free fallin'

I’m stringing along a one sided feud with a man who said something degrading to me one time six years ago and is now dating one of my friends like Christmas lights in a fully lit room, unnecessary and ornamental. I can’t help it that my feelings are stubborn, that I hold anger like a traffic delineator, bendy plastic stuck to the road. You can hit them, but they always spring back into place. My resentments are bolted down with stud gun scars; I will always bounce back, but I might not like it. I will always bounce back, but you might not like it. I blame my scorpio rising but I’ll take accountability I’m sorry I am this way I know it’s difficult and I want to be flexible and easy and smooth like a rock that’s been kicked into a sphere, but every time I think I’ve walked past the bollard for the last time it keeps snapping back. I’m an emotional boomerang and it’s tired, and tiring. Maybe the problem is that I don’t validate my negative feelings, wring them out like laundry and check them into neat storage boxes. I try to forget them and so they fester, spoiled, fermenting into fizzy rot. It would explain why I’m prone to give off sparks.

At my core, I think I’m a writer. My mom nostalgizes about the toddler who would reenact her day before bed time, just me and my stuffed animals; no surprise that I grew up drunk on my own mythology. The literary urge to structure a story dances obdurately in why I’ll never take no for an answer I need to be yes until I’ve broken myself trying to break down the door. It’s why I feel most powerful when the soccer ball comes off my foot and lopes on its path and I get that god feeling that comes from being the energy that catalyzed this chapter: I did that. I made it happen.

I say all of this to say that, charitably, where I get caught in the cobwebs of acrimony falls on the cleavage between what has happened and what has happened to me. It’s hard to accept a statute of limitations on anything I had no agency in. In my weaker moments I chide myself for indulging feelings of victimhood like children given too many immediate gratification marshmallows but truth to power: spite and the scrap heap of trying to reclaim power have gifted me my career and my union and my unorthodox Jewish life and I love them for that. I don’t need to go video game revenge mode guns blazing but give me the space to weaponize bad feelings like propeller fuel to make myself better and I will spin it into a messy hero origin story every time. I’ll never cede territory until it serves me, I’ll tell you a story but never a lie. If I could let the sleeping dogs be I would, but what’s the plot point in that.