October 5.

I dunno, man… I started a fire in the other room, and I’m thinking maybe I need to move my writing desk over there. I want to be close to the light, to the heat, to the crackle and smoke.
Okay, fine, I moved my body back. A few months back I brought in this teak and canvas beach chair, to take pictures of and to sell, because I’ve never actually taken it to the beach. But then a few weeks ago I lit a fire in the fireplace and wanted to sit closer than the couch would allow, so I thought to set up this beach comber. That first night, I was playing Minecraft, so I had this whole set up with a footrest and an armrest for a mouse, with the TV on because if there’s one thing I hate it’s doing just the one mindless activity at once; if I stack my mindless activities, then I’m really getting something done.
The chair, however, causes my butt to fall asleep if I sit in it for too long. And maybe I should just sell it.
Clearly I want it to be winter. Every day I get home from work and like Mr. Rogers I change into my houseclothes: sweat pants and a hoodie. I’m intentionally keeping the house cold–one, because my house just tends to stay cold, and I’m not ready to afford running the propane furnace; two, so I can wear my sweats without the sweat, and three, because my cold heart just wants it cold.
So there will be days when it’s 62 in the house and I’m strolling around in sweats, and I go out to check the mail or walk the dog and it’s 75 and sunny.
The calendar is so G.d. relentless and harsh. Thank God I don’t have one of those hyperactive memories where I remember each and every snack I ate. It’s bad enough that a date on a calendar or the pressure in the air will evoke the feelings I felt a year, two years, 7 years, 22 years, 23, 24 years ago.

Today’s date was the gate code at the end of G______ Lane. Also one of my personal identification numbers.

Twenty-two years ago today, a girlfriend and I were on the vestibule of Graves Hall, in the process of breaking up. I was 19: it’s important to remember that we were kids, she was a child, I was a child. There were only a few weeks, let’s say 6, tops, that we were together after we came back from summer break, but it feels longer in my memory. We both had roommates–I had two, both relative homebodies, and her’s was the R.A.–meaning there wasn’t much of a place to go to be alone.

So we’d make out in the back of my van.

Those 6 weeks, if we weren’t making out on the floor in the trunk, then we were in the process of breaking up. That’s an exaggeration. For the first couple of weeks we were training for a bike ride (ironically riding within a mile from my now-home). There was some studying. The semester before, she had talked me out of registering for Physiology, saying I wasn’t smart enough, and talked me into the general education course that fulfilled the same requirement, “The Human Body in Health and Disease.” Still, it was the same subject, so we would occupy the lobbies of different buildings until the wee hours of the morning, doing flashcards. I would do them for her, then she’d run them for me. She’d ask how I could do the flashcards, even though I was in the gen-ed course, and I would just shrug. She’d ask why I didn’t study (I didn’t), I said I’d listened during the lectures, read the book, and just remembered the information. This should have been a red flag–that she both thought I was dumb, andbutyet annoyed I knew the answers.

There was the time she asked if I masturbated, after it came up in her girls’ bible study and prayer session, about if their boyfriends carnally relieved themselves. Looking back, I wish I just had said yes. I wish I had just owned myself and my sexual desires, and said, yes, I’m 19, and hornier than a bull. Honestly I don’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t close to the truth. I mean…that summer she and I had round after round of prude, front-of-bookstore-romance-novel cybersex on AOL Instant Messenger.

There was the pregnancy “scare”. I use that phrase, the word, so…delicately, because there had been no coitus. When she called to tell me her period was delayed, I almost laughed–I think I did laugh, which I think pissed her off, and I had to quickly back track and swallow the absurdity and get aboard. Now, I might only have been in the gen-ed physiology class, but even I knew it was nigh impossible to impregnate someone by ejaculating in my sweat-shorts and underwear during a session heavy petting in the back of a Ford Aerostar van.

Oh but where was I? Today, 22 years ago. We were breaking up. Over summer break, she had determined she wanted to be with one of her high school boyfriends. His family had a cottage on a lake with jet skis–I remember her saying she wanted that for us.

There was this bizarre night–I don’t remember if it was after this date or before–when he drove up from Notre Dame to visit her, late, late at night, midnight or thereabouts, and she was adamant that she was going to hang out with him without me. Talk about a red flag.

Remember when I said it was important to remember that we were kids? Neither of us had the gonads to break it off. She wanted to date someone else–and she did. Right in front of me. Why didn’t I break it off?

We were sitting in this covered vestibule of this old stone lecture hall, out of the wind knocking leaves from the oak trees, and I remembered it was a friend’s birthday. We weren’t actively fighting, but we were intensely negotiating, one of those emotionally tense lulls between fights at the end of a relationship, and I said I missed my friend. She said, “what did she do to you? Did she touch you?” She tried to convince me this high school friend who’s birthday it was had sexually molested me, and tried to convince me I needed therapy.

We were kids. With enough gonads to know we wanted to be dry-humping somebody, not enough to break it off. Instead of breaking up with me, she tried to convince me I had been assaulted. Instead of saying she wanted to get back together with her ex, she told me the lights weren’t dimming, that I was going crazy. When everything in my body was telling me, she doesn’t like you anymore, she denied that, and told me I was jealous, told me I had been molested, told me I needed therapy.

I wish someone had told me, then, that that’s why I should go to therapy. Not that there was anything wrong with me, but because she was trying to convince me there was.

The truth is, that after we broke up, I did see a therapist. There was some discussion that if I went to therapy, then we could get back together.

But I didn’t have the language to tell the therapist that I had been gaslit, that she had tried to convince me I had been raped. Years later, when the term gaslighting came into existence, I remember casually telling friends, “Oh that happened to me.” I joked that it was “Gaslighting lite;” I recognized that telling someone they need therapy could be a form of telling someone they were crazy–but still not enough to recognize I could or should go talk to someone who could tell me how fucked up it was.

20+ years on I get it, and I get that fucked as it was, others have gone through depths and depths deeper and more damaging emotional abuse. And that I can only judge my wounds against themselves.

20+ years on, 3 therapists later, I dunno, man…

I mean, here’s the truth: though she hadn’t molested me, that friend had used me. It’s hard to describe what she did; she withheld that she had a boyfriend, she withheld how much she was drinking and smoking–but I also let her.

That’s when we began our codependence.

Ah. There it is.

It’s the not the whole story–one strand can never be the whole story–but looking back I see how my codependence (it takes two) with that friend directly led to me being open to being persuaded that she had molested me (again, she hadn’t–but isn’t that codependence what my girlfriend was picking up on?). And I see how it set me up for a lifetime of chasing that dynamic. It’s not the whole story, no, but for this telling its the inciting incident. Oh lord.

My therapist said he’d be happy to keep taking my money, but that it’s clear I have what I need. Ain’t that the scariest thing to hear.

I’m left trying to stitch my shadow back on.
It’s not the whole story.
The fire dwindles. So does my ability to dig deep.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply