(This is a piece I wrote to perform at the Woodstock Writers Festival Story Slam. The topic, "I am an emotional idiot" was inspired by the work of author Maggie Estep, who died earlier this year.)
When it comes to breaking up
with men, I am an emotional idiot at genius levels. Maybe that’s why I’ve
been with the same guy for over twenty-five years.
See, I don’t want to HURT
anyone…so I string out the breakups. I procrastinate. Maybe until… one of us
moves to another city…or he gets married…
Breaking up with the average
guy was hard enough, but I’m partial to creative men.
Creative men are so sexy. They
sing songs about you, they write poetry about you, they want to paint you
naked…holding fruit, for some reason. Or a kitten. Yeah, because when I’m
hanging out naked, I relish the idea of eighteen razor sharp claws gripping my
bare flesh. Or…fruit salad.
Creative men are great…or at
least the ones I’ve chosen were. Until I had to break up with them. Until my
vagina, that traitor, no longer wanted sonnets and glitter, but that angsty guy
in the corner who smelled like turpentine. Or the one with the suspiciously long
fingernail that could double as a guitar pick.
Oh, they were all basically
nice about it while I was slipping the equivalent of a passive/aggressive
butter knife into their hearts. I’m sorry
for wasting your time, one said …I’m
sorry, you need someone more assertive…I’m
sorry, you need someone heterosexual… One of them who liked to cook for me
told me I would starve without him. I did a particularly bad job of breaking up
with that one.
But then, these spurned
creative men went home and started … processing…and
talking to their therapists. Or their men’s groups. Who told them to sublimate
their pain into their art. I have inspired so much post-idiotic-breakup
art that someone should name a grant after me.
I broke up badly with a comic
book artist, and somewhere out there I am a she-devil of a villainess with a butt-ugly
costume and the smallest rack ever seen on a comic book female.
I broke up with a musician,
and I’m the subject of a song where the guy’s best friend runs off with his
girl and he really misses him.
I broke up with a painter, so,
in some avant-garde gallery in Boston, I’m naked with six eyes and three
breasts and seven pieces of fruit and a double-pawed kitten.
I broke up with a writer and
now I’m a series of evil bitches whose names begin with “L” in thinly veiled
autobiographical fiction.
I even broke up with my
husband while we were dating. In a case of pre-emptive emotional idiocy, I
waited until he painted my portrait and carried it from New York to Boston on a
train to break up with him.
If he dismembered me on
canvas afterward, he was nice enough not to share it with the world.
Fortunately for me, and unfortunately
for the hopeful recipients of the Laurie Boris Emotional Idiot Grant, the
creative guy who would become my husband took me back a year later. The
portrait still hangs in my writing room, fully clothed, without kittens,
without fruit. Partly as a gift…and partly as a warning. Because there’s a hell
of a lot of room on that thing for a few more breasts and eyeballs.
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