Popsichology (sorry)
My days are filled with the things I do. I am lucky. I spend most of my time doing things I want to do. And yet I am unlucky in that there are things I’d like to do that I don’t do. I am lucky in that I can’t say I don’t have time to write, but I am unlucky in that when I do have time to write all I can think to write about is how I don’t have much time to write.
My wife comes into the room— our children’s room, which we often use as an impromptu office while the children use the “big room” as an impromptu children’s room— and sits next to me, but slightly behind me. My blindspot. She begins to eat a popsicle and every crinkle of the wrapper goes directly into my ears. Every slurp is delivered straight into my brain. From waves to wrinkles I am destroyed. Why does she hate me? I wonder. I am so enraged by this action I am unable to respond in any useful way. The thoughtlessness! I can’t see because the tears threatening to leave my eyes have already burst into flames and now my document is behind a firewall.
My wife as a child, and/or a literal representation of my emotional maturity.
And what to be said? That she is not welcome? That she eats wrong? That I, as an artist, cannot work under such conditions? Tempting, of course, but no.
I do wish I’d done something. Instead, I sat in furious silence until prompted to get up by some slight thing my kids needed me for.
These moods are exhausting. Already I’m seeing ways I could have handled it differently. Handled it at all.
I’m still learning to ask for what I need. Not angrily demand it. Not sheepishly beg for it. Not sullenly declare that it would have been good to have had. Not childishly decide that if someone really loved me they’d know what I need.
Ask, without guilt on either side, for time and space for myself when I need it.
Largely unedited, for reasons that will be given elsewhere, if at all (but if I were to unnecessarily force myself to pithily phrase it here, it’d be: It’s kind of simultaneously embarrassingly bad yet poetically interesting and any attempt to fix it would only make it worse; I want to publish it anyway).
