Britney
I don’t know what to start with this week. I was going to write about being liked back by someone for the first time in over a year, and the first time ever by a boy, and then the Pulse shooting happened and gripped my morning. I was going to write about Pulse and how heavy it made me feel and how it intersected with my recent thoughts on my own sexuality and how strange it’s been being queer while so involved with a boy when another personal crisis blitzkrieged my day, leaving me at a complete loss for breath and blood and everything that reminded me that I was alive. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to stop thinking about my own problems without dropping my ego somewhere where it can’t be recovered.
My grade is on a college trip right now and it is so hard to keep myself upright, to be centered and well and not constantly in the midst of a stomach pain or quieting the pounding for validation in my head. My mom always told me that I made myself sick with my worrying, and it is true. All of my stressors are mammoths in my mind, trampling the calm savannas of “happy places” and the unmoving upstate air.
The boy and I—we talk about where I will be in a few years. It is the day before I leave. He wonders what I’ll be doing. “So do I,” I say. Unsure footing is my constant.
“You watching you,” he replies. “Me watching you watching you.” I’m too tired to be happy.
“Just like television.”
“Better than television,” he says. Of course. I can always figure out our script. Nine times out of 10 it makes me feel better. This time is a rare miss. I still feel confused, stuck on the prospect of not being good enough, of being the domestic bore ignored in daylight and returned to in the comfort of privacy. Being ignored and coming in last does this to me.
I fear anything owning my heart like this. I don’t know when the loan became permanent but I do know that my existence is now tethered to something greater than itself, something extending beyond another person. It is not just him but the way I feel about him, the strength of the ability to relate this deeply to another person, and the potential for all of that to undo the pieces of my foundation this same connection laid down. None of these are new concerns—only the vulnerability is a changed brand.
I am in five different knots. He makes me feel like my life is a strip of light with no years to contain or restrain it, and he makes me feel like I am back in the woods waiting for the hatchet to stain my nightgown’s back with the final blow.
Trusting, or even beginning to trust a man feels like one of the greatest betrayals that I could ever enact upon myself. I am the one who taught myself to be unmoving in the face of evil, the one who has understood the manipulations of beauty that men tirelessly weave and then lay down for the next day’s catch.
What have I done?
Where are we going?
What have I done? ♦