Throughout the semester we have discussed multiple times how various works were familiar or unfamiliar to us, and often when they were completely foreign the conversation lacked. We tend to find comfort in the known. It is the unknown, the new, the changing times, the incoming foreigners that are frightening to our characters, but us as well. I felt safe in our texts about southern California and the drive to Arizona that I knew well, or the love for a grandmother that felt familiar. We have been searching for something in each text in order to make us feel safe and confident to discuss it. We want both feet on the ground before we open ourselves up with ideas that invite counterarguments and criticisms. However, the short story Bulletproof felt familiar in a way that left me feeling completely exposed and unsafe.
Just like Lisa, I have been at a point where all I felt was pain, isolation, and a desperate need for someone to care about me, or just know that I existed for one night. While I never went down to the street of the working girls, I understand the feelings that drove her there. I know the desperation she felt as she got into Leon’s car. I know Leon too. I understand the frustration of love being conditional. I know the desperate hopeless game of vying for love from a mother that would only give it on her terms. Hearing, “I’ll love you forever if…” insert endless chores, grades, favors, and sacrifices. I know the desire to find someone who will love you as you are, no strings attached, no matter what you do, and the constant fear that this will be what finally drives them away forever.
Reading Bulletproof was suffocating. It was everything I felt in the darkest moment of my life. For the first time this semester, I was right there in the darkness with them. I knew what that darkness looked, sounded, and felt like. I lived in that darkness for a year before I dragged myself out, with the man I was made to love as my anchor. I was excited for Leon and Lisa. I thought their story could end the way mine did, but it didn’t. The darkness claimed them in a way it could have claimed me. Therefore, this text is the most familiar to me, but the least safe. It makes me regret looking for familiarity. Maybe I should be grateful for the distance I have from some of these texts, or maybe I should embrace the darkness and see where it takes me.