Navato, CA – “Misophonia” – Navato Arts and Wine Festival, June 15, 2000

It’s a beautiful sunny day and I’m finishing the last sweet sips of a perfectly doctored cocoa/coffee. I’m taking time to write you from the back seat of Moby as she climbs North, up the I-5 from California to Oregon. Somewhere near the last gas stop, Soucy found a farm stand where he managed to porcure the largest carrots any of us have ever seen.

The boys gladly accepted Soucy’s orange offering and now their crunching is triggering my misophonia.* I want to strangle them. I’m embarrassed about my unreasonable reaction to their mastication, so as I write, I covertly slip in a pair of earplugs and hum a happy tune to mask my overwhelming desire to kill them all. What makes matters worse is Delluchi’s rotten molar. It catches shrapnel from his meals like a baseball mitt. He’s had the hole in his tooth as long as I’ve known him. It doesn’t seem to bother him save, after every meal he’s obligated to spend 15-minutes forcing saliva through his cavity to suck out impacted detritus.

As an embarrassed misophonian (not sure this is an actual word) and someone who also loves her band, I’ve had to pretend the sound doesn’t bother me enough to want to scream into a pillow while digging my nails into my eyeballs. I think I’m pretty good at masking my outrage most of the time, but I’m always worried that someday I’ll just lose myself on him while he’s doing something innocuous like eating pretzels and never find myself again. Anyone with this disorder will tell you how both excruciating and embarrassing it is. Ear plugs only do so much but I thank god every day they exist. Ahhh… it’s quiet again. the carrot symphony has abated. The earplugs come out.

The days off in the Bay Area were a welcome repreive after I made the mistake of accepting Sam’s apology.

We’d played a show in Navato at an arts festival where the sun shone down hard and relentlessly and little white fairy seeds floated through the air and got stuck in our hair and instruments. After the show, I got my face painted. The artist put a perfect yellow star on my cheek and dotted it with gold dust. We sat in the sun drinking wine, eating cheese cake and watching children race each other through the grass — toward rides and cotton candy and popcorn, toward first kisses, toward heartaches, toward adulthood and old age.

Sam was at the show. He’d painted a portrate I thought was beautiful but looked nothing like me. I should have known then that I wasn’t the girl in his picture but I needed to understand why he’d been so willing to lose me in the first place and he wanted to make things right (or so he said) so I nively let him drive me up to wine country.

Girl In The Picture

You keep on saying I love you
I do not
And just like a daisy chain
I’m tied up in “Why nots?”
You’re vagueness discloses
Who you refuse to be

You dance me in circles
You dip me to the ground
You give me your silence
All covered up in sound
You may ask yourself
Why I’m still waiting around for you when

I’m still
Not the girl
In the picture

I’m in your bed and
I’m on your shelf and
You’re lieing about seeing
Somebody some where else
You say that you miss me
What you’re really missin’
Is yourself

In a cabin in Sonoma Sam seduced me, then proceeded to treat me worse than before. He was wretched and crule and in the morning when he woke to find me prematurely packing my bags he asked, “Penny for your thoughts?”

Me: “They cost more than that.”
Sam: “Two pennies then.”
Me: “I’m thinking I need to tell you I’m done.” I looked him square in the eye with so much clarity it pierced his ego.
Sam: “With what?”
Me: “With this. With our relationship.”
Sam: “You’re joking.”
Me: “No, actually, I’m not. I’m 26. I’m funny and fun to hang out with and I deserve to be with someone who treats me better. I deserve more.”

There was a moment’s pause that seemed to last an hour. In it, I recalled our first morning together — the light had poured like warm milk through his billowing cotton curtains. I could hear the filtered bird songs of and early California spring. I relived the moment I fell in love with him. It was like riding a wave — the curtains filled in slow motion to match my breathing. Sam opened his eyes and stared into mine. The sun lit up the room and my heart let go of the ledge. I fell and fell and fell and fell and fell and fell backward…. into the highest part of the sky.

Now out of the corner of my eye, as I packed, Sam looked crude –like a line drawing of himself, like something surface thin you’d apply from a squeeze bottle. I was angry less at him than at myself — that I’d placed a piece of my home into him only to discover the key didn’t work and I’d been evicted.

Me: “I think you should take me back to the boys.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were packed and in the car headed back to San Francisco. Rows of grape vines wound their arms toward an open sky and outward toward the sharp edges of the horizon. smoke billowed from wood-burning fires.

The boys helped me back into Moby’s emrace. They comforted me and cursed Sam’s stupidity. I dried tear ducts that had only just healed over. I think I left my shoe in his car. How very Cinderella of me. But if it’s not there, it’s lost forever in the parking lot of The Casbah in San Diego or in some hotel room in Oklahoma.

I feel like a bottlecap in a basket of broken hearts. He’s probably breaking someone else’s heart now. Maybe it’s his own. I want to call him. I want to hate him. But maybe I’ll just forget him, in time.

---

Footnote:

*Misophonia is a disorder in which certain sounds trigger emotional or physiological responses that some might perceive as unreasonable given the circumstances. Those who have misophonia might describe it as when a sound “drives you crazy.” Their reactions can range from anger and annoyance to panic and the need to flee. _{Web MD}