As his hands slid up and down my back, scratching and circling and I stared into the distance at nothing, I wondered
what is he waiting for?
When his hands slid inside my shirt, I knew he wasn’t really waiting. Just nervous. While his fingers flexed and gripped parts of me that are usually reserved merely for gentle massages, and his tongue barely tasted the terrain that begs for deep exploration, I thought
why am I doing this?
I didn’t have an answer. I knew I’d been thinking about doing it for a while, plotting half-consciously, eyeing the merchandise, considering whether the prize would fit in my coat closet. But I didn’t know why. I knew that I was on automatic, that the program got rebooted the first moment that a lingering smile met my body, then face.
RidingYourWayToHappiness version 2.69 is an application with a lot of bugs in it. Eventually, with even occasional use, the end user is left frazzled, distracted and with a need for a complete memory wipe in the form of bourbon, vodka or whiskey. The cheap kind that burns your throat and the pictures in your head.
I’ve never wanted to be that girl, and time and again, I have been. The one that perceives an interest and walks her way into a lap so as to, what? Quench the oft-overwhelming self-hatred that speaks louder than any other personality facet. To silence the mantra
you are never good enough and you never will be, except for when you’re making some other person feel as if their shit is hot and you can’t resist it.
It sucks, being a slut.
I’ve been good, possibly you could call it, not fucking outside of the box. Waiting until there was a definitive maybe instead of an unspoken temporary. I don’t know why I might have backtracked, since I wasn’t facing a drought, weight gain or wrath of my father’s.
I shut down almost immediately. As I was pulling him into me, I was pushing him and myself away. This was purely a physical thing and there was no room for thoughts, feelings or sensitivity. The foreplay was unnecessary and the mind-play ahead of it was, too. The brain had been turned off long before his hands finally found their way into my bra. I think he needed to think that I needed him to talk and caress me; most have. But the whole time I was pondering
how much longer can I do this before his hands getting to know me means he knows too much? When will the award ceremony no longer be worth the pre-show?
I don’t kiss, you see. It’s too close. Too much. Too heavy a potential for tragedy and feelings, more than lust and less than marriage. I don’t kiss, you see.
But I did.
And then, dirty, ashamed, wondering why I fell off the wagon and when the next meeting was, and why my sponsor wasn’t calling me back, I walked. I walked for miles and simply breathed in one mouthful of tobacco-laden air after the next. I slipped into a place I used to when I was younger, an alternate reality wherein I am not myself, I’m putting on a show.
I shut down.
Because of that, because I didn’t simply address it within myself and make steps to correct it. Because I laughed off my indiscretion as simply that – an oops – because I thought that everyone stumbles and it’s okay that I did, too. There I was, merely a bit later, with my dress around my waist, my stilettos cha-chaing against the tiled floor, and unwilling to look at myself in the mirror as I bit my bottom lip harder with each successive climax. I wondered
who am I?
My first boyfriend wanted to kiss me. We’d run around the fair that’d been taking place at our school – I don’t remember the why or when, but know it was toward the end of 7th grade – and every once in a while, he’d catch my hand in his own, clammy one. When we neared the back of the gymnasium stage, where the heavy fake velvet curtain gave up privacy from the where the cake walk wares were displayed for ogling, he moved in for the smooch.
I kneed him in the balls and ran away.
Spencer, I never let him in at all. He wanted to be in – as much as the popular boy who already had a popular girlfriend could be – with me, the quiet, assumed brainiac, former-fatty-turned-walking-human-skeletal-lesson. I denied his phone calls, the notes he’d try to give me. I was beneath it, having a relationship with someone who couldn’t even confront who he wanted to be with, or why.
Summer didn’t want a relationship, but she wanted everything one came with. I gave her half.
The first high school boyfriend told me he loved me and we were going to get married and have children. Too bad I was 14 and already (still, really) looking in the direction of someone else. Someone very not available to me, emotionally or high-school caste-wise. I told him that I loved him too – the only person I ever knowingly said it to, lying – and after a year of on and off, we were off.
The next boyfriend, The Rock Star Ex, lasted nearly four years. We were engaged for most of the last two of them and still, I wasn’t in love. It’s easy to say that we fell out of love, which was a good thing to realize shortly before a wedding, but in reality, neither of us knew who we were or what the other was, or where our paths should or would travel. Never mind if we should be on the same ones. I don’t think we were ever in love with more than the idea of being each other’s futures.
Next, if you’re not counting the boys who were kind of relationships, but only by their own definitions, came The Ex.
Like the others, I only gave him enough to make him want to stay. When things were good, they were the image of perfect: fun, carefree, honest, expansive. When things were bad, I was proven time and again why I shouldn’t trust or contribute fully to a relationship. Why I should never give me, if I couldn’t afford the cost. I loved him, but to say I was in love with him would be pushing it.
To say that I still love him, facets of him, the possibility of him and us, wouldn’t.
But we’re not going to happen, regardless of the number of times we play house and pretend as though being friends when we’re friends is enough.
There’s someone else. A friend. That, you know, is a little more than a friend in my mind, and also completely unavailable to me.
That’s me M.O., you see. Pick the ones that won’t have me, 100%, or let the ones I won’t have pick me.
I’ve been single for a year now, since the day that The Ex walked out, after moving back in for two weeks, after I’d started to hemorrhage and before I had to call in friends I barely knew to pick me up from my self-created hell. I had to ask for help, something I’m not known for doing in any facet outside of hair cut, wardrobe or tattoo advice.
That taught me about me. My ability to weather another complete life change, and what it was like to trust people with my child and my broken, arrhythmic heart. I moved on, except I didn’t.
He’s always been a safety net, The Ex. Well, I guess in another way, for the past five years, so has the Rock Star Ex. They’re both there, as long as I’m here asking them to be. I am apparently a constantly replenishing buffet item that they keep coming back to, whenever they’ve made some room. I’m laden with MSG, known to cause bloating, migraines and greying hair (not to mention hair loss), but yet, the craving is enough to merit the health hazard.
Because of these safety nets, I’ve had the ability to cast off any need to remedy the very daddy issues that have created for me these (ultimately unwanted) relationships. Since I nearly always have some ability to satiate my thirst for contact or love or worship, I didn’t have to stop being aloof and unavailable. I most certainly didn’t have to date, and had the confidence to turn down a number of people because I just wasn’t interested in trying.
This is changing. Techtonic plates have slid against each other and suddenly, I find myself with some regularity, feeling lonely. I want someone to care about. I need to understand what it’s like to look at a person, or think of them, and feel it, inside, and know that there’s nothing wrong about that feeling. To feel freed by it, you know?
It’s melting, my exterior that doesn’t allow trespassers and I don’t know what to do with the person whose left inside, damp and shivering. I know I’ve created this reality – the one where The Ex is just as likely to love me as hate me, want me or leave me. Though The Rock Star Ex’s appetite is contrived merely of appreciation for our chemistry, it never goes further than witty conversations, watch ups and toe curling, and it never will – that’s not healthy for this still-enclosed me, either.
And newsflash to me: I don’t want those two men to be more than they are. In fact, I don’t want those safety nets any more.
I’ve come to realize that a net shouldn’t weigh you down. It should catch you when you fall. My liability within these two men’s lives should be negligible, if one exists at all. I shouldn’t be their anything, besides a once-upon-a-time. This is not a moral contention, this is merely, fact for me.
So. How to go about that…moving on without the safety net? Opening up without the immediate paranoia of pain. Walk away from the abandonment fantasies, so that I can actually put someone in the position to be able to abandon me.
I have no clue.
But this morning when I woke up tired, I still put on makeup. And when I wanted to spend the whole rainy day in flannel, I still put on new boots, fitted jeans and a shirt that cost more than 5 dollars. I wore my favourite bra, my red lipgloss and I walked out the door with Isobel to the library without a trace of scorn at the world or its inhabitants.
I think a start is doing that more often. Because for once today, I didn’t feel invisible by design, and I wasn’t looking for attention to mend a warped sense of confidence. I wasn’t paying attention to whose eyes were looking where, or why, and whether it was with appreciation or a snarl. I wasn’t measuring any one’s self-confidence and malleability by their body language.
Maybe today was the beginning of another rebirth.
