The Chemical Formula for Drama - Part II

Our lovely (and modest) heroine stood immobile under those glaring harsh truth lights for quite a long time, tethered firmly in place by the multitudes of conflicting thoughts racing through her mind at a more than dizzying pace. What should she do? Was she blowing things out of proportion, as was her tendency, and would she find in the morning that the deep wounds were merely papercuts in disguise? Yet she ultimately could not bear the idea of lying down in bed next to this man who barely seemed to register her presence, or so she felt, as if everything were normal and okay. Nothing felt normal or okay and she was so mired in the swamp of fruitless expectations that she felt she absolutely needed to leave in order to find clarity and figure out just what was going on.

Taking a deep breath, she left the comforting solace of the bathroom (finding it incredibly bizarre to find comfort in the cold tile and bright glare) and walked into the bedroom to inform her boyfriend of this decision. She sat on the tiny edge of the bed between his curled up body (they always do become little boys in bed, whether asleep or awake) and the vast expanse of nothingness on the other side of that edge, aware of the metaphorical accuracy of this precarious perch. "Listen honey, I'm going home. I just really need to go home to my apartment right now." He made a sharp movement that can only be described as bolting upright, trite as that phrase may be, in bed, his inner alarm clearly sounding. He turned off the radio immediately (a first in her experience) and said "What's wrong?!" in a very surprised tone of voice, as if he was completely unaware that she would have any cause to be upset. "I just feel like I need to go home. I need to go home and process all of this." "What's wrong?!" This time it was spoken with more urgency and almost panic. While she has always been quite uncomfortable with speaking her mind, especially without the benefit of some reflection time, she decides that these things do need to be addressed now, clumsy though the attempt may be.

"What's wrong is that I feel invisible. I feel totally invisible right now." "What does that mean?" "It means I feel invisible. It means I feel unimportant. It means I feel like I barely exist." The words began to pour out more rapidly now, as if an avalanche of feeling had begun and could no more be halted than the snow hurling down a mountainside and gaining momentum with every inch it traverses. "I mean, here we haven't seen eachother in a whole week and its like its absolutely no big deal to you! First you're out having dinner when we had already made plans the night before..." He opens his mouth to interject but she cuts him off before he can "And I know it was a last minute thing and all but it still hurt my feelings.." And here the boyfriend does interject, raising the stakes while furiously backpedalling, "I had to go. It was something I couldn't get out of. I had to go to this thing." "We've already been through this, I know, but it hurt my feelings, okay? And its not just that, its not just that at all." "What else? What else is upsetting you?" "Well, the fact that I haven't seen you in a week and was dying to have sex and you couldn't seem less interested in it, even after I practically threw myself on you!" What makes you think I'm not interested?" This was just too much for her frantically whirling brain to take in. She takes a microsecond tour of the evening's events, searching for any room for misinterpretation. Finding none, she blurts out "You got in bed to go to sleep with the radio on and everything and just said 'come to bed' that's all," feeling like this does not do her position of the rejected lover the justice it deserves. "I didn't say I didn't want to have sex, I just said come to bed." What? Was this more backpedalling or had she truly misinterpreted? "But you said you were tired!" Yes, and that's true, I am tired. But that doesn't mean I'm not interested in having sex with you."

But he was still missing the point somehow, so she tried to push things further, to make him understand how hurt she was and why. "My point is that you hadn't seen me in a week and didn't seem to even care, didn't seem to miss me at all!" "I don't show my feelings, that's just the way I am." "Yes, I noticed. I'm well aware of that." "What, you think I have no feelings? You think I'm a robot?" She notices the choice of the word robot; a word she has never nor would ever choose to use in that situation. This must be quite a familiar argument to the boyfriend, and she recalls from the deep recesses of her dusty mental attic a conversation long ago on the edge of a pier looking out over the Hudson River, in the days where he was still wooing and she was uncertain of how she felt about him, where he mentioned that his coldness and lack of emotional display had been a problem in past relationships. One of only a handful of insights into his life and past that he has carelessly dropped like a crumb of bread for the starving to lunge at. "Sometimes it certainly seems that way." "I have feelings! I have a lot of feelings!" "Well that's not something I'm let in. You don't share that with me. I don't get to see that." "Well that's just the way I am. I'm weird, in case you hadn't noticed, and you happen to like a lot of my weirdness. This is just one thing you don't like so much." "Okay, but can you see how hard that might possibly be for me? How frustrating and hurtful that could be? Can you see it from my perspective?" "Well, I'm trying to, but I don't think I undertsand why my feelings and whether or not I share them with you affects you."

TO BE CONTINUED....

(sorry, I have a dinner engagement to go have an important conversation with someone regarding a whole hell of a lot of unresolved issues)