You Know The Feeling
Photograph by Carina Cain
By Carina Cain
Mad. I am mad, so I practice feeling it in the mirror. I practice on my face and listen to angry, abrasive music. I do this to encourage the muscles around my mouth and eyes to contort and pinch in a way that lets people know I have an anger I won’t just swallow and digest again. Too often, I think, I have been mad without expression. Now I express. I am ugly in my anger and laugh when spittle from my frenzied lip-synching hits the glass I’m raging into. I am selfish now that I’m mad, but I know this already and do not care. It’s all about me, me, me. How I feel. And so what. Soon I can’t stop laughing at my mad faces, because how ridiculous, really. Right? Baring teeth and releasing spit on smooth surfaces and mouthing along to someone else yell about how angry they are. Me too. But now I’m laughing more because it’s so ridiculous. I hate that I’m laughing because I want to stay here, stewing in my madness, just for a little bit longer. But, already, I feel it passing. But won’t that recycle some of the anger? Thread it over my lips and tongue and brow and put down, out, into a face of rage once more. I hope. But do I? This is the problem, I think, as I glare. Why does everything have to be so momentary? I don’t want to be frugal. But the laughing has balanced out the mad. Neutral. And that’s how I’ve always been. It pisses me off. But not enough to change, right? So I turn the music up to blast it all away.
Sad. Sad follows after mad, dragging feet through dusty ground on a tight leash like some small, forlorn animal. But sad really came first, you know. You know the feeling. Hurt led to sad because we gravitate toward blanket emotions here. That way, they’re easier to interpret head-on. So, that first pinprick of hurt was swaddled in sad, and then mad the next layer on top of that. And mad is warm and suffocating but not so prolonged as sad. That’s why I wish I could roll up and cave in with the mad around me for just a while. Because when you’re mad it doesn’t feel so much like you’re missing out. Mad is a little more bearable. And even if there’s no direction for your anger, mad makes you sharp-edged and motivated. Makes you want to grab a phone and dial, slam glass keys and yell. Or grind down someone else with words. Be mean back. Mad is a pointed object twisting into an immediate injury. But not sad.
Sad is the worst sunburn ever. A lingering heat from the mad that’s like permeating light all over your body. A body, my body. Our body. You hope for the best. A slight darkening of the skin, maybe, from the anger. But even if exposure is momentary, you underestimated your proximity to the heat source. You’ve made a habit of this. Bad, you know it’s bad. Even worse, there’s no aloe vera gel in the house. You used it to make hand sanitizer. Today of all days. So what can you do? Wait as the sad burns the color red into you, against your consent. Who said anything about blue? Red. Sad is red and hot skin, dry skin, peeling skin. These are the stages of sadness, and if you’re lucky, they pass quickly. But not without significant, bodily alteration. You look at your new skin in the mirror and I look at my new skin and maybe we can both agree that we’ve been sad, yes. A lot of us have been sad. We’ve been lonely. And now we’re smooth and tender and something neutral. Like charcoal, or olive. Not red or blue. You know the feeling?
Carina Cain is a Bay Area local who graduated from Lewis & Clark College this past summer with a B.A. in English. She is admittedly too fond of the hyphen, and wholeheartedly believes that arts education is fundamental to the well-being of society.
