This is less a proper post than a lament: Crankenstein and I watched Poor Things tonight and Leave Her to Heaven last weekend, and together they reminded me enough of my former not-quite marriage that I’m left feeling hollow in ways that are hard to describe. I write a lot about my former partner without ever actually saying anything, which accurately reflects my ambivalence, but there’s more to it than that. There are things I don’t say here (or anywhere else) because replaying her self-destructive greatest hits would hurt too much.*
Crankenstein, too, has made self-sabotaging decisions that I’ve been unknowingly caught up in at times, and I’m no good at sharing those particulars, either. It would be easier to write about our marital problems here if I was willing to put more out there. Skeptics might understand why I think there’s nothing romantic left between the two of us, only a sort of sisterhood and a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility we’re unlikely to find with others. But I’m not prepared to do that, for complicated reasons.**
After we moved in together, she noticed that I clam up when I’m really upset about something. At first she assumed I was giving her the silent treatment, which troubled her. When she admitted as much, I explained in embarrassment that sometimes when I’m emotionally overwhelmed it’s like there are overloaded circuits in my brain that are about to melt. Too much is happening to make sense of my true feelings, so it’s easier to give it a few minutes (or hours, in rare and extraordinary circumstances) to cool down before resetting the breaker.
Once she was aware of it, she said it was something she could see for herself. Ever-curious about the human brain, she asked me to describe what it feels like. I’m not sure there’s a satisfying answer. It’s not like I lose track of language or lose the ability to speak; my verbal facilities are fine. It’s more an emotional equation I’m trying to solve, one that includes my feelings and hers (or those of whoever else is involved) and all the possible combinations of implications and ramifications that go along with it.
The easiest way to describe it is that it feels the way the mounting tension sounds in Elliott Smith’s “Can’t Make a Sound,” all Sturm und Drang reverberating with energy and emotion you’re desperate to release but can’t quite express. That’s where I find myself tonight, sitting in my office at 10:29 pm with a head that feels full of Slinkys, loose marbles, pool noodles made of rubber (like something from the old SNL Consumer Probe sketch), and graffiti drawn in Silly String. I simultaneously have nothing and everything to say, and no way to say it. When I’m up in a few hours at 2 am, staring into the darkness while the radiator clangs and Crankenstein snores, I’ll have probably found the words. By the time the sun rises, they’ll have disappeared again.
* I’d discuss it with her but have dwindling hopes she’ll be capable of an honest or emotionally mature conversation in my lifetime. This is also a good place to say that I don’t put much stock in the Academy Awards overall, but if anyone but Emma Stone wins Best Actress this year it’ll be viewed as an historic blunder. The other nominees are great, including Lily Gladstone, but Stone was Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester’s cinematic spawn, an IVF mutant baby born 88 years after Bride of Frankenstein was released. She was in a Bertolucci film one moment, Godard the next, then Roeg, and so on; the demands she met were preposterous.
** These reasons include loyalty, yes — i.e., the feeling that even when Crankenstein screws up, it’s not malicious and usually goes back to her upbringing — but also vanity. You feel pretty dumb when you realize your partner can look you straight in the eyes and, with total sincerity, feed you a load of horseshit. Mostly, though, a lot of our issues go back to a couple of subjects that I think she deserves privacy about unless she specifies otherwise.