I remember a loved one telling me to go to hell and meaning it. It was like my backbone turned to dust in an instant. I wanted to hole up in the furthest corner of the house. I wanted to bolt, but it was not within my power to leave. I didn’t sleep that night. A part of me went to hell. If it had been a one-off, I’d have asked them what on earth was up, told them to cool their jets, or that they should not speak to me like that, that our relationship matters. But it was an accumulated go to hell. It wouldn’t be the last one, and it wasn’t the first. They never said they were sorry, never excused their utter rejection of me. I cannot remember what I did or said that provoked them. I stand before the memory of the scene, inhabiting who I was, hearing the words, feeling a dark acid laying heavy in my chest, then being a pile of dust in the corner.

I once let loose my own anger in a car with two siblings who were goading me. I was driving. I wondered if they feared for their lives.

But here I sit, years later. Whole. Resourceful. Not in hell at all. Since I can heal myself, let’s look at anger.

It seeks an anatomy to rise up into.

A viscerality to stir.

A voice to scream through.

A target to scream at.

A geography to alter, perhaps forever, perhaps for the better, or not. Look—there’s the island we inhabited before. Now the shoreline has changed. The mountain has sunken into the valley. The river has dried up here where we used to fish, and flooded the meadow there where we used to saunter.

Certainly, anger is about the other person. Any therapist would quickly say it. But once it plays out, it’s about both people. They are forever linked by that scene. Just as having sex links people, so does having vitriol. And so does receiving kindness. We don’t forget kindness, nor anger. (Nor sex, a topic for another essay.)

The world can be hostile, unfair. There is no guarantee of it being reliable or nourishing.* It buffets you spastically like the bumper cars at the county fair, driven by a current of its own volition. So too is anger fueled by a current of its own volition. Where do we find sustenance when anger conflagrates and burns our house down?

There is a space beside it. A Virginia Woolf room of one’s own. It’s not a place to hide. It is a reclaimed place, was always there. Whereas the world moves at a flooding pace, there in the beside, it is quiet and still.

Back at the fair, you sit behind the wheel of a bumper car. On the one hand, you could be present to the ride through mental strategy. You want to win by dodging others’ bumps, or by stopping others’ momentum.

Alongside that, or instead, you could experience it more through your body than through your mind, smelling, touching, feeling the bumps and momentum.

Hear the blaring music trapped beneath the electric track-gridded ceiling, hanging from which are a dozen bumper cars that spark from time to time. You chose one based on a gut feel. The black spongey surface underfoot acts like rubber and smells licoricey with the sweat and skid marks it absorbs a thousand times a season. The undersized steering wheel feels grimy to the touch but you grip it firmly. The pedal on the floor causes the car and your body to lurch and bump and lurch. You hit a straight-away across the floor and for a moment your hair sweeps back and you glance over your shoulder like you’re on the corniche in a convertible. This is the sensual texture of the bumper cars.

So too with anger.

Go to hell.

If I recall, it smelled like the inside of the house when the late evening breeze and early dew wafted through the screen door. Earthy dampness hung in the air. The lighting was dim. Their face was in obscurity. Their voice was flat, like a straight line, all three words on middle C cut through the late evening stillness. That was the texture of the scene. The beside zone.

The car scene. My chest was as full as a balloon. My hands gripped ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel until the tips turned white. The tires thrummed along the highway as my anger accelerated. My mouth went dry. My scream erupted. And then complete silence in the aftermath.

By experiencing these scenes through my body rather than through my pathology, my inner child, my sense of justice, my need to be loved; by experiencing them in the beside, anger’s vitriol has less power.

It’s another way of experiencing. Available but unpracticed.

There’s something there.

*I learned about besideness by reading Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003.