Wednesday, December 8, 2010

How to Fabricate the Truth Without Even Trying

Ten minutes ago I ended a 14 hour death match with a $4100.00 insurance claim check.  The check had come in yesterday afternoon.  I immediately opened the envelope, made a copy of the check, took the check back to my bedroom and put it in my billfold in my purse.  Then I returned to the study to check off what items Blue Cross had paid of the items I had sent in.  A couple of hours later two delivery men brought a television I was expecting.  Anticipating their arrival, I had gone back to get some cash out of my billfold for a tip.

After the delivery men left and I had set up the TV, I prepared to go to the bank to deposit the check.  I looked in my billfold for the check to make out the deposit slip.  The check was not there.  My anxiety ran up the scale like a thermometer headed toward appendicitis.  Within seconds I had pictured several scenarios in which the check had been misplaced, lost forever, or stolen.  As my homemaking is not altogether, um...efficient, I have spent the better part of the last 14 hours going through piles and stacks, looking in certain places, going again through piles and stacks, looking again through the same places (perhaps not efficient because obsessive), and gradually adding piles, stacks, and places to my frantic search, for a while in this room, then again in that room.  What I put off and put off was digging through the two huge bags of trash I had put out just before preparing to leave for the bank.

In most endeavors I use an open (if scattered) approach to the task.  If a new detail or idea occurs to me, I tend to follow it.  While digging through something in the study I spied the workbook in which I had checked off claim items against the BCBS Explanation of Benefits that came with the check.  I knew it was illogical to look there, so vivid in my mind was the memory of having put the check in my billfold before I started that task.  Perhaps it was my ironclad resistance to sorting through garbage that allowed me to plunge ahead through the cognitive dissonance of having an impulse to look in a place that totally contradicted such a clear memory.  But plunge I did...straight to the location of the check.

If cognitive dissonance had been uncomfortable, think total ambivalence.  My first reaction was actually spoken (to an audience of two kitties?  More likely God) and is unsuitable for reproduction here.  My next reaction was the kind of relief in which one feels the body melting. 

If in this case there was thesis, then antithesis, there has yet to be synthesis.  I do not anticipate that melding any time soon.  Giving in to the idea that a memory (which I still experience) was actually something else entirely, say, a wish (Dr. Freud certainly would have) requires a certain grace to which my narcissism will be loath to hand over the reins any time soon.

But why go into such detail about a relatively minor life event?  As it happens, very recently I carried on a very exciting and intense communication, by email, text message, and telephone, for over five months with a high school friend.  We exchanged over 200 emails; over time we began to talk on the phone, up to two hours per night.  We became very close and got to know a great deal about each other.  We looked forward with great anticipation to his trip to Dallas, very close to my home.  Based on our conversations I had very high hopes for our face-to-face meeting. 

And meet we did.  I needed something less than two seconds to read him (facial expression, body language) and know that somewhere between the speaking and the hearing of the words by telephone, the great Universal Truth in Advertising Law had been smashed into a thousand broken fantasies, never [think Humpty Dumpty] to be put back together again.  Even as I write, some three weeks after these culminating events, the memories of what I read in text messages and heard on the phone are as real as the kitty on my lap.

But the last 14 hours bring a new experience which must be integrated into my understanding of Dear Things Lost.  Essentially this is a situation of my existentially experiencing what Mr. Einstein told us about the the Law of General Relativity: when I am in fifth gear, blowin' and goin' with my hair on fire, I can never be sure exactly where I am or how fast I'm moving.  So how in this universe could I ever pretend to think I know where I've been?

The inability to rely on memory I describe is not the phenomenon brought on by age.  It is the universal human phenomenon directly proportional to desire: in my case with the check, a desire to have done the safe thing; in my case with lost love...to have not.  Put another way, to have had the fantasies running in my head alongside the telephone repartee be as real as an iPhone.  When desire is that great, one is apt not to know, or much care, at what speed the train is traveling.  The speed feels slightly manic when desire is undifferentiatable from reality, and manic is always more fun...until, as can only happen in the human mind (so far as we know at present) the train gets headed back into itself and reality crashes into the cherished desire.  This is the moment of truth: those of us who are blessed with mere neuroses begin to understand what's what, undergo the agonizing grief of giving up what we thought was real, and begin to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives.  All of which I am going to do right now...beginning with a good long cry, I think.