When I was a little girl, I had a rag dollI found this song on a Tina Turner greatest hits-type CD, and I love it. It has what my limited musical vocabulary describes as a boogie beat, a lotta horns, just a good song. It talks about the depth and breadth of love for another human being in real and human terms; expressive without being fancy. Very down to earth.
Only doll I've ever owned
Now I love you just the way I loved that rag doll
Only now my love has grown
It gets stronger in every way
It gets deeper, let me say
It gets higher day by day
Do I love you my, oh, my?
River deep, mountain high, yeah, yeah
If I lost you would I cry?
Oh, how I love you baby, baby, baby, baby
I played it for my wife, and she didn't get it. She didn't like the style of music, didn't understand Tina's lyrics due to her screeching (some might say, wrenching wail, in a good way) style. The whole thing left her cold. When you're trying to express to someone how you feel about them in another medium, the blunt force trauma of the dearth of connection there is chilling indeed.
Why is it so hard to make these connections? Why is the chill of rejection, even minor or imagined rejection on such a small scale, so bitterly cold? I used to think I was immune to the pain of social isolation, and maybe I was. But if I was numb or emotionally armored for years, that desensitivity has vanished, that armor has turned brittle and flaked away.
The kicker, the proof in this pudding, was my trip to Paris, France this past spring (yet another eye-opening revelation from a trip to Paris, this one not necessarily as welcome as the last). I was so horribly lonely, desperate for human contact of a sort that I could not achieve; what anguish. Now that I'm back, I can't deny that the sensation persists, if much less acutely.
I think I was happier with my social blinders in place; this new sensation is anything but pleasant. It's like an ache in the bones before the coming rain; I'd much rather just depend on the weather report, and leave the discomfiting forecast out of it. Apparently I have no choice in the matter.
Just as hunger is an excellent motivator, maybe this gut-borne longing will propel me to do or find or go to or be something useful or valuable. I hope so. My friend Joe believes in an ultimate sense to be made of these types of things, a cosmic logic; I hope he's right. 'Cuz this malaise is just a nagging misery at this point, and I'd just as soon be rid of it.
