there are events that happen in my life that make me scream, curse, bitch, moan, sulk, sob, or cry quietly in a dark corner of my bed...
then there are the odd ones that don't give way to any of my typical reactions ... I'm left confused, as though someone had just walked up to me out of nowhere and punched me in the gut for no reason -- all the wind is knocked out of me, I'm disembodied, fragments of my former self ... no longer a person... just ashes... and my brain disengages.
everything sounds different in my ear, I understand the words people are saying to me but only in a denotative sense - dictionary meaning. I see things in my field of vision, but none of it has sensory meaning.
there are no tears, words don't come to my mouth. everything just stays stuffed way down inside me - nothing moves in or out. It feels like I swallowed something whole, that sits heavily, right in the pit of my belly.
and all that I do feel can't be described as pain ... no -- it's some new category of hurt, and I spend hours, days, sometimes weeks or months, stunned ... just ... stupefied.
i realize what is going on inside me. I am searching my database, leafing through my years, my life, every memory cell, for a reaction to something of this magnitude - but nothing that I know of is even vaguely appropriate for such a situation.
i tell myself I should be angry -- i know how to be angry -- but anger doesn't surface. I try sadness -- nothing - I run the gamut of emotions that I know how to react to, but none of them come - just more numb silence.
after a while, I start wondering if anything had really happened. maybe it didn't happen ... maybe it was one of those weird dreams that haunts you with a sense of realness - then I realize I'm in some stage of denial. It has happened, but nothing in my past experiences has equipped me to handle it.
the first time this happened to me was the first time in my life that i realized -- that i really understood, why people sometimes kill.
while we sit on our sofas, watching the news, with a warm plate of food on our laps, we cannot come to grips with why someone otherwise intelligent, with so much to lose, would choose to exchange their future for a life in prison.
but you cannot possibly know the answer to this question if you have not known that most profound hurt that your current response system fails to shelter you from.
when there is no available reaction, no appropriate response to some unrecognizable hurt, sometimes people --- not just the thug, or the insane criminal-minded; not just the psychopath, or the evil bastard, but the regular, even tempered intelligent and aware person, with a great career, a nice home, and beautiful family, who has never felt that foreign blow to the gut, --- with nothing else inside to rely on, they just unleashes a foreign response to an unfamiliar blow.
whoever is in the way, be it perpetrator of said hurt, or not, everything and everyone in the wrong place at the wrong time suffers, including them self...
but at last, they now have a familiar feeling...Regret... or Shame. And we all know how to feel those. We all have a trained, built-in response system to those familiar emotions ... even if we do not know the cure.
