Honest Look


Dear Eugene,

I can see from my kitchen that my neighbor's living room TV is always on.  Often playing news and weather.  Mostly weather.  As if when one stares at the screen long enough bad news will go away and good ones stay for good.  I don't know.  I am not my neighbor.  I am an alien from outer space arrived early this morning and find human being interesting in a sad way.

Sad but lovable, like baby, can't hide their need and fear.  Laughable too.  I don't mean to be mean.  But what a screen can do to them--for them?--is really quite strange, so effective that it must be called powerful.  What are they trying to see, to hear, to get out of it?

Things are happening out there.  Issues and concerns.  We need to know, pay attention to, stuff them in our head, knead them to fit our heart.  But we don't really mean any of these--we can't--because there is no time, no space, no energy: our head running out of RAM, our heart overloaded as is.

What I have is good intention.  Always willing, never quite able.  But the willingness is cute.  Just look at how I stare at the screen you must want to kiss me for wanting so much so often so consistently and earnestly.  You can't tell by looking into my eyes if I am savoring a striptease.  No other part of my body is giving away any sign either.  A calm dog in heat my life is.

I am not living a lie.  I have a hyper-awareness of my own insensitivity, the honesty of a blank stare.  It started years ago and why change now?  If this sounds pornographic to you, Mr Alien, I must say you need to go back to your planet, where naked hearts are bouncing around-- unprotected?  You can't live long with that sort of bruising.  I'll give you three years max if you don't kill yourself by then someone else will.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 13, 2018 at 3:10 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “I have a hyper-awareness of my own insensitivity, the honesty of a blank stare... If this sounds pornographic to you, Mr Alien, I must say you need to go back to your planet, where naked hearts are bouncing around -unprotected?”

    An honest look may elicit a response as organic as linoleum floor or as promising as a no through road. I remember 2 instances where I’ve least expected honesty & reacted dishonestly in the most expected formality.

    In my earlier college years in LA, I befriended a high school senior & helped her quite routinely with homework. Reserved & cautious, she would often glance askew during our conversations before posing her questions. Our dialogues camped upon all sorts of adolescent thematic landscape shifting from peer pressure to acne & mouthwash. One evening, she delved into the heart of her “issues & concerns”. Her eyes lowered, she muttered about a nightly radio host, Delilah, who would advise listeners embroiled in their dilemmas of love. In a rare moment of casting an honest look at me, she confessed: she had spent many late hours glaring at her radio screen & bedroom ceiling while listening to Delilah & learning more about sexuality in this program than from any other person or venue. Her face seemed “sad but lovable, like [a] baby… laughable too”, woefully bare & unprotected, a striptease of emotions in vile gyrations of overexposure. In place of empathy, I replied with a perfunctory series of sanitized nods & affirming words out of duty. I had decent intent without intending to invest more time or energy in trying to understand her. “Always willing, never quite able.”

    The honest-look effect was somewhat replicated a few years later in Vancouver. I was invited to the home of an 80+ yo church friend in Chinatown on one rainy night. Reposed on her bed, she spoke about her husband’s recent whereabouts & her gratitude for his sacrificial love: he would always grace these flights of stairs, uphill & downhill in all flavors & curses of the weather, to feed & nurture her as he had vowed half-life earlier on their wedding day. And she called out with an endearing twang about those fruits & cakes gifted by friends a day or two past, her kyphosis imposing an eerie presence of faithful resilience compressed in her spine over decades of communal living & giving. Her skeletal frailty & curvature were too explicitly graphic, morbidly surreal to retain my gaze. I should have listened more vigilantly but I felt too vulnerable in the wake of her strength to be awakened to the truth of aging. I persisted in smiling at her as she continued describing her daily feats & failures for the next 30 min or so before I closed my visit with a civilized embrace.

    “A calm dog in heat [of denial] my life is… It started years ago & why change now?”

    Because the honesty of the blank screen will indeed kill me if I surrender to anything less than an honest look into myself.

    Yours, Kate

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