stove still hot
on a metaphor I can't stop turning over in my head
Several months ago, I told my psychiatrist I was thinking about talking to my ex again and he said “I can’t stop you from touching the stove, but the stove will still be hot.”
I tell people I’m not allowed to be near hot glue guns and they always ask me why. This is a story I like to tell about myself: in the seventh grade, I took an arts and crafts class and burned my finger on the hot glue three times. After the second time, my friend told me to stop using the hot glue. After the third, she took the hot glue gun away from me. When I tell this story, people ask me why I kept touching the glue even after my finger blistered.
“I don’t know,” I tell them, “I guess I wanted to see if it had cooled down.”
Let’s go back to the psychiatrist story. I don’t remember much else because I spent the rest of that session bouncing the hot stove metaphor around in my head; it felt like a marble in my mouth that I kept moving back and forth with my tongue. The stove’s still hot, but I’m freezing. The stove’s still hot, but maybe I am the stove. The stove’s still hot, but maybe there’s something in there about gasoline or hot glue or ash and dust - or maybe I need to stop turning every facet of my life into a metaphor.
The session ended, we said goodbye, I went home. The session ended, we said goodbye, I went home and touched the stove and the stove was cold.
“The stove’s cold,” I wrote in an email to my psychiatrist, “or maybe I was the stove.”
“Good to know the stove’s cold,” he wrote back “and based on our sessions, I don’t think we can conclude you exclusively were the stove.”
That was the last time I spoke to that psychiatrist (my insurance expired). Is now a good time to say I was lying about wanting to see if the hot glue had cooled?
I accidentally walked by the last place I saw you a few days ago. I say you and not him because the exact thought that brushed my head as I walked by was “this is the last place I saw you”, emphasis on the you. I think the reflex I developed where you’d be the first person I texted was still there. Like a ghost, I found myself turning to the empty space, wanting to ask if it remembered, too.
When the breakup was still fresh and the stove still burning, the empty space felt less like a hole and more like a ghost. I found myself typing out long messages and deleting them (not that I could send them either way, you had changed your number). Everything reminded me of you in those days; I could see anything and suddenly there’d be another three paragraphs in my notes app.
Walking by the last place I saw you was different. I hadn’t really thought about you in months, but seeing it again snapped me back a year in time. I thought about the hot glue gun again, how the fifth time I touched the glue it was finally cold. I thought about how once it went cold, I touched the gun instead.
I made a personal note not to walk down that street again.
Everything feels two-faced these days - I can’t tell if I’ve inherited the eating disorder my mother had when she was my age or if I’ve finally started caring enough about my body to not let it rot.
I spent four years fighting the future my parents paved for me only to blindly stumble onto the same path anyway. I spent four years fighting my mom over my body only to hand it back over to her. My father tells me he is proud of me and my mother tells me that she just wants me to be healthy. Everyone is kinder to me these days and I resent the fact that it doesn’t make me feel any warmer.
I left the house that was a stove and when I returned, the stove was cold. I left the man that was a stove and when I returned, the stove was cold. I re-read the email over and over again: “I don’t think we can conclude you exclusively were the stove”, but logic tells me I was at least the gasoline.
My friend has this theory that maybe I’ve changed and I can’t see it. That maybe everyone seems kinder to me because I’ve stopped fighting. That maybe I seem kinder to everyone because I am kinder. I resent the kindness that makes the heat bearable for the world around me. I resent the kindness that seems insistent on eating me alive. And I resent that it is so hard for me to be kind.
The stove remains hot to a sensitive hand even after the flames have extinguished. Eventually, you get so used to the fire you forget to scream. Eventually, people forget the stove is hot because the fire alarm no longer sounds. Eventually, there is no more metaphor.
This post has an additional On Writing.
this was wonderful. I've used the stove metaphor in fiction about exes reconnecting, and now that I've read this, I can't help but see: yep! definitely resonates in my personal life again. currently back with the stove that my family tell me has cooled down, and perhaps was never hot. good thing my friends can see the burns! wow this comment got maybe out of hand, which is my way of saying hey this was inspiring! and made me feel so seen. I raise my virtual glass to you x
Wait so the stove is always hot, you just become numb to the heat?😭😭 Everytime I read one of your posts it makes me want to have a workshop where I just tell you everything I love about them.
This is so…beautiful isn’t even the word. Your use of metaphor and perspective is mesmerizing, and this is coming from the girl who has read and critiqued A LOT of creative memoir. So excited to read more!