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Chapter Fourteen - The One - |
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Girls have it easy. It’s as if they come with the instruction manual for emotions. It’s OK to cry when you feel bad, when you feel good, or when you just plain feel like it: “Go on, Sweetie, get it out of your system.” A girl gets the secrets. Mom, sis, and all her friends show her the emotional ropes, happy or sad. That’s why girls look natural hugging each other or crying or having their period. Someone told them how. Nobody tells boys. If we arrive in this world with any innate sense of how to handle emotions, soon enough it’s beaten out of us. “Don’t cry, be a big boy. Only girls cry. Suck it up. Hold it in.” Don’t feel too bad, don’t feel too good, and while you’re at it, just don’t feel. It’s a gender-wide numbing that must have seemed like a good idea to someone very high up way back when, but it’s as against nature as a Catholic priest’s vow of celibacy. We’re born with the equipment, but society won’t tolerate us using it. It’s a stupid, stupid state of affairs with some serious consequences. What do you think happens when that mailman goes postal? Emotions, that’s what happens. Why do you think serial killers are by and large white males in their mid forties? It’s all those repressed white-trash emotions catching up with them. Suicide bombers, warlords, certain presidents with a hard-on for the mid-east, egomaniacal CEOs who ruin countless lives for a few dollars -- they’re all the by-product of the emotional constipation running rampant in this world of men. Crime, hunger, war, and poverty could all be things of the past if someone would just tell men how to handle their emotions. We are simply not prepared for that day when our poor, neglected emotions get fed up being ignored and tap us on the shoulder. Trust me --by the time that happens, it’s too late for talk. Testosterone dictates (and I mean dick-tates) action, usually violent. Men are time bombs and we don’t even know it. We don’t get the instructions or the secrets. Nobody teaches us how to handle emotions, especially when those emotions concern The One.
The One. You hear about the one you’ll marry. Everyone talks about the one you’ll have the best sex with. You’re even warned about the one you should avoid but won’t. (A lot of times that’s the one you have the best sex with.) But no one ever tells you about the other One, the One who’s going to demolish you, the One that embalms your soul. The One you don’t see coming. Fathers never say, “Son, someday you’re going to meet a girl who is going to make you happier than you ever thought possible. This might happen at a time when you need it the most, when you’re the least on your guard. She will crawl inside your very being and addict you to her. She will accomplish this before you ever realize what’s going on. Once you begin to suspect something’s up, she will leave you. Then your addiction will cause you to go through a painful withdrawal, more painful than any kick in the stomach or punch in the face or burn to your skin. “She will rip out your heart, sauté it with a little garlic, chew it up, then spit it out at your feet and mix it up with a little Bondo, using the mess to patch up the right rear fender of a Buick Skylark, leaving you alone to piece back together the shards of your life. “You will give her repeated opportunities to cause you even greater pain in hopes that one last word or touch or glance from you will miraculously set everything right and she will come back to you. But nothing you do will make that happen. Everything you do will make the situation worse. You will do regrettable things with no explanation. At best, you will humiliate yourself. At worst, you will end up in jail. “When you reach the absolute bottom, you will receive a visit from a stranger. This stranger will come in the form of all the emotions you have been taught to bottle up inside yourself. You will be at your weakest and unable to hold them back or defend yourself from the effects of their sudden trespass into your life. You will cry uncontrollably, sweat profusely, and experience delusions. You will be unable to sleep, eat, or concentrate. You will become a gelatinous blob of psychological waste. And you will stay in that state longer than you think you can possibly survive. “Songs that were once repellent will be suddenly and inexplicably teeming with all the answers you’ve been searching for. ‘Baby, Come Back’ will play over and over in your head and cause tears to well in your eyes. “Finally, after several years of telling anyone who will sit still, be they close friend or stranger on a bus, about this devastating, life-altering experience, it will occur to you that if you ever come up in her conversations, you are referred to as this guy she dated for a while.” No one ever tells us about that One. 3a was far from just “some girl I dated,” but I must have treated her like she was. Once again, stupid youth left me with no clue that our affair would still affect her years later. I was that One to her. It would have been nice to be able to realize that and prepare for my turn.
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