I’m tiny. He’s huge. Amber light creeps across the rug. We lay at the shadow’s edge. Witchy Woman plays in the night. “Harder,” he commands. I obey, but only in the physical – cus’ I’ve already decided that nothing will ever touch my spirit.
My mom didn’t know what to do. I’d changed. A therapist friend suggested she buy balloons for me to pop. I set about the living room enraged, wildly strangling everything in sight. When done, I began beating two long body pillows with a fury no eight year-old should own. Then I went to bed believing I was fine… vowing never to let her know, because I’d do anything to protect the woman I loved.
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Her lips are moving, but my heart’s stopped cold. We’re panting together in the heat of southern Utah. Red sandstone cliffs rise tall above us and we’re low on water, which I find far less worrisome than her current line of questioning. I rub my brow, shaking my head in the negative. She’s a graduate student at Harvard, just a few months from graduating. “I really do like you…” I reply flatly, before assuring her that we could never work.
We’re walking. Together, but divided. Five years of bullshit and three feet of dirt separate us when she speaks. “I’m scared you’re going to die alone,” she says, plunging a knife into my greatest fear. I flinch but remain silent, desperately wishing it were over.
She’s standing in the bathroom. Curling iron in hand, asking whether I’m going to follow her to South America. I’ve never seen her angry before. The curling iron explodes against the floor. We lock eyes as she backs out of my driveway. I turn my back to her, ascending the stairs to the studio apartment we no longer share. Her coffee grinder sits on the counter glaring at me with contempt. I stare back defiantly before descending the stairs in search of something I don’t understand.
The stars are out, but it’s high noon my time. I level my weapon and dial. Her voice is shaky, but resolute. “It’s ok,” she says, like a worried mother to a lost child. “I know there’s nothing left to say.” I go quiet, the phone goes dead and I walk back to my room telling myself she never got me, knowing she loved me as much as anyone ever will.
I pull my wheels to the Unloading Zone. Fitting, I think – anxious to end a lukewarm summer with a scalding hot woman I no longer feel connected to. “Will I ever see you again?” she asks. I lie, unload her bags and return home to find two wine glasses and a note on my bed. I open it, cautiously – like a ball player certain they’re about to make an unforced error….
“There we’re moments I felt happy and high as ever, believing that I could achieve anything in the world, as there were no obstacles, only possibilities out there. And then there were moments when I felt sad, lonely, hurt, questioning what I was doing here, struggling to understand how someone could go around hurting people intentionally, rather than being open, respectful, sharing what’s on his mind instead… It’s kind of hard to go back to my life knowing that you exist and how great you can be when you want to.”
… and the ball tumbles from my mitt. My heart tightens, forging heavy shame from well-deserved failure – revealing the man I’ve become, blackening the shadow I can’t seem to leave behind.
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I hate her bridesmaid dress. It lays on her like cheap carpet over stunning Italian marble and I’m intensely jealous of it. That night I set my mind to what lay beneath and when I opened my eyes the universe ceases to exist. We’re laying nose to nose. White light floods the room. I’m motionless. Transfixed. Held taught by a deeply expressionless gaze heavy enough to sway the course of celestial bodies – and I’ve never been more naked in my life. Her eyes, sapphire blue with long dark lashes lay inches from mine – my heart rejoicing in her cosmos.
Her reddish-purple sweater is invitingly see-through. Her jeans city tight. Dark hair hangs long below her shoulders with black mascara framing two shamelessly playful blue eyes. She laughs, snorting and wriggling like a ticklish Pug puppy blessed with immaculate breasts. She’s unconscionably irresistible. Powerless, reality abides, easing to a point of stillness – like Father Time himself has joined me awestruck to leer in full gratitude before respectfully tipping his cap and dropping dead, certain he’s finally seen it all. I still can’t visit the hockey rink without staring at the spot we met, smiling broadly and feeling that joy and hope are one.
We’re on a sailboat. Her aqua marine eyes stare long to the horizon. She’s abnormally tan, blonde and goofy as fuck. I duck my head beneath the calm clear ocean water, magically resurfacing in Wyoming. She’s alone at the bar being generously over served by an ambitious bartender. I join her and we laugh for hours before walking outside, across the street and into an abandoned school bus. Pants off, she swings wildly from the handrails overhead. Her legs wrap hungrily around me as I become her most grateful passenger.
I’m at the base of our town boulder wall. She approaches swiftly. Her arms are unusually long. They wrap around me in a way I’ve never known. She smiles at my buddy, a guy she slept with years ago – and I turn back to the wall, boiling with insecurity, praying she’ll choose me over him. Long brown pigtails fall from a trucker hat that rests an inch above her emerald eyes. She’s ripped, wearing a tight red t-shirt to prove it. We exchange numbers and she smiles wide, like a gymnast who knows she just stuck the landing and earned a perfect ten in a my heart.
She smells like euro-bitch and I’m completely disinterested. I’m here to look in, not out. We leave the yoga retreat without ever making eye contact. A week later we meet by chance. She speaks slowly and eats slower. I love what she says and the honesty with which she says it. She speaks at a depth I breathe easily at, far below the line of senseless chatter. We walk, stopping in an empty soccer field to kiss beneath a full moon. Heart wide open, blue eyes ablaze – she makes me believe I’m no longer alone.
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I’m alone in my mom’s living room. She’s been dead for a week and I’m leaving tomorrow. I stare down at a stack of mail, finding a card with my name. I turn it over, inspecting it cautiously, exactly as I do now – wondering what it means, knowing it has the power to hurt me.
Last week we stood together in the ice rink, just paces from the spot memorialized in my heart. Blue eyes, white hat, dangly earrings. She’s laughing freely as a beautiful woman should. It’s uncomfortably familiar. I lean against the boards, standing small beneath a tall shield of Plexiglass. Chuckling, I play along – silently debating whether I deserve her, fighting the urge to run away in hopes of protecting her from my love.
A week later we’re on my couch, legs intertwined. Her head rests softly on my chest. I confess to having a crush on her. Her eyes drop, confessing to the opposite – and instantly I’m safe, swaddled securely in my belief that she’ll never let me love her, falsely believing I could – and knowing, from the loneliest depths of my untouched soul that the only person I ever needed to leave behind was a babysitter named R.S.
And then we kiss.
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And of course it changes nothing, because no kiss has ever turned a frog into a prince or a maiden into a princess. The only thing that holds that power is one’s belief in the goodness of their own heart. Positive transformation isn’t possible without believing that you’re deserving of love, because you can only give as much love as you yourself are willing to receive.
And thus, in the absence of self-acceptance, no woman I dated ever had a chance. It’s not that I deemed them unworthy of my love, it’s that I never felt worthy of theirs – and while I know I’m wrong to feel unworthy of love, knowing is different than feeling and feelings that deep aren’t an easy thing to change.
Sexual abuse isn’t something you can understand unless you’ve experienced it. It’s not rational. It’s emotional. It reaches deeper than your mind to a place only your heart knows. And so you put a lid on it…
until inevitably fumes begin seeping from a pot you know exists, but can no longer find – pushed by a wind beyond your control, carrying the worst of you towards everyone closest to you, slowly poisoning all who dare to touch you.
So for the last ten weeks I’ve sat at home chanting, meditating, humming, stretching, vibrating and staring at my third eye trying to plug a slow leak draining from a reservoir of shame I never knew existed while another ex moves on and the girl I like tells me I’m too old and the world before me continues to unfold as I sit quietly staring into the either of my mind determined to build a mountain of self love tall enough to climb from the deepest hole through the darkest mind on my quest to find who I was before I became what I am – and then I slowly open my mother’s diary, wondering what answers it could possibly hold…
“I have a gift given to me by God when he made me. But I did not realize until now that the gift was not something I could do for people, or something I could make happen, or buy them. It is simply myself. I am the gift. Who I am, not what I can do.” – MJM, 2005
…and I’m reminded that it’s never too late to reclaim the innocence we’re all unconsciously programmed to forget.
