The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Six

He wore the fish shirt to the stupid drama performance, I think. I mean, he probably did, he was very sweet and thoroughly thoughtful.

I had so looked forward to him being inside my school, I so wanted to snuggle and PDA it up and show him off to my friends, but I couldn’t connect. What I remember of that weekend was sadness, a feeling that I was losing him, that he didn’t love me anymore, that all was lost. Whatever grace had shined upon me over the summer, whatever suspension of disbelief, had left me and now I felt a million miles away from everything.

The sadness, distrust, resentment, and disappointment I was feeling (toward the world, not toward him, he one of the few people I could probably have trusted) didn’t leave much room for kindness, tenderness, affection, love. Sometimes it still doesn’t.

But instead of being able to articulate all that, I was just an asshole. I had discovered, during one of our conversations, that he couldn’t name all four Beatles. The 8X10s from my dad’s White Album hung on my Smurf-blue bedroom wall like a shrine. John Lennon was like a religion to me, (I know! I’m sorry! Women born in the Seventies (or probably at any other time ever) are pretty fucked for pop culture father figures.) it being decades before I wised up and converted to Yoko-ism.

So I concluded, in archetypal teen-asshole fashion, that if he didn’t know the Beatles, he couldn’t possibly know me! (I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have just made him a mixtape? Somewhere in there is the sexist assumption that boys should provide the music?) I’m utterly cringing as I type this part of the story, (I still panic sometimes about weird pop culture disconnects. It’s one of my very worst qualities.) but there was a grain of truth there—not about the Beatles, just about life.

I didn’t understand (I still don’t understand, really) how he, over there all beatific and (I assumed) untraumatized, might really be able to understand the fear, pain, and horror that had colonized my head, my heart, my body. If I would have told him, he probably would have listened, but it all seemed too dirty and bad for him to know about and besides, I couldn’t even express those things to myself. So I was mean. I was petty. I wrote a dumb letter and broke it off about the Beatles.

(Favorite Aunt was PISSED: “He is wonderful and perfect and you just threw him away.” So not too long after that I lost her support for a while too. That was probably okay—when it was time for me to come out as bi she was pretty crapola.)

There’s part of my mind, a part I’ve only in the last few weeks decided to debunk, that had me convinced for the longest time that someone as messed up and harsh and inside-ugly as me could never have deserved his sweet and generous love. I’ve sometimes felt that about Sweetie too, about my nieces, nephews, and students, about my friends and, on the worst PMS days, about my cats.

No matter how much I meditate or get therapy or just generally live a kind and awesome life, I still have the stubborn belief that I’m just a goth-girl Tasmanian Devil of grief, despair, and destruction, annihilating everything and everyone around me until I’m back to my natural state—alone, safe, everyone once again safe from me.

But it’s well past time to let that belief shift. Thinking that The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was a generous angel and I was a selfish mess is not only unhelpful, it’s dehumanizing. Past or present, he deserves better than to be stuffed in a box of imagined virtue, and I certainly don’t need to keep considering myself a threat. I’m glad it only took a few hours in a museum to start unraveling that story I’ve been telling myself, to wonder what will happen if we just get to try out being real human friends.