So Sad Today - Melissa Broder Page 0,53
health, will never look like my friends’ marriages. I feel like, well okay, I can’t have that. I probably wouldn’t even want that, in the case of husbands and wives who do everything together, from the gym to grocery shopping. But look what I can have. But I also think that some people, like myself and Ron Jeremy, are uncomfortable with the traditional picture of marriage. Maybe we do better when we see each other simply as beloveds.
Los Angeles has been good to Ron Jeremy and me. It’s easier to be a sick person in Los Angeles than in New York. LA allows for more mobility, when weakened. Also, as a sick person on the street, it’s better not to have crowds of people pushing toward you. We originally moved here hoping that the weather would help him get well. While the LA sun has not been a cure, he has more of a life.
Recently, we went to a Jewish deli, where Ron Jeremy ordered an exorbitant amount of food, including a knish, which I told him not to get. The next day he complained about being fat. I was like, I told you not to get the knish. He said that would be a good title for an essay about marriage.
I walk into the kitchen and I kiss Ron Jeremy with an open mouth. I kiss him with an open mouth, as though he is not my husband. Or I kiss him as though he is my husband, but that the words husband and wife mean something else—not what I have perceived them to mean through my own fears.
In this moment I resolve to kiss my husband with an open mouth forever. I want to freeze him the way I see him in this instant: dark eyebrows, sexy, sleepy hair and sleepy eyes. But we can’t freeze the way that we see the people we love, as much as we would wish. I know that I will kiss my husband with a closed mouth again, at some point. I know that I will even kiss him with a closed heart.
I pray for our love. I pray that even if I kiss my husband with a closed heart, my heart opens again to him. When I desire my husband, I am grateful to desire my husband. What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.
Under the Anxiety Is Sadness but Who Would Go Under There
I’VE ALWAYS HAD GENERAL ANXIETY, and later came panic disorder. But it took me many years before I realized there was depression underneath the anxiety. They are the flip side of the same coin. I never identified as depressed, despite the fact that all along there was an ocean of sadness, disappointment, hopelessness, and nothingness inside me. I think the anxiety was a coping mechanism; its heightened sensations, as terrifying as they are, were in some way preferable to me than the depression underneath.
As a little kid I took fearful thoughts to a greater extreme more than most kids, I think. If a parent got sick, it was cancer. If I got something in my eye, the cornea would be scratched forever. A sprained ankle on a school trip definitely meant an amputated foot. I was dying and everyone I loved was dying, which was true, of course, but it wasn’t happening as quickly as I thought.
There was no specific event that triggered the anxiety for me. Rather, the anxiety was always there, floating, looking for something to land on. Any minor event could serve as a seed, which, when nurtured with the anxiety, grew into a scary thought. The seed event would ground my fear, rendering it tangible. For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety. When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic.
My anxiety found a steady focus when I began having nightmares about fires at age twelve. I repeatedly dreamt that my family was burning in our home and that it was up to me to save them. Nightmares turned into daydreams and visions. I made my mother store the family’s fire ladder in my bedroom and learned how to assemble it, plotting an escape route for the family out the second-floor windows. I knew how I would break the