I don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
I've been meaning to ask myself
I’m starting a new interview series called I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You where I invite people to answer questions about being human.
But I’m not going to ask others these questions without first doing the interview myself, so here are my answers.
While I’ve got my guests lined up and can’t take interview requests, I do have a fundraising draw below that you can enter for a chance to win a one-year paid subscription to Send My Love to Anyone plus an invitation to participate in the interview series.
I’ve been meaning to ask myself …
What is your first memory of existing?
My first memory of being a person was at the age of two where I found myself buckled in a black rubber portable car seat and placed in our tiny back porch screaming my head off. I was wearing a white shirt and blue pants. This is probably the most vivid memory I have. I remember that back porch smelled like earth and mold and the spongy texture of the rubber on the car seat. I remember feeling hot and itchy. I remember salty snot running down nose and into my mouth.
A few minutes earlier, my mother said, “I’ll be right back” but then she wasn’t.
I remember feeling trapped and panicked and abandoned.
My parents hadn’t quite abandoned me though; they were just a few meters away in the backyard taking photos with my sister and my grandparents. But I could hear them outside which was all the more frustrating. They were so close and didn’t appear to hear me screaming. It felt like one of those nightmares where you scream and nothing comes out.
My father had graduated from teacher’s college that day, which was the cause for celebration, and I guess removing me from the car seat and including me in the photos would have been too much of a hassle.
Even as a little kid when we took out the family albums, I remember being insulted that I wasn’t in the photos.
“Where was I?” I asked even though I knew very well.
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“You left me in the back porch,” I told her. “In a car seat.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“You did.”
“You’d be too young to remember that.”
Oh, I remember.
For most, this wouldn’t be the biggest deal to not be included in a family photo, but my parents rarely took photos of me as a baby or child like they did with my sister.
“Oh we didn’t have a camera,” my mother would say, but sometimes I can’t help but think that my photo exclusion had something to do with the way I looked being born with what was then called “a lazy eye.”
Perhaps that’s what makes this memory vivid and painful.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?
My first memory of writing something creative was a rhyming poem about spring. I was probably around 7 or 8. I just wrote it unprompted and drew a little picture of a bird to go along with it.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?
Mine is a recurring dream where my head is in the clutches of a large dog's jaw.
He’s just pressing his teeth into my scull, but he’s not biting down.
Yet.
What is your favourite coincidence?
Favourite isn’t the best word I’m realizing for the coincidence question. A strange and uncomfortable coincidence happened to me.
When I was in my 30s I was stalked by a man in his late 50s who was on my train commute from Toronto to London. The man claimed he taught in the Business school but I doubted it.
He started talking to me, and I quickly realized he was breaking social boundaries by standing too close, sitting in the empty seat beside me without asking, touching my arm, inviting me to his hotel room. Yes, he invited me to his hotel room.
He would approach me the minute I got to the station. I started changing my pattern of getting to the station early so I could get a good spot in line and would instead come late and get on last. I started having panic attacks about travelling and to make matters worse he had befriended all of the VIA employees on the train so I couldn’t even ask to be moved to another car.
One day my boss and few professors were sitting in the common area of the office and I mentioned that I was being stalked. I kind of made a joke about it, but my boss took it seriously and said you are being stalked, and it’s escalating.
He happened to have been to a conference where he learned about how to deal with this kind of behaviour, and he advised me to disrupt the stalking by being rude. He said the man is relying on you being nice and on social norms.
My boss said, “If he touches you, say, don’t touch me, loudly and firmly. If he asks to sit with you, say no. And when he says hello, look away.”
The thought of doing these things horrified me, but I was desperate and his advice was backed by research, so I gave it a try.
The next week, I got to the train station early and stood in line (my old habit that he had disrupted). When the man saw me, he bee-lined over and said hello. I turned my back leaving him standing there looking stupid in front of the other people in line.
And it worked. He walked away.
When we got on the train, he attempted to say hello, and I looked out the window and said nothing. Again he moved on.
The next time I got on the train, I saw a colleague of mine and asked if I could sit with him. And that seemed to be the final straw. The man never talked to me again.
*
Six months later, I was in Ottawa for a film conference. I took the train to the conference, and the the train car I was on had prearranged seating. I was sitting in the window seat and the stalker was seated in the row ahead of me in the aisle seat.
He noticed me right away and kept peering through the crack between the seats and popping his head up to look at me every so often.
He couldn’t sit still.
Because it was such a strange coincidence, I felt like I couldn’t alert the staff or even the person sitting next to me. I feared that I would sound crazy. The train was packed, and there likely wouldn’t be any free seats anyway.
About an hour into the trip, I noticed that the man had a flip cell phone with large text. He kept waving the cell phone around as if to get my attention, which it did.
Through the crack I could see the words “I love you.”
A chill ran through me, and I looked away.
Was he writing this to me? Or was he showing me that he had someone in his life that he was texting who he loved?
In any case, it was creepy.
I completely ignored him for the duration of the train ride, and I never saw him again.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?
Perferred Emotion
My favourite emotion is the feeling of being in an ideal conversation with someone who I am totally comfortable with and do not feel judged.
In an ideal conversation I do not go home and replay every single thing I said and did.
In an ideal conversation time passes so quickly and I never want the conversation to never end.
The more far ranging the ideal conversation the better.
It’s also better if we don’t agree on everything but share some core values and respect each other’s point of view.
An ideal conversation is pleasant and exhilarating.
I think there should word for it as it kind of emotion but there isn’t.
Detested Emotion
I don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
I like being in love, but the falling in love part is pretty excruciating.
It’s euphoric and then terrifying and then (can be) devastating.
Falling in love has only happened to me two times before I met my now husband 34 years ago which was the last time I fell in love.
So the being in love is pretty great, but the falling in love terrible.
Do not recommend.
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?
I feel like I am embarrassed most of the time and that being not embarrassed is the exception.
For me the dumbest thing to be embarrassed about is if I say hi the wrong way or if I think I see someone I know and it turns out to be a stranger.
These two things embarrass me most often even though they shouldn’t.
Like who cares?
But one of the most embarrassing things I can remember happened when I was teaching years ago. I had something called h-pylori (a potentially serious bacteria) which gives you a lot of gas and can make your farts smell like death.
Anyway I was teaching a three hour class when and I had to fart so badly all the way through it. It was the kind of gas where I was sweating I was in so much pain and every time I moved I feared the gas would be expelled.
Once the class left and room and was empty, I let out a bunch of very loud, very stinky farts. Like I had a condition and I’d been holding them in for three hours.
Just as I had relieved my gas, a student walked in as asked if she could talk to me. She had been waiting until the other students had left. Of course I said yes but was utterly morified as we tried to talk seriously over the stench of my very very eggy fart.
Mortifying.
Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?
I worked the night shift at a corn canning factory one summer when I was eighteen which incidentally was the subject of my first poetry book, Onion Man. I worked on a machine called a Brite stack where my job was to look at cans moving along the conveyor belt, and if they fell out of place, I would poke at them with an iron rod.
While staring that these cans one night, a poem popped into my head. I was not a writer at this time, so it was quite surprising to me and something I absolutely did not expect to happen during my shift which was normally pretty boring.
I wrote the poem out on the inside flap of my Player’s cigarette pack and then typed it up when I got home.
I don’t have the poem anymore, but it was about my grandfather who was dying of Alzheimer’s.
Typing up the poem was very satisfying, and I remember feeling good about what I had written. I didn’t write again until three years later when I went to university.
What do you cherish most about this world?
My family and friends but also large bodies of water. The ease I get when standing by the water is unlike any other feeling in the world.
What would you like to change about this world?
It feels like humanity is dust.
Maybe it never existed.
I would like there to be humanity in this world.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.
This could be advice to me at any age: You’re not doing yourself any favours by hating yourself so much.
Put your energy into something else.
Literally doing anything else including picking your nose would be a better way to spend time.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
Yes.
I once lived in an apartment with my sister. I regularly felt the presence of ghosts there.
She saw a ghost in that apartment. It was definitely haunted.
If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?
I am sending my love to the people of Palestine.
Please consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
If you donate at least $20 to the PCRF, send me a receipt by email or direct message, you’ll be entered in a draw. The winner will receive a year’s subscription to Send My Love to Anyone and be invited to do the I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You interview.
Join in the conversation!
Pick your favourite question and answer it in the comments!
I’d love to hear your stories and anecdotes!
Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.
My debut story collection, Anecdotes is available from Book*hug Press.
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Join in the conversation!
Pick your favourite question and answer it in the comments!
I’d love to hear your stories and anecdotes!
oh, how i loved these questions and answers. my first memory of existing was similarly in restraints — i was in my crib, which i soon learned to quietly escape from, first to crawl in with my parents, which my mother disapproved of, then to sleep on my sister’s floor, which eventually prompted my parents to give up the crib and get bunk beds. but at this moment i hadn’t figure out how to escape, and i was screaming, and no one was coming. i could see a darker darkness across the room, on the wall, creeping towards me. i knew it was a wolf spider, and that my sister shrieked when she saw them. that house was riddled with them and i grew terrified of them.
when my own children were little and were frightened by a wolf spider i caught one in a jar to release it outside. it struggled so hard against the glass, unable to escape, and looked so defeated. i have felt such affection for those spiders ever since.