Walking a Fine Line

Maybe I'm pushing the envelope, or walking a fine line, with this next piece. But it's all just writing, and it's also a bit of experimentation. I hope you enjoy.

In 2004, I read the book “In Cold Blood” for the first time. “In Cold Blood” is about the murder of  a prominent family in the American heartland. The book is groundbreaking because of the way its author, Truman Capote, structured it. When the book opens, we are in the presence of two men. We are not sure who these men are. We are not sure if we should like these men or not, but we are in their presence, and after a while, we develop a type of sympathy for them. One man’s name is Dick and the other's is Perry. As time goes on, we start to develop much more sympathy for Perry. Perry is a sort of likeable misfit. He's not great at making decisions, so we can’t say he’s a leader, but he lives by his word and he doesn’t do anything immoral if he feels he doesn’t have to.

Eventually, we learn that Dick and Perry are the bad guys in the story, that they, out of greed and desperation, will murder the four members of the prominent family, the Clutters, “in cold blood.”

I mention "In Cold Blood," not because of the interesting way it was structured, but rather, because of one detail in the book that I’ll never forget. That bad guy, Perry, had had a lot of pain, a lot of body pain.  I forgot why, but he did, and in order to ease that pain, he used to take a lot of aspirin. But he wouldn’t take it in any old way. He would chew the aspirin. And he wouldn’t chew the aspirin sometimes and swallow it other times. He would always chew it.

I never forgot this small detail: that Perry chewed his aspirins; that he was in that much pain and that desperate that he chewed his aspirins.

Now skip ahead about 13 years, to 2017, to the last months of a 10-year relationship that I was in. I absolutely loved Maya, she was great, and, after all, we had been together for 10 whole years. But in the end, it just wasn’t meant to be no matter how much I wanted it to be, and Maya and I were fighting. We were fighting a lot. We were having the type of fights where I would say, "Look, that is white and Maya would say, "That’s not white, it’s off-white," and we would just fight about that. The fights were killing me and as a result of them, I would get headaches, lots of headaches, cluster headaches. Eventually, to try and get rid of these headaches, I would chew aspirin. And many times it worked. When you chew aspirin, the medication enters you your bloodstream a lot faster. I must have chewed aspirin at least five times during those final months with Maya.

Now skip ahead about two years, to January 2019. I’m in a relationship with Caro. Caro followed Maya. Caro had been super calm. In fact, that was one of the things that attracted me to Caro. She was very zen in many situations and she hardly ever raised her voice. When I met Caro, I was still having residual effects from the breakup with Maya: namely, I was still having headaches. But after a few months with Caro, the headaches stopped. That my headaches stopped was something that Caro would always ask me about and remind me of. She would say, “How have your headaches been?” and I would always say that they have gotten much better. But Caro knew what the source of those headaches had been, and every time she asked me, “How have your headaches been?” I felt as though she were really saying, “Isn’t it great to be with someone who is not as shrill as your ex-girlfriend?”

But then things started to go south with Caro. I won’t go into it, but the relationship started to give me major stress.

I knew that things had come full circle, so to speak, about one and a half weeks before Caro and I broke up. That’s because on that day, I stood in my kitchen with a glass of water in one hand and an aspirin in the other but ultimately put down the water because I didn’t want to wait that long. It was the first time I had ever chewed an aspirin while dating Caro. It was also the last time.