brain lint #7: He Discovers The Lair Of Bigfoot And Is Told LOUD AND CLEAR He Is NOT Welcome
angry much?
I used to want to push my stepdad into Bristol Harbourside and then push his bald head under the mossy currents with a stick. The stick would be a really long one like I have seen gondoliers use. And he would come up and blub occasionally, coughing, eyes red and sore from the rancid water splashing at his face, and I would laugh like he was making a joke, a bit of a surreal one, yeah, but that’s very him, he was always very funny. Oh, you want to come out now, do you? I would say. You want to come and see me now after all this time? And you can’t? That’s funny. You’ve always been funny. And then eventually we would both get a bit tired, and I would stop laughing and poking at him, and I would watch his head slip into the river really silently. And then maybe I’d sit down, have a tea from a Thermos right there on the river wall, and smile to myself in a silent, glassy sort of way. And then I’d walk home.
But that doesn’t make any sense to me now, I don’t think. Sounds like it would be a cold day, and I like to be warm now. I have nicer places to sit and have a tea, and better things to do than poke at a man in smelly waters when there’s a really nice cafe like, right there. Even if he’s a really huge twat.
We haven’t spoken in ten years now, so if he started to talk to me again (not possible anyway) he would be talking to a relatively new human. I too have to remind myself that there’s a new-ish person here now instead, the one that’s typing away here. I find it so strange that parts of you can change, and that such entrenched rage at leave you, even at all.
I don’t think I’m in denial. I genuinely believe I am not angry at him any more. I have been in therapy coming up on two years now, which I know is small change therapy-wise, but I understand that I will never speak to him again and therefore will never get what we might recognise as ‘full closure’ on our relationship. I’ve had to accept that about other relationships I’m in too – that they’ll always have to be what they are, and not everything can be, or has to be, made better.
This is really hard with active relationships that keep revealing new situations to deal with. But with my stepdad, everything that could have happened between us has happened. He did what he did, and I did what I did. I couldn’t have done any more or less because it happened already (also, I was a child for most of it). I can use bits of what I learned from that whole awful relationship and make sure that it never happens again. That’s all I can do, I think.
So when you change where does the bit that has been sloughed off go? I was watching a video about Sasquatches on the weekend. It’s called He Discovers The Lair Of Bigfoot And Is Told LOUD AND CLEAR He Is NOT Welcome and it’s by a user called Homesteading Off The Grid. The host Kevin E Lake is in the Virginian woods, tracking Sasquatches, also known as Big Foot, also known as Yeti. I know! They aren’t real. But you don’t have to believe in them to watch this stuff. ANYWAY. In it, he says: “energy can neither be created or destroyed. So what happens if an individual is filled with tonnes of negative energy? Rage, hatred anger, jadedness, bitterness? But through nothing short of a miracle this individual recovers. Heals. Where does that negative energy go? Is it possible that energy could leave that individual’s body and become its own separate entity?”
I can’t lie: he loses me from there. But that got me thinking. If my hatred and bitterness towards my stepdad turned into something, if it hadn’t dissolved into thin air – what would that thing be? My thing would be thrashing, small and strange, I think. It would live in the edges of the Welsh woods and come out at night to pick through the drive-thru wheelie bins for dribbles of McFlurry. It would be a baby thing, all feral and frothing, with little sharp teeth.
I think I’d like to keep it safe, that thing. I would like to give it a bath and a kiss. Put it in a little bed and teach it things. It would hate this because it trusts nothing but I would do it anyway. Poor thing. I am glad that I am rid of it but there’s also a part of me that wants to hold it close.
After a while it might run away. I think it could be time to let it.