Fool For Love by R. D. Cochrane

Author:R. D. Cochrane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2010-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

When I got back to my apartment there was a note on the door from Bill that I threw away without reading. (Okay, that’s totally a lie; I read it and all it said was, “I’m bringing my cell—call me, sexy” and naturally there was no way I was going to call him, especially not after the P.S. that said “Nice try with ‘Bleak House,’ punk—they reran it late last night and I’ve already watched it—so there,” so I decided to pretend I had thrown it away without reading it.) I started to watch another episode of “The Golden Girls” but it was the one in which George Bush visits Miami and I felt I didn’t need to get any angrier than I already was, so I pulled out some paper and started Googling and making diagrams. I figured the thing to do was to knit all the cortices and lobes and structures separately and then stitch them together at the end.

I would start with the amygdala, I decided, the area of the brain that controls aggression and fear. (I know things like this because I once briefly dated a neuropsychiatrist. When he dumped me he said it was obvious that I had a hyperperfused locus ceruleus so I told him it was obvious he was an asshole.) The amygdala seemed an appropriate structure on which to take out my own aggression—it’s not like I’m a moron, the metaphor was staring me right in the face—and the amygdala is also small, about the size of a walnut, so it was a less frightening first step than, say, the parietal lobe, which is huge and controls perception of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain. I looked through my yarn stash (I hate that term but that’s what they call it), and after briefly considering a gorgeous soft green alpaca, went with a cheap purple polyester, as I suspected it was more appropriate for an ex-gay. I started knitting according to the diagram I had drawn up, yanking the yarn hard as I went. That fucker. Right with God, my ass. I yanked the yarn so hard, in fact, that my stitches were much tighter than usual and I ended up with an amygdala the size of a grape, which wouldn’t do at all, so I had to rip out all the stitches and start over.

Then I got some sparkly red yarn and moved on to the cingulate gyrus, the strip on top of the brain in the middle that governs error detection. There were so many errors here I didn’t know where to begin to detect them. For a while I focused on Bill’s error in going to this stupid conference, and then as I knit, I moved on to his other errors, like not liking Bette and believing in God in the first place. Then it occurred to me that maybe the error was mine, in dating him for ten months. I mean, he hadn’t come out until three years ago, and if that hadn’t set off warning bells in my mind then it was my own damn fault.

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