“The act of hurling something to the Earth is an interesting one. It connotes a dismissal of physical/material form, both in terms of the thing being hurled and a violence toward the dirt-planet at one’s feet. Furthermore, the act of presenting an object to someone in this way exaggerates the act of looking down, and requires one stoop to retrieve it, bowing, in a way, to the one who made the initial gesture. It’s an act that anticipates complicity.
The night things went shitty between us, Isabel — the night when it became clear to maybe everyone but me you were a liar — was Halloween. While you were on your phone desperately trying to get a cab to leave the party under the false pretense that your sister was having an overdose, this guy way trying to hit on you. I took his hat off his head and threw it at his feet and demanded he pick it up.
You often talked — almost fondly, Isabel — of how your ex-boyfriend threw you down a staircase once. Infidelity, you said. You learnt your lesson, you said. I didn’t yet suspect your pathologies. This was a scene you returned to more than once. Nearly bragging, sometimes smiling. You lived mostly in your past, or else were scheming futures. Either way, your lack of presence — it sucked. And tho I loved to see how your hands would move around when you excitedly told your stories, how you would interrupt yourself with laughter — I resented that the person I was falling in love with was mostly a former version, or your own invention, and that these things you told me had nothing to do with how we were together.
Later, I wished it were me that had thrown you down the stairs. Maybe then I’d have meant something more to you.”
That was Garett Strickland, in an essay on HTMLGIANT. The whole essay is great, really, and I highly recommend reading, but that particular section was increasingly painful.
All I could keep thinking was, Oh, that’s me. Definitely me. The worst parts of me, maybe, but definitely me. It’s hard, sometimes, to think of one’s self as more than just the things that have happened to it (does that make sense?).
Have you ever painfully recognized yourself in literature?
ashley bethard 