It is pride month, and I am dating a woman. I have no idea how to feel about it. I have no attachment or identity to being queer, it still feels funny in my mouth, and I find myself wondering what I am supposed to act like in my first relationship with a woman.
There is a tremendous undercurrent of change in my body. The first couple weeks of dating each other I was exhausted. Pushing the boundaries of my mind, of the identity I had constructed for myself as a straight woman. My attraction to her was undeniable but SCARY. Sometimes scary exciting, but sometimes scary-scary. There was little to no inkling of this ever being something I would do, or could do. I have always thought-fantasized-dreamed-invested in-and dated, men. And me, the self-aware! Me, the my-mom-tivos-the-L-word-but-I-don’t-watch it. Me, the therapy twice a week and surrounded by queer people and their various stories of coming out! How could I not know?
What I can say is that in the years since processing being raped, I realized what I needed in a partner was dramatically different than what I had wanted before. I realized today, in therapy, that in some ways the image of the man I dated for so long was somewhat similar to the man who raped me in high school. Well-liked, golden, popular. Ease in groups. I was bullied a lot growing up, teased, insulted. I figured out how to make friends but it was hard, especially as an only child. I was always watching from the outside. In some ways, I still am.
And my three year relationship was with a man who was adored, easily, willingly. I am enthralled by the well-liked. Certainly after being socially castrated after the rape, after I was the one who “betrayed” my best friend after sleeping with her older brother. Of course, no one knew I had been raped. And I didn’t either.
In this very moment I realize a common thread here. Are the narratives of my own story so well-woven, so cemented in sharpie, that I can’t look outside the lines? I didn’t know I was raped. I didn’t know I could fall in love with a woman.
Falling, certainly. This relationship is miles different than anything I have ever had. Sometimes it is so slow I can’t believe two humans can be so patient. And sometimes I feel like I’ve fallen in love with her in the course of fifteen minutes. And there are times I am screaming at discomfort, that all of this is so new and so overwhelming, and in other moments this could not be more simple, so un-complex, so absolutely normal.
But I am sorrowful, too. I am deeply sad for a layer of myself that has peeled. This conscious discovery of how I have made myself for men. How I now see the tolls these games have taken on me. The mannequin I have, at times, made of my body. The jokes, and the flirtations, and the misandry that I did not know was there until I began dating someone I simply could not fathom being mean to.
What’s more is that there are scars picked fresh again. The harrowing judgement of my classmates, the intense dislike of my character that I internalized as true, the soul I wasn’t allowed to know I had. And now? Someone loving me? Wholly? It hurts. It hurts to know that there is a part of me that truly has run from love. That poured more gas into the flames. It is foreign to me, this love. I run from it and then breathe, remember my soul, remember how deserving I am and how very hard I have worked to unfurl from this pretzel of pain. I am standing tall, heart facing outward. I am steady on my feet, and so is she, and she’ll make sure I stay that way.
I had a run-in with my ex-boyfriend yesterday and left shaking. My adult self is so aware of the trappings of toxicity that exist in his skin, in our permanent exchange, both past and present, with each other. Our relationship is so wounded, so irreparable, we are a nasty poison for each other. I left so quickly.
What I have now is stability in a deep, rooted sense. So deep that the child in me yanks at the hand that holds mine so tenderly. Testing. Will she stay so steady? Can I really show her who I am without her losing her step? So far, she is steadiness personified. It is wild.
I am slowly getting rid of all of my past relationship’s posessions. Cards, and photos, and books, and clothes. It is so very painful. It is so very necessary. Growing up is bone-achingly beautiful.
1. everything you know about love isn’t true.
2. keep writing poems in your math notebook. someday people will eat your words right off the plate and lick the scraps. but also, do your math homework, because apparently discipline is a cool thing you can spill your dreams into.
3. you don’t have to lick anyone’s dick “like an ice cream cone.”
4. I’m sorry for what’s coming.
5. when they begin to tell you your blood is made from sin and your fingers tarnished in charcoal betrayal, crawl deeper into your mother’s arms.
6. beat your chest like fury, shove your budding womanhood into their lockers, smear your skin with the smell of their ignorance so they have no choice but to breathe their own unfairness. prove them all fucking wrong.
7. you can stop telling yourself you wanted to have sex with him.
8. when the gynecologist blinks at you with pity in her eyelashes, tell her how dare she, tell her she’s the reason people can’t get up in the morning, ask her if she ever was a girl with collarbones sprinkled with moondust and didn’t she ever make the mistake of searching for answers in a boy?
9. when you dare to look at your vagina in the bathtub, please don’t make it into a house of shame.
10. you didn’t want to have sex with him.
11. someone will love you.
12. a couple someone’s.
13. when you go to that dinner with Grammy, please hold her hand a little longer. you won’t always get to do that.
14. the walls of your high school are crushing you, your classmates are hiding their own monsters inside your gentle mistakes, your teachers cannot grade the ancient waterfalls washing your ribcage, you are a poet and a prophet and words like entire galaxies live in between your molars.
15. start flossing.
a year ago today I chose three pictures of us that I liked, and I began writing the words I’d send to you to celebrate our three years together. I didn’t go out that night. I wrote an email to my grandmother I’d later read aloud at her funeral.
I went to bed that night knowing I’d begun to let go, and I didn’t know what that meant but it was the first time I’d cried in that lonely apartment and it hadn’t felt like searching. I fell asleep knowing you would cheat on me. I woke up and it was true.
When you fall in love with a man who doesn’t love himself you will bare the weight of his self worth. You will mistake it for your own.
I still love him like a second skin. I still pray he takes a knife to his puzzle pieces, shaves and shapes them so they finally fit with all of mine. I am not so naive in thinking this is how love works. I am naive enough to still wash my hands in hope.
I wonder if I wrote it all down so that he’d finally feel like he couldn’t forgive me for something. I wonder if I did this to save myself. I wonder if you can make a life out of charred promises, bloody words in Instagram captions, and broken picture frames.
When your love is two parts six hour dinners and laughing until your cheeks hurt, and three parts infidelity, and four parts roots from a different species of tree, and one part a woman who can’t stand to be taken for granted anymore, do you bother turning the stove on? Do you cook a meal that is meant to last the rest of your life, or do you order the second best option and pray to God your tastebuds change?
Come now, sweet lovely girl, is it all for nothing?
What a risk, it may be, to dig up the past. Solid dirt isn’t worthy of a second look, but the stuff beneath, the deliciousness of fresh findings, how doused with worth it is. The dark and the wet and the sprigs of life not yet ready to emerge, but willing, but wanting, unafraid of the world above because life does not ache until you find yourself missing it. The beginning has all the glory and none of the hurt. And so, we begin with it.
(Source: lifeinpoetry, via alonesomes)
I can be feminine in all my rage.
I can be girl and woman, and claws with teeth.
Watch me burn.
To the boy who I sent a photo of the menstrual cup I was buying on amazon: when you first replied and said “I’ve heard of those!!!” I grinned. How sweet, to exclaim in recognition. And then, “grosssss.” My stomach lurched.
How can this be possible? How can the graphic designer with long hair and an art school degree still be so backwards as to think he knows what’s best for my vagina?
It’s a cup. That goes up my vagina. That collects the blood that my body releases every month I decide to keep my independence for myself.
What is gross about it, exactly? Would you prefer I stick no rounded objects up there? Should it just remain empty, then? No cups, tampons, fingers, tongues, penises? Shall I sew it shut? Get rid of it altogether?
In replace of the cup, and the tampon, since you’ve since enlightened me with your cavalier “I didn’t say those weren’t gross too,” what would you suggest?
Shall I bleed through my underwear, my shorts, down the very long legs you have so greatly complimented? Shall I paint with red marker up and down these very clean streets of New York?
Is my blood dirty? Is the freshness my heart pumps only acceptable inside, and tarnished when out? Or is it that it comes from my vagina, my dark center, my unknown that you crave and condemn, all at once?
What else should I keep inside? My anger, my power, my ferocity, my spirit, my joy?
Tell me what makes you cringe, boy, when there are black boys being murdered and blueprints being drawn for walls meant to keep out a different colored flood?
Tell me you’re scared of a little magenta-hypo-allergenic-squishy-little-cup-that- goes inside my vagina - to collect the blood - that your mother also bled - every time she wasn’t ready - to protect you.
Tell your little sister you think it’s gross. Tell the woman in your bed, breasts swollen and body blooming, that you won’t go near her and her little squishy cup. Because it’s gross. Because she’s gross. Because the reason you are even on this planet is a five letter word you learned when you pushed away your broccoli.
A year ago I called you on Nancy’s house phone. I was up, a moment of up, fleeting although it felt otherwise, and I called. We were dabbing the rips with glue and securing paper clips round the frayed edges. It was coming apart and I heard it in your voice, you were letting me go. I clung. I wrapped myself around your ankles and the pit in my belly weighed enough to keep you there. I can’t believe we sat for hours on my floor and fed our lack of clarity with sobbing. What were we crying about? I know and I don’t know, just like I did then. I knew it was the end but couldn’t find words for that. I know it was the end but I can’t find words for that.
I sit down to write lists of why we were golden and why we weren’t. It’s so overwhelming that I fall asleep. I stare at them in the morning and they don’t mean anything at all.
When I write the story of how we come back together I have the speech planned out. “I had to let him go, firmly, had to tune my life to a different vibrancy, paint with indecipherable shades, speak a language he has never heard, where the ground is made from foreign pebbles and struck by lightning from a heaven separate then the one he learned to pray to.”
The speech can exist without needing to be spoken. These are the things I have done to excavate your head from my shoulder. These are the precautions I have taken to prove to myself that I am strong.
They say it takes half the time of your relationship to get over someone. We are nearing ten months. I’ll have to do eight more to graduate from breakup school. I’m hoping I have enough extra credit to do the ceremony early. Should I get my hair done? Is it you who gives me my diploma or is it the next love of my life? Maybe I’ll flunk out.
Growing up is this weird place where I don’t call you demanding that you tell me if anyone’s body has felt as holy as mine. Growing up is reminding myself you took me for granted instead of fantasizing about sharing your sandwich. Growing up is listening to the voice that says “you might not ever love anyone again” and telling it to shut the fuck up and drown itself in the ocean. Just kidding. It’s giving myself a goddamn hug and saying, “don’t rush the beauty.”
If I could change one thing
I’d take mud and twigs and sunshine and cement and my mother’s promises and your mother’s promises and mold them into the space your father made when he left you.
I’d seal the cracks along your ribs with ribbons of porcelain and bits of stucco from the houses your tiny hands brushed against as you ran, a gleeful barefooted boy, small enough for Greece to hold you still, big enough to know betrayal was slinking around your corner.
I’d melt the parts of you that couldn’t let me in into syrupy silver tendrils, weave them into a basket meant for holding.
I’d whisper to your shadow all the things the light hadn’t been able to show you, and draw you maps that lead to forgiveness across your forearms.
If I could change one thing, I’d save you from yourself.
But since I cannot.
I’ll save myself.
And so I’ll change every insult you’ve ever hurled at my forehead into moth’s wings, every hammer to my spine thinking I’d begin to bend for you into violin’s bow, stir all the disappointment into milky tea with honey, all the questions you had for your universe blaring like a teenager’s bursting eardrum into soft cotton and fresh strawberries.
I’d change the wrongful tears into rightful anger. I’d change the other women into fields of poppies. I’d wrangle the fear in my heart into bulls stampeding. I’d forgive myself for loving a boy whose earth spun in the opposite direction of mine.
Aristotelis, in the end it’s always you. In the end it is you in a linen shirt and no shoes on, grinning as I walk toward you, wrapped inside of angels. In the end our children are olives without the pits, naked and ferocious, with fingertips like poetry.
In the end, it is you. If I could change it to my end, I would. If I could promise that my middle chapter took spoonfuls out of yours, I would.
If I meet you again on the pages of our cracked spines, I will not attempt forgiveness. If I meet you again in the ruins of your father’s restaurant in Greece, I will not make myself small for you.
If I meet you again, if I meet you again, if I meet you again, it will be because I could not change one thing, but I will be hoping that you could.
Last night in the kitchen Nancy says, “I have a feeling you’ll fall in love before you leave.” I grin and reply, “God I hope so.”
Last year I walked in the kitchen and Nancy said “I have a feeling you’re falling out of love.” I crumbled right into my cereal.
Letting go of what doesn’t serve us. It’s earth shattering. It’s gut wrenching. It’s a kind of dry-heaving you do curled up on the floor, mouth crystallized in a permanent “why?” But necessary. It’s that, too.
My friend Stacy was sick for a long time. She began to heal with food and in a matter of days she was out of bed, after seventeen years, and her life began for a second time. She left her husband soon after.
Letting you go made the basin of my stomach into a blender, into rusty coins, into a darkness that caved into itself over and over and over.
A year ago my brain wasn’t my own. I sat on a bench outside the Edgartown bookstore and forced myself to read a book of poetry too profound for my fragile state. The poems ripped at me, they stung with a venom that made me cry right out in the open, in vacation dreamland, and no amount of ice cream cones or self baptisms in that big blue endlessness could make it go away.
My depression told me I had to go live in a cave like the Buddha. That I had to leave the life I loved and force myself into an unwanted enlightenment. That I’d have to be silent. That I should get rid of my identity. Surgically remove my ego. I read pages of books that told of white men and women from big cities leaving for India and never returning. Devoting life to gurus and to quiet. But everything inside me was screaming. I binged entire chapters, gluttony as a garnish for my guilt. And then the purge would come, heaving crying and panic, and panic, and nothing at all to comfort me in a vast world of disappointment.
My depression left me alone in a one bedroom apartment on the upper west side, my body in a constant state of trauma, my toxic brain the loudest thing in those rooms. I painted the walls with that misery. Everything felt like fear. Death looming, my grandmother dying, caves in India, and no energy left to assume my role as fighter in the relationship.
Exhausted, wrapped up on my parents couch, still entirely unsafe in my own mind, I accepted that we would not make it through. I understood that I was too tired to fight and that you would not, as you never really had, as you were never very good to me when I wasn’t there to remind you that I hung your smile across my sky.
When I am depressed my spirit cannot speak with me. Our intercom breaks and she can’t scream loud enough over fear’s whispering. My spirit has since told me she wonders if we would have made it had she been able to climb back into my ear. I tell her, firmly, that it doesn’t matter. That we need to find someone who loves us even when the intercom is broken. That knows that part of the package, part of the mirror to the resounding resilience that is my nature, is a darkness I didn’t ask for but sometimes have to answer to. The thing I know but that is impossible to remember when I am depressed is that the universe functions on a scale. And it swings at a peaceful rhythm. The good doesn’t outweigh the bad. The bad isn’t quite as heavy as we think. Balance. It’s the root of the root and the bud of the bud (that’s what you meant, didn’t you, poet man?)
My friend Stacy tried every medicine known to western man for seventeen years. But her healing came instead through the natural stuff. This was a mirror she had not looked in.
I tried everything before the medicine. Yoga, food, sleep, therapy, my mom, my dad, my friends, my dogs, perseverance, pot, apathy. It was a different mirror I’ve had to look in.
There’s a way to write this story where I weave together the depression and leaving you. But I can’t quite do it all the way. I found the pieces in the same box, but they are part of two different puzzles. All I know is that when clarity came, the decision made itself. All I know is that the medicine fooled me into believing love didn’t have to feel like a punishment.
Other days I walk into the kitchen and Nancy says “You’re incredible. The beauty, yes. But the wisdom! I can’t believe it.”
I like to think she is saying “I have a feeling you are falling in love with yourself.”
I am part of an incredible storytelling group in Williamsburg called The Collective Sex, and this is the first story I shared. On heartbreak, redemption, and vacuum cleaners.
boys from California make me weak in the knees. something about sunshine makes them lighter, somehow there’s always salt in their hair, sand stuck to their feet.
winters made me sickly pale and out of my mind with loneliness, sucked the life out of me and made my feet raw with cold. I was itching for sunlight and you had so much extra that it spilled from your pockets. can you imagine, being so nonchalant with something as precious as the sun?
I could kill for sandy feet. I’d bend over backwards for a sandwich on the beach and the ocean in my hair. That’s what you tasted like. The way your skin tanned like an afterthought, after years of my desperate bear-trap attempt to shed my winter skin when the sun came out. like some sort of mechanized alarm, summer makes me panic and my mind exhausts itself with the same order: the-best-time-of-day-to-tan-is-10-and-12-reapply-the-store-bought-tanning-oil-please-God-make-me-look-human-again.
The secret is I’d be a terrible full-time-summer-resident. I need to run a little cold, I need that chill whipping against my face to remind me that life isn’t easy, I need all those frozen months before I can thaw. I know I look good in the summer. I know I have perfect beach hair and my teeth look extra white with a tan. It’s a little more important to grasp what’s beautiful about me when you can tell just how tired I am, when I’m hibernating with an extra 3-5 pounds wrapped around my waist. You really find out who you are when you have to stay inside for three days because the snow is blockading your door.
But boys from California make me feel like summer is knocking on my door. They make me feel like a teenager, like my feet are hanging out the jeep window and their hands are snaked inside my jeans. Like I’m sneaking out of my parents house, rolling around in the grass and sharing my body for the first time, like every night is moonlit with a bonfire and too many beers, like kissing is as mandatory as breathing, like my skin is prickling from too much exposure to every element, like I’ll be young forever with a flower garland in my hair.
I love when people tell me they think I’m from California, but every boy I’ve ever held hands with know I have east coast impatience caked under my fingernails. That sometimes my heart has as many layers protecting it as the scarves and sweaters I’ve been taught never to leave the house without. That I grit my teeth and clamp down on my jaw as an excuse to keep out the cold.
I need someone who makes me melt. Someone who chips at the ice or at least makes me into a snow cone. Who doesn’t take the winter so seriously because they never had any reason to.
It’s hard to be in California without you. It’s hard to drive by your house and eat at the places we ate together and drive down the streets where we held hands in your car. It’s hard not to think of how good you were when you were back on the coast your soul screams for. There might not have been anything more beautiful than your skin in the sunshine.
It’s pretty hard to tell if I love you because you’re from California or if I love California because I love you. It’s pretty hard to remember all the reasons you broke me when all I want is to share your ice cream cone and make out in the back of your car.
This week I could feel you for the first time since we broke up. I remember what your hair looked like up close and how you talked about my body. The sense memory is so strong here and I cried for all those memories, the streaming kind of tears that mean the pebble that was stuck has been dislodged, and I felt like myself for the first time in a long time. It’s hard to realize that feeling like myself means also feeling a part of you with me, always.
This breaking up thing is pretty strange. Kind of beautiful. Mostly painful. A big teacher.
Tonight I’m grateful for all the ways our love proved to me that I could get everything I wished for, and more.
You got me blazing, fiery, fingertips dragging the dirt behind me, like smoke billowing, like a whole school of fish and the shark behind them. You will never get me casual. Not out to coffee, not on the phone at the grocery store, no voicemails on my machine, no kiss on the cheek, not 3pm mani fucking pedis. You didn’t choose friendly, you chose fire. And then you dumped a gallon of water on my flame and I looked pretty stupid sopping wet with all my clothes on. But I don’t burn for you anymore, and I most definitely will never flicker.
on monday you asked me who the writing was for. it’s for me. it’s for me, for me, for me, for me. but it’s for us, asshole. it’s so that when we’re 45, 50, 75, whatever, we remember that we loved like poison. like venom in our mucus. like eve’s apple made into pie. we were always good at sharing food. i’ll give you that much, asshole. happy friday.
one day there won’t be anything else to write. I’m not ready for that day. I’m still banging on your door, I’m still ripping your hair out, I’m still punching your stomach for texting “call me when you wake up.” You never wanted to call. You never wanted to hear my voice. See my face. Unless it was your way, unless it was in person where I could hold all your burdens in my backpack. Unless. Unless it was to tell me you touched two girls at the same time and forgot to tell me you were sorry for it.
I am going to be angry until I’m not. I am going to hate you until I don’t. I am going to miss you always, forever, I know that now. It’s not just going to disappear. My first love. My first big. My first earth shattering trust. The first good sex. My first, my first, my first. It was so imperfect. It was so heavy. I can’t write that it didn’t have to be, I can’t write that we could have done better. I can’t erase the ferry ride when we got to Greece, holding your hand after four months, after an eternity, there are no words for that. You looked perfect to me for a very long time.
I don’t know how to do this the right way, and I know, okay, there isn’t a right way but dear fucking god I loved you and I don’t know what to do with it all. Why does it come out of my pockets when I haven’t even reached in? I feel like I’ve been stuck in the air for months and months and every time I try to come back down I realize I don’t know how unless you pull me there. And I know you pulled me too low but I really miss my feet on the earth. I really miss sleeping well.
I can’t write this pretty. I can’t make this good. This is just me falling apart because I’m scared of you. This is me not actually falling apart but letting myself, for this twenty minutes, because I know it has to come out. I miss your name in my mouth. Sometimes I say it, just because.
It’s not like I go around with heartbreak duct taped to my mouth. It’s funny how much you can function, how happy you can be, how strong, how determined, how you can date someone you really like, how excited you can be about your life, and still with a thousand little rips in the “Permanent” folder of your heart. Man, you took up a lot of those pages.
I’m gonna survive this week. I always say to people “I take you as you are.” I’m gonna say that to myself.
This thing isn’t linear. I learned that when we met. You were dating someone else. There was a lot of overlap when we started to color in our story. There was a lot of red crayon that went outside the lines.
I can spill the honey. I can say I am strong and not be proving anything. I can dress like a bombshell or a bum at my own choosing, and I don’t have to warn anyone about it. I can be quiet at dinner. I can lay in bed for a whole day. I can be exactly who I am and be loved for it.
Our story is woven into my ribcage like a bony wicker basket. I don’t know how not to show it to people. ‘Look at my side,’ I think. ‘This took years to make can’t you see the details?’ 'I made this with my hands,’ I say. 'My fingers started to ache and I kept at it til they bled.’ 'Can you see it, still, even with him gone?’