I don’t have an Ipod, so maybe I’ll only suffer minor burns. I thought coffee shops were equivalent to libraries in regard to noise level. Apparently I’m not enough of a coffee shop afficionado. They probably don’t even call them coffee shops anymore.

Some young girls, six of them, are next to me, playing cards. They are at that precise age where they still like their parents and have slumber parties (without alcohol and drugs). They are completely awkward and haven’t grown into their real bodies yet. Free of makeup and thongs. Lankiness. Braces. How I envy their innocence. Truly.

I hope the older ladies behind me aren’t reading this. As if they really care, or can see font this small from where they’re sitting. Really. How self absorbed I am.

Like I was saying, I’m in a panic today. I haven’t felt this, on the edge, feeling in quite a while. I’m not having a panic attack or anything (unless I don’t even know it), but I feel like if anyone asks me anything the wrong words will spill out of my mouth.

Random person: You think it’s going to rain today?
agreenleaf: Soylent Green is people!!!

So, I think I’m going to avoid discussion where possible.

Some sort of switch needs to be flipped in my life. I am out of control. Please. Do the honor. Flip that fucker. What? I have to do it?

[Old ladies to the rear have left and now a younger person (hence better eyesight) is behind me and making me super fucking anxious. He’s moving chairs and shit around. Walking around the table for the seven thousandth time, like my friend Megan’s dog that is always circling. Always. Circling.

Also, I don’t know how this guy across from me can study while the six girls play some loud and fast moving card game that involves lots of hands being slapped down in the wooden table right in front of him. I wonder if he thinks about any of the girls. You know what I mean.]

There is a little baby near me. Well, she’s probably 1 ½ or so. I want to hold her adorably soft chubby teeny hand. I think that would fix all of my problems.

I think we might be entering the Era of the Great Hermit-ing of 2005.