Spillover

The first frame is a new draft of my entry for this week's Single Frame Stories challenge. I was pretty happy with the original. But the female character in the story apparently wasn't. I was minding my own business last night, trying to enjoy a live show I'd been looking forward to for a couple months. But she kept grabbing my attention. Again and again. Until I transcribed a new ending at the intermission. Then this morning, I realized that the text in the first frame was way over the 140 character limit. So I made a new cut, which ended up exposing more of the male character's own frantic frustration.

I never saw my parents fight when I was growing up. They intentionally hid all of their conflicts from my siblings and me. The good result was that I acquired no lurking childhood trauma related to emotional violence. The bad news was that I was initially unequipped to handle interactions with significant others when they expressed strong anger. I figured things out eventually. But it took a long time and some good counseling.

This comic is a pretty fair depiction of what this type of interaction feels like to me. Intellectually I know such tempests in tea cups aren't big deals. People get stressed, are inflamed to anger by some real or imagined issue and then calm back down in short while. Intervention, even well meaning, can often inflame rather than quench the fire. Fortunately,  my relationship is to the point where this kind of thing doesn't happen very often. But I have a fourteen year old daughter. And man. She can be fucking wrathful!