Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Teardrop?

The aftermath of a very disturbing dream...

I think we have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations - beyond expectations in fact, requirements.
Some of these are small: If we're given a surprise party, we will be delighted.
Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken.

But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful call and our mother/father is dead and we will feel nothing. Nothing.
I wonder if this quiet, unutterable fear is even keener than the fear of bad news itself: that we may discover ourselves to be monstrous.




1 comment:

Girl said...

Why would feeling nothing be akin to feeling monstrous? Sometimes death entails sorrow, sometimes rage, sometimes even relief. As someone who has cause to feel the latter emotion in case of a loved one's demise, it seems unfair to suppose that feeling nothing would say something about one's morality. We are what we are and we cannot change what we feel sometimes... and maybe more than fearing that we are deviant in some way, it is better that at the end of it all, we can be honest with ourselves and admit that we run the gamut of all emotions, including ambivalence?

PS That is one hot picture dude... :)