ASSIGNMENTS:
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Anonymous
Seattle, Washington USA
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REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
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Advise to myself at age 38
1. Do not touch P's arm. When you do, your cells will blast awake and you will fall in love with yourself again after so long, and for this way of accessing that information, you will pay a very heavy price. You suspect this, but you don't know this yet. It's March, and you should not touch P's arm while you are sitting in your half-renovated apartment on a striped couch that belongs to your lover, A.
2. Quit trying to be the perfectly supportive girlfriend to your lover, A. You are about to join the illustrious ranks of persons who tried so hard to do the right thing, that the pressurized nuclei of their own repressed truths ultimately exploded into fountains of irreparable harm.
3. #2 translates to the following instruction: Do not have an affair w/ P while your lover A's mother is dying.
4. Most people will not be interested enough in the details to ever understand how it would have come to that. They will not care about your six plus years of unwavering fidelity and monogamy; about your devotion to an impossible situation; about everything you did give. They will only think one thought, "horrible." When, six months from now, you appear as a character in A's new play, you will be cast as a callous adulteress who ignored her during her worst days, and the audience in unison (cue music) will think only one thought - - "horrible." This, you will be able to live with. What the fuck do other people know about anyone else's life, anyways? You will find forgiveness for yourself for your own frailties. You'll even ultimately be able to use this experience to better understand your own deep seated feelings of abandonment and your own secret identity as teenaged accomplice to your mother's betrayal of your father.
5. But - LISTEN UP HERE KIDDO - when you wake from this fog you will unfortunately remember that you are not and never will be the kind of person who will be able to forgive yourself for making waste of something and someone you cared so much about.
6. Thusly, it's imperative that you do the following - you must find some one to throw you up against the wall and tell you how much pain you truly are in and tell you to STOP. You don't realize this now, so I need to tell you - - your best friend is not capable of helping you this way. Neither is your mother. They see your strengths, and unfortunately, when they do see your vulnerabilities, they project their own stuff onto it. They aren't able to see you clearly. So, find this person who will throw you up against the wall. Because you are a mess. A beautiful mess, but a mess.
7. Now, make this person hurriedly explain the difference between patience and restraint - you can't really afford to wait until July to understand this difference.
8. Also, while they have their hand around your t-shirt collar and the full weight of their body pressing you up against the wall in performance of this intervention, beg them to put you on a plane to your brother's house. Get there and tell him and his wife everything. Make them let you stay here until the inevitability of your unfolding actions has passed.
9. Finally, fall in love with P after leaving A. You and A are leaving each other anyways, and both you and A truly deserve for this to be done with love.
10. Admit now, instead of when it's much too late, that A already broke your heart. Stop pretending you can take it. Get off this ridiculous train now!!!
11. Also, as an extracurricular project, begin studying up on what a hot-headed fool you can be sometimes. You're not very nice sometimes. And, you're angry a lot, but have been busy spending a life time pretending not to be.
12. Finally, and on second thought, touch P's arm. It is still March, and if you don't touch her arm, you may lie in a wintry dormant state for another few years that you can't afford to waste. You have already missed the chance to have a baby (You didn't know that yet - sorry if telling you that here made you cry). Touch P's arm so it will be revealed to you that the half-renovated/half-demolished apartment is a metaphor for the state of your life. And, as an added bonus, by touching P's arm, the fire a few months from now that will ravage and destroy this same half-renovated apartment will get to serve as an extended metaphor of grand poetic proportion.
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