Photo by Hannah Popowski on Unsplash
Though it’s only been a few weeks since we hit it off at a dinner party, she’s already playing the role of confidante in the drama of my life—impeccably, like she was destined to fill this highest of non-familial positions in my relationships org chart. Ever sympathetic and trustworthy, she has become the emotional safe haven I can always return to—a refuge from the usual social circles, now fraught echo chambers relentlessly pounding my eardrums with the same judgmental pronouncements.
And yeah, I’m really mixing/heaping on the metaphors—clichés, even—but that’s exactly the point; she’s so many things to me: soul sibling, therapist, sounding board, interpreter of dreams, arbiter of truth. To her, my woes are stories to be attentively listened to, then surmountable problems to be worked out with such mature strategies as the setting and maintaining of boundaries.
But as we grow closer (and I grow more reliant on our relationship), her solutions—if they can still be called that—turn increasingly… unconventional. There’s the anewifier session, then the silence pills. This weekend, it’s the screaming retreat.
Which, though taxing, proves to be therapeutic as I and fellow attendees holler our frustration, sorrow, yearning, etc. into open fields and deep ravines, striving to make each successive scream more cathartic with guidance provided by the retreat staff. But oddly, she doesn’t partake in any of this and just watches, usually with earplugs. Why would she come all this way for two days to merely observe? She might as well do some screaming herself.
“They say that screaming when you don’t have anything to scream about isn’t good for you,” she explains. “And this way, I get to see all the great progress you’re making.”
She’s right about the progress. During the communal howling session that concludes the retreat, I growl mostly with gratitude—now disencumbered of the emotional burden I arrived with. Though in exchange, I leave with the physical burdens of my enfeebled body: hoarse voice, raw throat, arms leaden after so much fist shaking, chest aching from all the projecting. Needless to say, she’s the one who drives us back to the city, all glowing praise behind the steering wheel, delighted by everything I’ve been able to “unleash.”
In the days that follow, her ministrations of warm compresses, herbal soup and hot tea with honey restore enough fortitude for me to take part in the next thing she has scheduled: a day of aggressive agriculture—popularly referred to as rage farming, because the idea is to put one’s fury into the growing of food.
When we arrive at the local farm offering this “hostility-channeling opportunity,” an ethos of enmity is immediately apparent in the murals that adorn the grain silos and henhouses—stylized scenes pitting people against the land, depicting harvest as a hard-won victory in our oldest of conflicts: man versus nature. In the barn turned ops center, the organizers quickly make it clear to me and other participants that we are comrades in farming conducted as down-and-dirty, “hand-to-land” combat necessary to get the earth to yield the bounty it would otherwise withhold from us. Then, under a blazing July sun, I savagely weed the fields, viciously till soil and turn a monstrous compost heap spitefully. All the while, she watches from the shade of the farmhouse porch through binoculars, waving vigorously whenever I glance in her direction.
During the break allotted for lunch, she meets me at the edge of the kale patch, morphing from spectator into a coach-fangirl chimera.
“Beautiful work! Just fantastic that you’re getting it all out so forcefully,” she says, then hands me a wet washcloth.
After I wipe the sweat from my face and neck, we sit under an oak tree and eat—more like devour in my case—the sandwiches she’s brought. Too worn out to talk, I listen as she gives me pointers for improving my hoe technique. Then it’s back to the tasks I’m supposed to carry out as battles that must be won. Crouching in the fields, I peel snails from seedlings to the soundtrack of someone grunting and cussing as they fling manure.
We leave the farm with a box of fruits and vegetables that cashes out the day’s worth of sweat equity. Back home, she tends to my recovery—this time blending the fruits into smoothies and reading the news aloud while I can barely move my arms.
Her gauntlet of “solutions” continues on with ruthless housecleaning, the merciless grading of term papers (using pens that make the brightest red marks I’ve ever seen) then brutally honest product testing, in which I am encouraged to treat prototypes with “real-world roughness”—even take swings at the aggravating ones with a padded club. She’s always there to cheer me on and afterwards sees to my recuperation with a warm towel for my tired eyes, hearty stews for dinner or some cooling tincture for my aching hands. Strange as they are, these activities do the trick, alleviating my irritation, resentment, regret and despair. Until I reach a point where I’ve been emptied of these emotions—or can’t feel them anymore. Then the activities are just exhausting.
So when she comes over to me all excited about a chili pepper endurathon, I tell her, “Maybe another time. I’m all catharsed out.”
Her eyes widen, becoming wild and frantic for a split second.
Then she smiles and says, “Of course, of course. You deserve a break.”
She turns away, and her quivering lips cut an arc through the air, sparking… something in me. But before I can tell what that might be, it’s gone.
Soramimi Hanarejima is a neuropunk author of Literary Devices for Coping whose recent work can be found in AMBIT, South Florida Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket and Vestal Review.