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Blind

A poem about being a know-it-all.

Notice by Heather Lewis

It's funny how people find comfort and familiarity in reading what is often touted as the "most disturbing book ever written." Whether or not it really deserves that title, I'm not sure. Truth is, I'm only half way through the book myself, but it's gripped me in a way, sucked me in through the main character's incoherent and meandering way of navigating her emotional landscape. It's often not a pleasant read. Why, then? What is it about me that draws me to such a miserable, bleak story? What's so enthralling about literal trauma porn?

Perhaps, if you're anything like me, you've preferred unhappy endings since you could remember. In elementary and middler school, I hardly read the assigned books because, unconsciously then, I was frustrated with how sugar coated and sanitized they often were. I needed the pain, sex, suffering, and romance to be more intense, more true to life as I'd known it.

But life was cruel to me. It'd tossed me unmercilessly throughout my adolescence, and, having grown used to the dramatic ups and downs, the difficultly and the pain, I would in my adult life attempt to manufacture an outer world that matched the deep, darkness that existed within me. In my self hatred and nihilism, I would seek out thrills much the way our narrator in Notice did.

I was hyper-sexual, a term introduced to me by my first therapist at eighteen, when I went to rehab, and deeply masochistic, and I'd often find myself in situations wondering if I'd walk away alive. One night stands met on seedy parts of the internet; my offering myself up on a platter, they would salivate and threaten me with all I'd begged for. More than once, a partner claimed to have a knife, claimed he would stab me. It didn't happened, but it's moments like that that open your eyes to how vulnerable you really are.

Anyway, the narrator in Notice navigates all of this with a detachment. She does everything she can to not notice, to distract herself, for whatever is happening within her. Some force unnamed and unknown to the reader has compelled her into sex work, has entangled her with a murderer and his wife, who was complicit in the rape and slaying of their own daughter, has lead her to yearn for pain and suffering, has caused her to avert her eyes in moments that could yield an intimate glance. Her tone throughout the text is not one of anger or fear, it's one born out of dissociation. In one moment, she stares into the distance at an illuminated pool through the window as the murderer violently rapes his wife Ingrid. Later, after he's left and Ingrid muses about draining the pool, our narrator wonders what she'll have to look at when it inevitably happens again.

She is not trapped, though. She is a prostitute hired for the weekend, not their daughter, and has stayed beyond the expectation. Why does she stay? I believe the reasons for her staying and the enjoying of this book are rooted from the same thing. Whatever it is, the narrator has failed to articulate and the reader must deduce what it is through her cloudy and indirect recollections. It's likely much easier to understand if you have some basis of what that feels like in the real world, and perhaps that's why this book is so polarizing. Perhaps, to the people who enjoy it, it's validating at the least and perversely comforting at its best. Because if you've ever struggled to put words to your feelings, ones that felt like a death sentence, ever struggled to understand how or why you've done something abhorrent to yourself, the narrator's inexact way of relating the story speaks so clearly.