A Woman Scorned

Well I'm drunk on self pity,
scorned all that's been given me
I would drink from a bottle labelled Sure Defeat

Over the Rhine - Poughkeepsie

I don't go in much for self pity. Out of all the bad emotional habits, there are others I much more prefer, like underhanded self sabotage. The unstinting victim focus required for self pity becomes dull to me after about 15 minutes.

I can go for months without having any sorts of menstrual problems and then whack, down flows the black cloud and suddenly it's like a different world where all the colour's leached out and all the hope's done taken some trip on some downbound train spouting Bon Jovi lyrics.

It's just descended on me over the past few days this little black cloud and I feel like all my get up and go has got up and buggered right off. So hard it all feels, so hard. Such a struggle just to stand still. And I have a bloody headache.

Once I would try and fight through this and now I embrace myself, I walk into my house on Friday night and sigh and feel the house enfold me. I look to the Cirque de Soleil DVD I have to watch. It is surely time to go searching for some David Attenborough to top it off, to watch the wonder of the natural world and be soothed by it, somehow, even when the animals of the natural world have this awful propensity to keep eating each other. Time to immerse myself in some clay, to batten down the hatches and look after myself.

This morning it was too hard to swim myself up out of the mood. I do admit, when I walked up the ramp into the train station to go to work I probably exuded a bit of "Get out of my bloody way you bastards" sort of an air even though it was somewhat closer in mood to "Ahh, what's the point of all this again? Tell me, I doth forget." It is an unfortunate occurrence of human facial features that depression and arrogance often look the same out of one face and the time you most need someone to smile at you is the time they will most likely glare.

The young man and I, for all I can see from my single perspective, were most likely just as much to blame as each other really. In hindsight my bag was pretty overladen with stuff and obviously I bumped into him more than I realised at the time. But he was carrying a backpack slung over one shoulder and he bumped into me too. Oh, the single eyed focus of the self-righteous, more one-eyed than any Collingwood supporter.

Now, I've heard it said that when we recount incidences containing ourselves more than a few times we begin starring ourselves in a rather shinier role, and I am mindful of that. Perhaps I did bump into him more than he did into me. Perhaps if we were able to instant replay it could be found that my bumping was 23% more than his happened to be, and yet it is not how it felt to me.

"How about saying sorry you rude fucking bitch."

I had walked past him and was on my way to the ticket machine. I stopped when I heard this and turned around.

"Yeah, you," he sneered. "How about saying sorry for banging into me. Pretty fucking rude."

"Likewise," I retorted. Quick tempered young man, I saw the steam begin pummelling itself out of his ears. There were many people around us and they began staring at both of us. Time slowed down as it does in such confrontations, when it feels like everything is heightened and at the same time everything is muffled and I do not know how much I remember correctly.

I do remember, however his next words. He spat them out of his mouth.

"You fat fucking bitch," he said.

"You ugly prick," I said. It was pretty deadpan. Timing is everything in comedy you know. He wasn't really. Ugly, that is. He was quite an average, pleasant looking young bloke but you know, you take what your mind dishes up for you at the time. He started spluttering.

Whereas I should play poker. I have had so many years of teenage arguments with my father that I can stay stone cold and deadpan on the outside while inside I am seething, boiling, white hot, red hot. Of course it has a time limit on it. All that anger ends up seeping itself out and if I play my hand too long I give myself away, my voice quavering with the white and the red, my fingers shaking involuntarily. But right now it was coming out as ice, which INFURIATES young men with anger management problems.

The whole thing probably took 10 seconds. I walked towards the ticket machine and put my ticket in. See, there they were beginning already, the slightly shaking hands. The deep deep shame. You fat bitch. Obviously a few hundred more yoga sessions are in order.

The young bloke continued saying things I do not now remember.

"Why don't you fuck off and go and sit on someone's face, you fucking bitch," he said. Which sounded slightly less stupid when he said it than it does here but nevertheless still didn't make me think he was off to a Mensa meeting. He elaborated a little more on his strangely phrased thoughts, which contained the word "fuck" quite a bit.

"Perhaps an extended vocabulary might come in handy," I commented as the machine vomited my ticket back out at me and I stalked off onto the platform. He stormed off down the ramp out to the street. I could hear him for much longer than I could understand his words.

My hands fluttered over my page as the train came. I read the same paragraph over and over, all the way to Flagstaff. 'Do not cry,' I ordered myself crossly, like a child.

Can't let them see you cry. Don't let them see you cry. It feels to you as if your whole world would collapse and your soul would dissolve if anyone was to see you cry, if anyone was to know that the words of a stranger - you fat bitch - hurt you enough on the inside to make you cry. You read the same paragraph over and over, and you make it to work, and you tell a workmate what happened, and then you manage to get a bit of work done but it's the kind pity in another workmate's eyes who has heard why you are upset, and that is what does it, and you escape to the ladies room.

The ladies toilets, two toilets for about 50 women, that are always, always full so that you can never get a quiet poo in in peace, and now they are mercifully empty and the tears escape down your cheeks before you can hold the toilet paper up to your eyes.

You wonder where you have learnt this rule, the rule that says that no one must see you cry. You know where you have learnt it. It is a tight, tight, tight steel wad of pride that is lodged somewhere up under your chest cavity and no one, no one, is going to dislodge it except for Love.

Turn the other cheek, someone once said, but you didn't. Not today. Really, would it have been so much skin off your own nose to have stopped and said to the linguically challenged young man, "Sorry"? Really, now, girl, would it have? If you had, then you wouldn't have had to box him up into something mean and negative, would ya?

Naw, I don't be thinking it would have taken any skin off at all.

Sigh.