After I said goodbye-for-now to the cute boy and went
home from the respite of Favorite Aunt’s, that summer is a fog of dissociated memories,
but I remember this:
My mom wanted me to get out of the house into the
sunshine, but I was afraid. She wanted me to walk a few miles down the rural
stretch of road that our suburban street turned into, to pick some daylilies,
sweet peas and black-eyed susans. (The only way I’m sure of the timeline of
this memory is the kind of flowers she wanted me to go visit. The clock of the
year has always been a loyal friend.) In fairness, flower-picking had been my
m.o. since I was very little, on any given stretch of road. But just then, I
felt frozen and afraid, in need of the deepest kind of privacy.
Mom said “Do it while you can, before you’re married
and trapped and you can’t do anything.”
(I have to wonder what horrible-but-sort-of-true advice
I’ve given my nieces and nephews and students over the years, what they’ll be
typing into their blogs and/or quoting to their therapists…)
I couldn’t argue with her (for once) and I didn’t have
a better idea of what to do with my afternoon. While I was recovering (or not)
from the Big Trauma, my mom was concealer-ing her own bruises (I never covered
mine, I felt like people should know. I still do, obvs.) and navigating her
stay in a violent, contemptuous marriage, a lifetime of hurt, of controlling
and being controlled. So I went and picked the the flowers. I felt empty and
not-there, a summer afternoon in quotation marks, but I remember the colors. Maybe
she was right, maybe the flowers did save me. (And also right that marriage
feels like a trap, although in my case definitely a trap of my own making.)
In addition to flowers, better than flowers, even,
that summer there was MAIL. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow sent letters, and I
wrote back on dolphin-themed stationary. (Why dolphins? I actually have no
idea. I don’t think we saw dolphins at the beach or anything. Anyway, dolphins
it was.)
(I wish Marie Kondo had a term for the opposite of
sparking joy—the pang you feel when you realize you gave away something
precious you probably should have hung onto. In my early twenties, I did my
first performance art piece: I built a small pyramid of shiny pink boxes, suitcases,
and other shiny pink things, all filled with memories and other things I (thought)
I wanted to give away. I liked knowing that a stranger was taking home a collaged
shoebox full of all my love letters, three loves to that date and so, so much
treasure. The idea made me feel more connected to the world at large, but the
practice left me with loss and emptiness. I’m glad there are blogs now so I can
give away all my love stories to strangers and still keep them safe with me. And
letters stay with me forever now, Marie or no Marie.)
(Another thing about Tidying Up: In addition to the
excitement of having neat closets and always knowing where my headphones are, I
like the way that Kon Mari has helped me to unstick myself from the present. “Live
in the moment” seems like excellent advice for an Insight-Timer-addicted chakra
enthusiast like me, but in practice, living in all of my timelines is better.
It’s less lonely with all my past selves, past loves, past friends, past cities
closer at hand and closer at heart, integrated with today—that’s kind of what
this story is about.)
As you know by his name, he sewed me a pillow. I think
he gave it to me on a visit, I remember hugging it on a Greyhound bus. (It’s
also possible that he mailed it to me but I brought it on a Greyhound bus to
hug. Totally something I would have done.) Favorite Aunt must have helped him make it. It was light purple satin, with a
darker purple lace around the edges. There was a purple applique of a dolphin
in the middle. It is the most perfect object I have ever owned, and I have no
idea what happened to it. It might have been a casualty of cat pee in my first
apartment, or perished in a housefire in my skater flophouse fourth-fifth-or-sixth
apartment. I wish I had taken better care of everything ever. I’m amazed that I
have anything left.
There were a few more days with The Boy Who Sewed Me a
Pillow that summer. I think there were some cancelled plans, too—I remember
being sad in a mine where you could look for phosphorescent rocks. When we were together, we got in our own little
world (well, our own little world that almost always included Favorite Aunt) of
giggles and inside jokes.
Also, we went to church together, holding hands
sweetly in the front pew. I felt fresh and new there, cleansed, like I was
doing something right for the first time in my entire life. It makes me really,
really sad to think of that feeling, the idea that he, in addition to being an
actual person I thoroughly adored, could feel like a source of legitimacy and
redemption to a young woman who would maybe never know she needed neither. I
want to rescue us both from that aspect of things, swoop in like Carol Danvers
and sweep us both to a field somewhere, tell us both that we’re perfect and
lovely and queer and have everything to offer, that the Catholic Church could
just fuck right off.
Maybe he never would have needed that rescue, maybe he
always knew his whole worth, maybe coming out was a breeze or a nonissue, who
knows? We’re getting a little into not-really-my business territory, I haven’t asked
him the million questions I have yet.
For a long time, I didn’t acknowledge the real
connection between us because all of the Catholicism and trauma and patriarchy
involved convinced me I must’ve been just a burden to him. For a long time the
whole thing just seemed orchestrated, like a performance of normalcy that was probably
less than convincing, a feint at something like virtue.
But then, weekend before last, my body was near him
for like two seconds before I realized that that interpretation of things was
nonsense, just as dumb and reductive and confining as religion itself. My body
knew what my mind had written off, had stored love in my muscles and bones and
veins for thirty years and gave it back to me like a gift, like a miracle.
Between us, this is still a very chaste kind of story.
Within me, it is decidedly not.