After she blames those nights on a kind of amnesia, you do research while she mopes around. She feels bad, so bad, she says. There is remorse there, true remorse, and yet sometimes you catch her composing her face into sadness. You google memory loss, sudden onsets of rage and violence. The internet gives you nothing, except one article about how it has been shown that heavy marijuana use ca,;,, theoretically, trigger an onset of schizophre-nia, if one were already genetically prone to it. This is terrifying; you feel deeply for her. You try to p~sent your various theories, but she scoffs at all of them. She hasn't been smoking much pot, she say;s. She doesn't have schiwphrenia. She says it with such disdain you begin to wonder if you'd exaggerated the events of that trip, whether perhaps you are remembering them wrong.
I think this is really interesting because a lot of the times you'll hear people talk about being so angry that "I snapped and then all I saw was red" or about someone flying into a "blind rage". These statements make it sound as if anger is something uncontrollable. The reaction itself is uncontrollable, but the action one takes is. I found it sad that her partner used this excuse to justify the abuse. I also found it sad that Machado feels bad for HER. Her partner manipulated her into thinking that there was some deeper unknown reason for her abuse and anger when in reality she was just a terrible person with anger issues.