BLUE CRAB
as i scuttle through cancer season (and the sun illuminating my 8th house and also kicking my ass), here are reflections on patheticism, my least favorite word in the english language
the specifics of the shitty day i was having matter less than the general feeling of it. the whole thing just had an absolutely abysmal vibe. but i’ve been being grown up, and deciding to do things with my time instead of staring at the wall when i feel like shit, but maximizing my time by prioritizing actually doing things, even if alone. it might be preferable, and much more comfortable to be alone in my house, but i’ve been trying something else, you know? so i had a bad day and decided i should go get one of my favorite dinners, which is pasta from the restaurant my best friend works at. its overpriced for exactly what it is, but i like hanging out with him, and i like his coworkers, so we go fairly regularly. he was busy, and told me he’d meet me out if he could, so i went alone. and also, that morning, i had signed up for a pilates membership with a minimum three-month commitment. the instructor had given me compliments after my free intro class, and unfortunately that's sometimes all it takes because i like being told good things about myself. and i had eaten waffle house that morning because i literally woke up pissed and needed something soothing and heavy, a deeply unnecessary expense. what was actually contributing to my irritation is that on a really bad day or a really good day, i am liable to spend an irresponsible amount of money to self-soothe or to celebrate. i digress. and after dinner, i walked to a bookstore to check out the collection of essay anthologies. i plead with myself to stop buying these. i can’t help it though; i’m drawn to them in a near supernatural way; i think my great passion in life is finding a through-line, something that connects many things, a common thread. i once went to a wine tasting event curated by a bartender at a local spot months ago, and spent most of my time trying to discern his tastes through the wines he’d chosen to share (he liked things with more funk and grit, wine that was more of an experience than a friendly pairing option. think barnyard, hay, slate, steel, etc).
this time, i found a treasure: “pathetic literature,” edited by eileen myles. i didn’t want to buy it, i swear. i had already spent too much money to justify that day, and i think “pathetic” is one of the meanest words in the english language and i use it more seldomly than i use just about anything else. it’s that it’s used to describe only the most inadequate, pitiful, mortifyingly wretched of anything that leads me away from it. but in the intro, myles writes, “it took a hundred years for pathetic to mean ‘mean.’ it went from ‘pathetical’ to ‘pathetic’ in the 19th century and it still meant something touching or pithy, ‘felt,’ but then pathetic went negative real fast. whatever brings up feeling in here must get squashed. the word didn’t do it by itself, but something closes in on us like a vice and all unlikely approaches will get slapped down. so what you’re stepping into here is a tiny monument for witnessing change, not of any one sort but of many sorts like a sex club of thought. a bar that serves only time in different and peculiar-sized doses.” and i was sold.
because i think pathetic is such a mean, bad, sad word, there was nothing i could do than let my mind be changed about it. i love having my mind changed just as much as i love being proved wrong, even if i might relish in being right. but i’ve found that this anthology is not doing exactly what i need it to do right now. it will be a lifeline in the future, i’m absolutely sure of it, but right now it’s as if my rejection of such a word, of a single thing meant to invoke such a word, is preventing me from enjoying such a beautifully curated anthology. i can feel how beautiful it is, how many hours have gone into its coming to fruition, because the thing is like seven-hundred pages. but something isn’t touching me the way i’d anticipated it would.
since my breakup last year, and with an even greater fervor over the last two months or so that the breakup has been truly finalized like divorce papers filed after months in legal purgatory (lesbian nonsense), i’ve been looking for a very particular, very specific kind of story. my roommate had been away for the week so my living room looked kind of crazy, books just strewn about as i kept rifling through all my fucking essay books i’ve bought over the years, looking for it: that one story, the one singular story that would give me the feeling i’m looking for. this story would remind me that my feeling wasn’t new, that it had been felt a million times over. it would remind me that there are no new experiences. it would make everything fall into place, tell me exactly what i needed to do, if only i could see someone else do it first. it felt like searching for something i hid from myself for my own good. in every breakup story, there’s so much emphasis on new love, a new outlook life, a new new new new new. that’s not interesting to me. i want a story where the heartbreak lasts. i don’t want it to mention or even pretend to mention the person involved in it. i want a tale of a heartbreak that feels more like death. my mom once told me leaving someone you love feels like cutting off a limb and learning to live without it. i want that feeling condensed into ten-thousand words of ornate, intricate prose that i can highlight and circle and read and reread and re-reread until i can recite passages to myself anywhere, everywhere, as my own soothing, regulating mantra. i want tales of heartbreak where the love didn’t die, but something else did. i want a story of the way you misplace your anger and want to make an example of every person who pisses you off for the next six to twelve months. i want a tale of feeling forced away, knowing you could try harder to make it work, bend yourself some more, make yourself a little smaller, but being too stubborn to ever do such a fucking thing. i want a story from someone who is less afraid to be abandoned than they are to feel forced to do the abandoning because they’ve just reached the end of your fucking line. i’m less afraid to be left than i am to have someone in my life who’s love feels like a testament to how much they can never see me, how they might’ve never seen me at all.
but these stories really seem to elude me. nothing gets it exactly right. nothing feels exactly like it. i know it exists, but i also know that what i’m asking for, patheticism on its own terms, is an unlikely phenomenon because it’s almost completely contradictory to the ways patheticism actually functions, especially in my own life.
thus, i wouldn’t describe myself as pathetic in most cases. i dislike the whole “loser lesbian” thing because i think its corny and i like people with charisma, like to be seen as a person with charisma. but for seconds, minutes at a time, i know what it means to be pathetic. it is usually when i’m most in love, when my heart is most shattered, and when i feel i have made a really big mistake. often there is overlap (when i am most in love and when i am most heartbroken, when i am most heartbroken and i feel like i made a really big mistake, etc.). these are incredibly fleeting, genuine, wilting moments where i am but a crab without a shell. these moments are few and far between because they make me feel sick. and pathetic here means something very specific, even more than the woeful inadequacy and pitifulness and weakness that i described before. it cannot be when i have not attempted to rectify my wrongs; that is simply shame. it cannot be when someone has said or done something deeply damaging to a relationship, but my feelings linger on. i usually leave when this happens anyway, because of my previously mentioned (or maybe even previously witnessed by you, reader) propensity to hold a grudge. but thats just normal, run of the mill heartbreak, when the love doesn’t leave even though i just couldn’t take it anymore and still be able to look myself in the eye in the mirror. and if i don’t leave, its me wishing i had more respect for myself, so that’s usually self loathing.
instead, my patheticism is this naive, colicky little thing, clear like looking glass and shivering like a leaf in a strong breeze. it’s small, and cowering, like the creature of hope who was left in pandora’s box when all the other monsters had taken flight to wreak their havoc on the world. it’s being a baby when you’re thirty-five. it’s sitting at the bar of a nice (overpriced) restaurant by yourself when you’ve had a bad day and all your friends live out of town, and nursing a super tuscan, and arancini for an appetizer, and then two pastas for dinner, and tiramisu for dessert and still not even finishing your wine because you know you have to drive home and the bartender is a friend of a friend so the heavy 6oz pour you’d asked for is more like a lighter 9oz, and you’re grateful, but you are not finishing that shit. it’s the yearning, the pining for someone you never thought you’d have to live without, and your subsequent irritation that it’s so hard to let go of someone from whom you’ve already parted. it’s those feelings you knew you weren’t hiding very well for someone else entirely, that you could never bring yourself to actually articulate like an adult because you felt those feelings would lead to little else besides catastrophe, and you knew your heart wasn’t in the condition for the type of heartbreak that would follow.
it’s the safety of one-sided admiration and adoration. its being so thankful when there’s someone willing to accept your affection, as if that’s the only requirement for a healthy, fulfilling relationship. it’s telling your boss that your fucking stomach hurts and that you’ve been having mild diarrhea for like, (what was approaching eight) days, so if you’re running to the bathroom you’re not blowing off your job but are instead blowing up the (decidedly weak) toilets. its the crushes that consume you. it’s trying to love someone that’s so afraid of themself they punish you for having the audacity to like them at all. it’s the time you spend [REDACTED] about a person you can never (really, should never) have, someone different even than number one and number two, and knowing that that’s okay anyway. it’s a wimpy fucking pale ale. it’s struggling through a drink you know you don’t like when you’re unwilling to bother the bartender. it’s tripping on the sidewalk and letting your eyes dart around in hopes that there were no witnesses. it’s that rapid blinking to prevent tearfall. it’s a drunk walk home, alone and sweating, feeling nothing and everything. it’s the eager, earnest sweetness of someone hiding a crush on you that wouldn’t last a week actually being with you. it’s the soft moonlight creeping through the window and casting eerie shadows when you just can’t seem to fall asleep. it’s pretending to be self centered and conceited because it’s funnier than being self deprecating, even if that’s what you actually want to be, but then just really enjoying twirling in the mirror unironically, anyway. it’s knowing you need more attention and praise than most other people might, but still feeling the shame and embarrassment of asking for it, even though it’s become a requirement for your emotional regulation. its the vanity that springs from affection with no place to go but inward. it’s not even really knowing when you’re joking or when you’re serious because that’s what irony does to everything anyway.
it’s slimy. it’s slippery. it’s light as air, even though it sinks into the pit of your stomach like lead. it’s a shy smile. it’s a kiss on a cheek when you want to kiss them in another place. it’s hoping they’ll read your blog and knowing that they won’t. it’s the edge of seventeen and the plateau of twenty-three. it’s planting yourself in the non-fiction anthology section of the same book store, swaying and tipsy on that aforementioned fucking super tuscan. it’s wishing you got the $34 glass of barolo instead but knowing that that would be irresponsible, but asking to taste it anyway, just so you can really know what you’re missing. it’s the dew drops and water that collected on your car during your meal, as if this two thousand pound hunk of metal was but a tiny blade of grass. it’s draining a year’s worth of savings on this eleven-year-old vehicle right before your big move. it’s “dreams” by fleetwood mac in the dark with the windows down with the crisp nighttime air tickling your face, and then again when you wake up in the morning, and then playing it at work all week. it’s begging stevie nicks’s rain to finally wash you clean. it’s bouncing your leg with your lips pursed and your chest tight and your face hot when you hear (watch) “silver springs” live from warner brothers studios recorded in 1997, and having to play it seven times before you can calm the fearsome heartbeat pounding and thumping away inside of you. it’s being easily manipulated by feelings of duty to another. it’s ensnaring yourself in a web of obligation, a web of your own construction, that leaves you tied up and drained in all the wrong ways. it’s falling asleep holding a pillow tightly against your chest. it’s falling asleep having dreams of you and not knowing if it feels like terror or solace. its knowing i cannot be with you but being unsure how i was ever supposed to be here, do this, without you. and it’s waking up and wondering if you can ever fix the messes of the days before, and knowing that you have to believe its possible or there’s no other point at all.
what isn’t helping is my own wishes, my dreams to escape. i have friends who have moved to chicago, spain, san diego, milwaukee, the middle of nowhere ohio, atlanta, and more. i feel tied to a place that feels synonymous with misery, because all of my adult problems coincided coincidentally with my first adult move at 18 for college. i don’t think i’m feeling left behind, so much as feeling like one of those dogs that was tied to a tree its whole life, so it doesn’t even try to escape because its never been possible before. maybe its learned helplessness. maybe its paralysis from an overwhelmed nervous system that dreads every fucking phone call and every single email. maybe its me making excuses for fear of really, really creating an adult life where i can’t just drive home for a night for emotional regulation. i’m unsure. but the feeling of running out of time before the world dies and takes everyone with it is creating a pressure in my chest, a building of momentum like the pulling back of a rubberband. i feel things in motion while i remain firmly in place.
what’s also been frustrating me is that i can feel myself searching for a person, whether familial or romantic or platonic or otherwise, that gives me a feeling of consistency. i was telling this to roomie, but i have just begun to understand that i crave one-to-one or small-group closeness because its a huge stabilizing force, a ‘homebase’ of sorts. to have consistent intimacy, for me, feels like the key to accessing certain parts of myself that are usually forced to lie dormant, and as i avoid romance like its the plague right now, it feels like a part of me might never come back. could it be that any kind of loneliness just makes parts of me feel buried under snow? sure. could it also be that i prefer co-regulation to anything else? that’s probable. could it also also be that i literally struggle to access certain emotions and perspectives entirely, as if other people are conduits for feeling, without having to make myself actually feel the true depth of whatever it is that concerns me? absolutely. right now, i’m focused on what i can accomplish without waiting with baited breath for someone to rescue me, or rushing off to rescue someone else.
about six days after my shitty day, i went back to my friend’s job and had the same meal and a hugo spritz before my super tuscan, and me and my friend left together after he was off work, and we went to that same book store and i bought an la review of books quarterly journal from 2016 on romance and a book of essays examining the enduring cultural impact of vladimir nabokov’s “lolita,” and i went home happy and nourished and having spent less money than i spent the week before even though i’d pretty much done the exact same thing. and i remembered to feel lost and pitiful and yes, pathetic, is to be breathing. it’s to be going places that make you feel shitty to begin with, doing things that lead to shitty outcomes, but at least you’re going. at least you’re doing. at least you’re feeling. that’s more than you know, you know?
