Dead Crush #4

Don’t imagine having sex with Jackson Pollock. Just don’t. You won’t like it.

I have been very angry for two solid months. I feel worried about what will happen when the anger goes away entirely. Sometimes it does go away and I feel delicate and shaky. I will be talking to my sister on the phone and will recall a time that my husband said something funny, adorable, or wonderful. He can be all of these things, occasionally. I will feel sad and tormented. Later, I will remember that I made his girlfriend dinner and complimented her stupid outfits before he declared his love for her: a chipmunky person who drives an SUV. Then the anger will come back and I will cuddle down in it, at home once again. My anger has become more like one of those body pillows than like the burning hot spear of hatred it once was. I need it. It helps me go to sleep.

However, the images of the girlfriend make me less and less mad. Two months is a long time to think about someone with no ideas or anything interesting contribute to the fabric of human experience. There are many other things to be angry about: the destruction of the future I imagined for myself, for example. But there are other futures. More than anything right now, I feel sort of…content. I don’t think good things about my husband. The funny, adorable, and wonderful things are like cheap plasticky trinkets now. They are sort of worthless. Pretty and cute, but not much else. I need stuff that is more like very heavy Victorian furniture right now. Fortunately, the furniture is right here inside shrew. I don’t need some dude to make me complete. In fact, I fear how little I need or want a dude. I mean, for Relationship purposes. Am I my own boyfriend? Sort of.

I do love Jackson Pollock so much. I’ve always known that I would name my kid after him. I love any story about him beating the crap out of someone at the Cedar Bar, or overturning tables, or doing other Jackson Pollock drunk stuff. Have you seen the movies of him painting? I want living to be like that. I’ve often been envious of men and the social acceptance of their violence. OK, the violence isn’t REALLY accepted, but I bet a lot more people would have been on the phone in hushed tones had it been ME who punched a hole in the wall at a restaurant where I worked many years ago, rather than my boyfriend at that time. The loud unreal crack of a fist going through the wall. The weird quiet afterwards. I say this as someone who has been hit in the face before by someone she loves: Don’t you wish it had been me? Don’t you kind of wish it had been you?