The amatuer psychologists in the crowd will perhaps sense the significance of shivering uncontrollably. The subject subconciously enacts a fantasy in which she is stripped of her self- control through a powerful, exotic love.
To which I would respond: Doy Hickey.
I was ravenous for a love so grandiose as to obliterate my life. Almost every relationship I'd formed in the past 4 years had gone south: romantic entanglements, friendships, some out of pure desperation. One friend referred to me as a train wreck. Another suggested "emotional atomic bomb" as perhaps closer to the mark . The ones I couldn't scare away, I managed to drive off over some perceived sight.
I was the world's welterweight champion of the slight fend. I didn't see it that way, of course. People just kept letting me down. It never occurred to me that I sought out rejection, engineered the drama of fresh grievances to distract me from older, stale forms of grief.
But that's not the story I'm telling now. No one - except those paid to listen- really wants to hear your musty songs of self contempt. What we want is the glib aria of disastrous love, which is, finally, the purest expression of self contempt.
I remember watching this film, where the lead tells this beautiful american woman, "You ask me whether I'm waiting? I say YES! We're all waiting, waiting for that one moment, transfixed in time, to save us all from ourselves."
But I am certain that you, too, have some episode in your life that lines up against this one, some mad period of transgression in which, your body, your foolish foolish body, led you towards tender ruin. And sometimes, at night you must lie awake and ask yourself: How could I have done this? How ever, in the world, might I have become such a fool? How do I stop? And when? When? When will I have her again?