My first submission to Literotica didn't go well. As it was the first story I'd ever written, I didn't realize how many people would misunderstand. I've thought about it decide to try to rewrite the story so that more people would understand it. The story was about a teenager who had his life turn to shit and adopted a fatalistic approach to life. It wasn't that he lost his ability to emphasize, it was about controlling the hurt. Some of what he said was meant to be sarcastic and some of it was meant to be lies, but I guess I didn't make my intentions clear. I'm also adding the other half of the phone conversation that I omitted. Maybe it was only clear in my mind about what Bev's responses were. Sorry about that. (By the way, my thanks to the people who did understand and liked what I wrote. I'll try not to spoil it for you while I attempt to reach the people that didn't understand what I thought I explained clearly. Instead of replacing it with an edited version, I'm just going to rewrite it with additional explanation and post it with the original. That way people who liked the original can still read it and compare it with the new one.)
*****
Do you know what the opposite approach to an emotion like love is? Most people think that the opposite approach is hate, but it isn't. It's indifference. When you lose someone you love, you can stand it better if you wall it away and try not to let it hurt you.
I'm not most people. I can control my feelings of loss when I'm disappointed in love, at least long enough to cope. I'd been coping with it for a while when my wife decided to bring matters to a head with, "Honey, we need to talk."
It's almost a cliché, it's so overused. What's worse, is that it's in no way truthful. Not absolutely truthful, not in total. 'We' don't really need to talk, but she wants to say something and I'm supposed to want to listen. Take my soon-to-be-ex-wife and our 'talk'. The first word in that sentence started it off in the wrong direction. I was no longer her 'honey', a fact that was apparent. Secondly, 'we' weren't talking, she was. Actually, she was reciting from a prepared script that she had rehearsed in preparation for the event. The 'need' part was also totally one-sided. I didn't need it. I would have vastly preferred that the situation wouldn't have developed, and if it had, I would have preferred her leaving a short note saying 'Am leaving. Will file papers soon.' and her wedding and engagement rings. If she wanted to be polite about it she could add the word, 'sorry', but I didn't feel it was necessary. I could cry about it in private, not in front of the one that hurt me.
That's just me, though. Most people enjoy reacting emotionally to things, but that's not my style. I could have reacted emotionally, been angry, hurt, bewildered, anguished, or just unhappy. They do it as catharsis, a way to get crippling emotions out where they can be dealt with. I've seen people get emotionally upset when they have a flat tire, and I think it's silly. If the tire's flat, no amount of emotion changes that fact. If the wife's leaving, once again, nothing emotional has any affect on that situation. Shut down, deal with the problem without distracting emotions and weep about it later. That's
my
style.
I suppose I should explain. I've felt bereavement and loss before, and I learned to handle it. At first, I wasn't very good at it. My mother died when I was six, complications with the pregnancy that might have resulted in a younger brother for me. It was like I had lost both my parents, because my father didn't handle it well. I cried for a few days and then kept it to the occasional sniffle for a while. My father worked longer hours and occupied his other hours with his other new hobby, drinking. Well, not exactly a hobby, it was more like self-medication in an attempt to cope with something he really wanted to avoid. I was ten when his two major pastimes coincided. One night he drove home after a 'few beers' after work. Boom, I had an entirely new family dynamic and another reason to have to deal with my emotions. This time I cried at night when no one could see me and pretended I was fine on the outside. It didn't do much for my grief, but at least I didn't have to deal with pitying looks. Don't people realize that those just make the sufferer feel worse?
As an orphan, I was taken in by the only family I had left, my grandparents. I was thirteen when my grandfather died, and sixteen when my grandmother died. Not accidental deaths, just the result of old age. I think that's how I learned to handle the loss of someone from my life. It didn't do any good to rage at my loss or lament the fact that I missed them. They didn't leave me or abandon me, they just died. Nothing intentional about it, shit just happens. I'd heard the saying, 'Life is an incurable disease' often enough. Everyone that is born will die, sooner or later. So, why let it twist your insides and make your life miserable? Mourn your dead, weep in private if you must, and get on with life.
I decided at sixteen to take as my approach to life that I had to accept that everything ended. Sometimes you were there at the end and sometimes you weren't, but there was nothing you could do about it. You just took the hand you were dealt and made the best of it that you could.
I polished the skills required to do that in foster-care. I only had to put up with it for a short while, unlike some of the other foster-kids. One guy I met had been 'in the system' almost his whole life. He had been approximately a week old when he was found at a bus-stop accompanied by a one-word note that just read, 'Sorry'. That's rough. My situation was better than his, any way in which you want to measure it. I was new to foster-care, only had two more years of high school to finish and I wasn't in bad shape financially.
My dad may have drunk to forget his pain but he was what they called a 'functioning' alcoholic. I had the money that my mother left me when she died. It was in a trust that I couldn't touch until I 'attained my majority', which I thought meant eighteen. I had the proceeds of my father's life insurance policy and the house where we had lived. The mortgage had one of those 'pay the balance on death' insurance policies, so I didn't have any debt. I wasn't really a 'welfare' case like most of the other kids, but I still needed to have a 'responsible adult' care for me.
That situation persisted for only six months. The attorney that was handling my father's estate decided that there was no reason for me to stay in foster-care. I had a part-time job, I would own my own home when probate cleared, and there was no reason I couldn't be 'emancipated'. That's when a judge looks at your situation and decides that you have the ability, and assets enough, to take care of yourself. I became a homeowner one week before my seventeenth birthday, and a legal adult two weeks after that. Since I had money, I did have to repay the amount that child-welfare had expended on my upkeep, but that wasn't all that much.
You can see, from my account of my childhood, why my outlook on life was a bit different what most people developed. 'Shit happens', you deal with it and move on with the rest of your life. Years later, I got a chance to put that outlook to some use to shape how I dealt with the woman I had chosen to spend my life with. She died (Well, she was dead to me from that point on, and that was close enough.) and I had to deal with it. It was complicated by the fact that only the part of it that was the woman I married died and there was another person inhabiting her body, but it could be handled. It was like that old movie,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. My wife was dead and what was left was a pod-person that looked and sounded like her. So, I started preparing for what I knew was to come.
