I am challenged by the concept of emotion. My color-filled stark-white living room surrounds me in a soft silence that makes me feel comfortable and cold. The round white specks of this or that on my black laptop test my commitment and a bleeding chin blemish mocks me. They all want my attention.
Yesterday, Emotion approached me. “Hey you!” I looked around inquisitively, confused, I’m never a ‘hey you’ type person to Emotion. We generally have a good relationship. I’m never picked on. But yesterday, I did something to change the rolls. His acid-washed ripped jeans grazed against his hairless legs. When he talks, he waddles in a stance, swaying nervously back and fourth. He pierced his ice-green eyes not into mine but through them. Emotion meant business. “Hey you! It’s time you and I had a little talk.” He was serious and bossy. He said it in the kind of way that makes you question if he’s reading from a script. Because come on, who talks like that? Emotion does, that’s who.
He told me I wasn’t taking him seriously and so he placed a balloon inside my ribcage to see if I could pop it. I thought I did last night, but turns out I simply extracted air. It has since filled up.
My eyes have that feeling. They’re hot in the back. Warm. Rigid. Sticky. I can feel the crease when I move them around and attaining that soft focus is easier than ever. Emotion and I have a deal: he’ll leave me alone until I let him occasionally pound it into me. This day and the last I received the beating of a lifetime. He’s that sultry kind of violent; you know the one, the type with the fire behind the eyes, which evokes passion and not fury. He’s sexy when he balls up that fist, purses his lips, and squints his eyes. It’s scary to like that sort of thing—like when Emotion is slamming your head against the ground and you actually think it feels good, but when you spend so much of your time unaffected by his actions it’s nice to have that seemingly terminal hot coughing, screaming, insanely pitched cry. People don’t recognize it enough.
Sometimes, when he has time, Emotion and I just sit and look at each other. A mental conversation begins: Hi. Hi. I’m looking at you. I noticed. I can see right through you. It’s okay. You’re wasting my time. So go spend it somewhere else. I’m only nineteen but I’ve developed this passive relationship with Emotion because I accept that he’s quite the bully… but he’s like Judd Nelson and Bender and I’m Molly Ringwald. I’m Claire. A fat girl’s name, but he knows he loves me.
So we spend our days, ins and outs, eye contact and none, loving and fighting. He even has those funny leather biking gloves. Emotion thinks he’s a bad ass…he kind of is. I’d love to take him to dinner some night. Open him up smoothly like a Petrus 1982 Pomerol: rich and definite. But for now, this scalding stern figure must piece me apart, every bit of me, til he can move onto the next. And this is it: blogs into paragraphs into sentences. Words. Syllables. Letters.
When might he return and to whom will he visit next?
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