I was on the subway just a short while ago, and as I got off I felt someone’s skin brushing against my arm, and naturally my first reaction was to recoil at the touch of another human being. The second reaction—again, quite instinctual—was to say “what the fuck you fucking bitch!” And then I turned to see who my assailant was: a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, springing gaily through the subway doors into a world. The contrast between me and her could not have been more striking, because I thought it wondrous, even though most people would not really find a child-like innocence and gaiety to be strange behavior on the part of a child.
I thought about myself—the way that I often
shrink back upon myself, the way that, unbeknownst to most of my friends and acquaintances, there is something deeper at work than a calculated-for-comic-effect-self-deprecating-misanthropy—there’s a fundamental ambivalence, on so many levels, to the world I lived in after departing my mother’s womb. If I had to characterize myself, I’d say that most of the time I am, in a way, like a turtle peering out from inside its shell. I haven’t shrunk all the way in. You can see the tip of my nose. But there’s always a part of me that is going to say
“god, I wish I wasn’t here.”
There’s something off-kilter or even madly unhealthy about that, I know. And plus, saying”Fuck you,you fucking bitch” to a seven year old that didn’t hear or understand is, in a way, really fucking abominable too.
