The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Five

An old painting, but apt. <3

It was such a pleasant weekend but I’m antsy to get back to the story, anxious for the part where the paragraphs drop me back in 2019, on a few-weeks-ago bright spring day in a nearby city, surrounded by people with fancy dogs and deeply curated outfits, pleasantly arguing with Sweetie (Still ex-wife, now freakishly close best friend and co-aunt) whether I was stopping to take pictures of forsythias or just boring yellow leaves.

While driving toward family for Easter, Sweetie and I decided to play YouTube DJ, with the rule that we could only pick fun-to-sing but wholly undignified songs. This led to a lot of belting hair-metal ballads and the over-optimistic decision to swing by my teenhood home. I was curious and it was on the way. I had this idea that it would be healing to be there and see how un-evil the place was, to be there as a strong adult with a reliable car for easy escape. But we hit a bad pothole and a hubcap flew off my pretty car, and Sweetie was worried about the tire.

Even if there hadn’t been car-upset though, the street would have felt rotten and bleak. Not even a couple of Pokéstops could redeem it—that place doesn’t deserve Pokéstops! The sky was trauma-grey and there was no escaping the fact that this was the place where the worst things of my life happened. The little park made me so angry and the old house had been painted a particularly upsetting shade of taupe. It was old-Twilight-Zone creepy there, without the fun or charm. I fucking hate that block, I hate that I’ve spent so much therapy time on it, I hate it, hate it hate it.

The magical thinking of mental illness clicked in and I thought I had broken my lovely car by getting curious about this awful place, but the tire was fine and if I want a new hubcap, the guy at the car place is very cute. Nieces and nephews several towns over broke the spell of the bad street, my youngest nephew chose a Captain Marvel book on our traditional comic shop visit, and all was well.

Back in the nineties, it’s still that summer. I’m pining and waiting for the mail—which, now that I think about it, was my default state for the ensuing ten years. I loved the feeling that someone cute was going to send you a card or a letter or a mix tape, sometimes they even still do.

Far more painful than the pining were the long and painful treatments for STIs—who knows if I got them consensually or not, I guess it doesn’t matter. The doctor was a harsh and judgmental old man, gouging and pinching away at the hurts, freezing my insides to try and heal them. There were big, intimidating, emphatic antibiotic pills. My mom was there with me for all of it, and, though we’ve spent big chunks of our lives at odds, for this, she was kind.

Once, after a particularly harsh doctor’s visit, I was walking in town and heard kids yelling “Slut!” out of a pickup truck at me. The summer was half ugly insult, half beautiful dream.

When school started again in the fall, everyday life settled onto me like a weighted blanket, not in a pleasant way. I gained so much weight (though I’m sure I was teensy compared to today, but this was WAY before Dietland/Roxane Gay/Shrill.) that my drama teacher (No Kate Moss herself) took it upon herself to tell me that I needed new jeans. I remember those jeans, high-waisted and acid-washed to almost white, devolving into a permanent wedgie as I got bigger. I want to say I didn’t care, it seemed like I didn’t, but I seem to remember it a little too vividly.

(This might have also been why I only got the teensiest, tinesiest part in that fall’s Drama Club production, one scream from backstage in a murder mystery. I hate this drama teacher. She also told me I’m too tall to ever be a leading lady, which I guess is true in the patriarchal sense. Fuck that lady though.)

ANYWAY, there was a very bright spot to look forward to! The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was coming up with Favorite Aunt for the Drama Club production, maybe in early October. In anticipation, still glowing with love about the pillow, I sewed him a shirt.

Objectively, this shirt was probably pretty hideous. I LOVED fabrics that made not sense back then, I really kind of still do. It was aqua blue, light green, and purple, with a large and semi-realistic-looking fish print. (He told me the other week that it also had tiny turtle buttons, a detail I thoroughly enjoy.) It was the most structured thing I ever sewed, with a collar and buttonholes and all kinds of ironing and steps. There is NO WAY I would ever have the patience for all those steps today, good job teenage me.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Four

That teenage summer, there were just a few moments between us that genuinely felt connected to sex, at least as I understood it then. I remember being on top of him, both of us thoroughly clothed, on the floor of Favorite Aunt’s sewing room, while a family party went on below. It’s hard not to imagine myself with the intent an evil scientist, trying to pin down a beautiful and helpless butterfly. I’m not sure if he remembers it that way, if he remembers it at all. Present-day signs point to no on the helpless-butterfly-pinning. (At least not in a bad way. But I can only speculate.)

I had sworn off sex as a respite after the Big Trauma. (He told me a few weeks ago, while having coffee outside a museum on a perfect sunny-chilly spring day, that I had referred to myself as a “born-again virgin.” A LOT. That quote both breaks my heart and makes me laugh—of course that person would become a pansexual sex blogger! I feel really awesome at life right at this moment!) Anyway, I was doing the reasonable-seeming-at-the-time thing of blaming my sluttiness, my adventurousness, for the fact that I had been drugged, raped, and assaulted at a party right before that summer.

I told the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow that we would wait until we were old enough to get married (by which I meant, like, when I was 20 and he was eighteen) and THEN have sex. Silly as it is, that strikes me as a pretty badass thing to say to somebody, especially someone you’ve only known a few weeks. Imagine saying that to a 2019 guy! Back then, the idea felt romantic and like a relief from all of the impersonal sex my body and soul had been though the previous school year. (Sex which, LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR, I chose a lot of and some of which I really enjoyed. I wonder if I can write about it in detail sometime?)

When I found out, years later, that the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (By then technically the Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow) ended up with a guy, I imagined he had been relieved by our lack of sex, maybe for the chance to rest in the performance of heterosexuality before embarking on the road out of the closet. So many oversimplified assumptions in one sentence! I told myself this story for DECADES, and maybe it is true, but I’m pretty appalled at my binary thinking, the ability to write off my own experience as well as the entire spectrum of sexuality and desire, even in the face of so much experience and SO, SO many paragraphs.

This seems like a good place to stop and let it all sink in over the long weekend. Kondo-ing my feelings takes a lot, and right now is that part where all the emotions are in piles all over the place and I need to slow down, touch each one, and see what sparks joy. Maybe next week I’ll finish the story and then everything will be treasured and have a place.

Dear people who are kind enough to read this, enjoy your Easter or Passover or Cherry Blossom Festival. Eat chocolate and look at flowers, I love you.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Three

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.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Two

The Cool Room in Favorite Aunt’s house is still one of the most comforting rooms in the many-roomed house of my heart. It was where the air conditioning lived in that sweltering, old-fashioned house. It was perfectly Eighties and all the way comforting, wood-paneled walls, small, curtained windows, deep-turquoise-blue couch with some kind of white print, maybe flowers. Pleasantly cavelike, with a glass pocket-door that maybe we slid shut. It was where the TV lived, and where The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow and I somehow found ourselves alone.  (I still don’t quite understand how that happened, can’t decide if it was kind of Favorite Aunt to leave us alone or if it was weird creepy matchmaking—it’s occurring to me that I never experienced non-sneaky, non-naked kids-being-attracted-to-each-other situations so I really have no idea how it’s supposed to go.)

How it went was, chaste, beatific, awkward, sweet. I lay snuggled in his arms for long, quiet stretches of time.

Until him, I had only been kissed by selfish, careless, insistent (and, by 2019 standards, sometimes pretty rapey) men and boys, so there is a very good chance that I was a terrible kisser.

My new friend may have had less experience at kissing than I did, but I think he had much more experience treating others like human beings. If my kisses were terrible, hungry, aggressive things, he took it in stride. I can hope that he eventually mellowed me to a more loving and thoughtful pace. Or maybe we were just teenagers doing our best.

After what seemed like hours of making out but probably wasn’t, he said “No thank you” and backed his face away. That hurt and felt like a mystery, but I think (I hope) I just put my head on his heart and gave it a rest. There were eventually more snuggles and more kisses, but I’ve always wondered if I or society or Favorite Aunt or all three of those things pressured him into continuing to kiss me. I didn’t think about any of that at the time. My heart was floating and selfish and somehow also generous with joy. I was a blooming little flower of love.

I forget where we were going or coming home from, but I have a powerful image of laying in his lap in the backseat of Favorite Aunt’s van, in another highway sunset. Pink sky, low-flying airport planes, lots of toll booths. I gazed up at his face feeling both blissful and disjointed—was this the face I would love forever? The answer, as with most faces I’ve been that close to, is both absolutely yes and not at all.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part One

For this one, we’re going all the way back to the early Nineties, to the summer after the Big Trauma happened https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2012/04/triggers-and-my-voice-story-of-hard.html?zx=e0bd5bdf8967148e. He was fourteen and I was sixteen.

Unable to stop taking their unease with the Big Trauma out on me and on each other, my parents, near divorce and overflowing with violence, sent me to stay with my Favorite Aunt at her beautiful Colonial-era home, about six hours away from my immediate family’s cramped and feral suburban home. Favorite Aunt had always been the person who most vocally liked me when my parents, clearly and emphatically, did not. She was an oasis of hugs, praise, and affection, in a childhood full of coldness, contempt, and turning to teachers as my only daily source of grownup approval.

She was also, though, Catholic. That part of the story makes it hard to not become incoherent with rage. Favorite Aunt’s spirtuality felt like a bright white escape hatch, a way to clean and simplify myself of such a dirty and complicated life, a way to escape the pain, trauma, abandonment and fear of the previous months. Of course now I understand that in being pulled (temporarily, I’m relieved to say) back into the religion of my upbringing I was both victim of and complicit in a more effective and insidious factory of rape than any teen party, no matter how out of control, could ever be.

At the time though, it seemed that the best way to regain control after a brutal rape and subsequent assault by my dad (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2018/10/metoo-letter-dear-dad-stfu-about.html) was to blame myself, my sluttiness, my sense of adventure. That seems heartbreaking now, but at the time it felt self-explanatory. Such is the power of an adult willing to dole out affection. I don’t think my Favorite Aunt was rape-culture-gaslighting me on purpose, because at the time, blaming myself seemed as natural and as life-giving as air.

Favorite Aunt’s charisma and generosity of affection means she often has children as friends. (I share this quality, for which I am very grateful.) She thought one of these friends, the artsy, quiet son of one of her church families, would be a perfect match for me, and he was. (All these years later, she still ships us, in spite of a lifetime mostly apart and a mountain of evidence. This doesn’t bother me as much as maybe it should.)

I don’t remember how he and I got together, whether we were pushed or drawn, probably both. I can’t clearly remember my first kiss with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (also, the first truly kind or loving kiss I’d known) but I know it was postcard perfect. Favorite Aunt and I went to visit him and his family where they were camping for a week, on a vacation island not too far ways from Favorite Aunt’s home. We walked (maybe I was holding his hand, seems like something I would do…) down the beach a little ways away from the families. We stood beside the water, the tall waves making for the closest approximation of privacy we were likely to get.

I remember the sea as rough but kind that day, the dizzy feeling in my throat, the sense of finality, of accomplishment. Having a sexy feeling that was also loving, with anyone besides myself, was a new and blissful sensation, as big and reliable and all-encompassing as the ocean itself.

The day went by fast. Favorite Aunt and I had made homemade poptarts for him and his family (how Emily Gilmore of us!) and we gave the container to him out the car window as Favorite Aunt prepared to drive us away. He kissed me on the forehead and said, not unkindly, “You have really big dandruff.”

All of the beach days and other excursions with Favorite Aunt meant that my scalp was sunburned and peeling. I was only a little bit embarrassed. I was a jumble of salt and skin and hot-pink feeling, riding away from the beach and towards a sunset as pink as my cheeks.

A Brief Gilmore Guy Revival: Part Two (Concern-Trolling Is Gentle Voter Suppression)

We didn’t talk much, at least not in the fun/deadening let’s-discuss-all-of-our-interlocking-relationship-dynamics poly way. After three hours of easy bliss, we lay in the afterglow. I was holding him tenderly as he started to talk, first about his day and then about the then-four-days-away Midterm Election:

“I want to believe there’s going to be this big, sweeping Blue Wave, but I just don’t think it’ll happen. I think we’ll pick up a few seats but…”

He went on to talk about how bleak things were going to be over the next few years. When he got to the part about how the Democrats didn’t have any strong candidates for 2020, my body went from being a sparkly cloud of bliss to being an angry spring. I disentangled from him as if I was disentangling from the entire last three years.

“Who do you want it to be then? BERNIE?!”

“No, actually I don’t really care for Senator Sanders…”

“WELL, you’ve got that going for you.” I hissed.

Part of my reaction, I have to admit, was good old-fashioned daddy issues. Gilmore Guy’s erasure of Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, et al felt too much like the anti-Gillibrand conversation I still felt trapped in with my dad. (OF COURSE dad didn’t acknowledge the letter I sent. OF COURSE he didn’t.)

It was also too much like the role-flipped therapy session I’d had earlier in the week, comforting a clearly-not-a-match therapist by trying to convince her that the Resistance does, in fact, exist and have an impact.

I’m so happy to have the election results to back me up as I continue to un-gaslight myself about this!

It frustrates me so much that they can’t see it, that they can’t see US or our work, even as it slowly but surely lifts the country out of our mess. I realize that as a member of the Resistance, it’s part of my task to HELP people see it, but having my own reality denied so often really hurts—it’s too much. The time theft is too much. The emotional labor is too much.

I’m not here to try and convince anybody of my existence, to convince anybody that the movements I love are not helpless or worthless or stupidly hysterical. (I’m all about reclaiming the word “hysterical” but that’s another post for another day.)

(My off-script textbanking exchanges with Republicans earlier in the Midterm process have really gotten to me as well, but the right is clearly not the only problem here.)

“I’m just worried about voter suppression,” He said. Of course! We all are. We were both up off the folded-out couch and I was angrily putting on my clothes.

“You’re DOING voter suppression when you tell us we can’t win!”

Concern-trolling is definitely not as evil or insidious as governors who purge voter rolls, exact-match laws, or Native Americans suddenly having to root out street addresses from obscure bureaucratic labyrinths, but it IS part of the problem and definitely should be voted most likely to keep me from snuggling.

I argued probably not very well. He said:

“Let me explain why Kamala Harris can’t…”

Perhaps realizing that I will be having some version of this conversation until she is elected, I fucking SNAPPED.

“I told you I don’t want to have this conversation. Do something about it or Shut. Up.”

(That may have been mostly for dad, sorry. But also yes, shut the fuck up.)

“Don’t scream at me in my own house.” He said, apparently out of arguments. My voice was raised, but screaming was an exaggeration.

The saddest thing about writing down that moment is realizing that he was happy to have me raise my voice in all of the sex-wails that I wanted, but not to stand up for myself, not even to defend my own worth.

“Have fun SITTING ON YOUR ASS and criticizing everybody who’s doing the WORK!” I hollered as I grabbed my purse and umbrella from the kitchen and headed for the door.

“Get. Out.” He said in that annoying I’m-the-reasonable-person tone that I know so well from back when I was married to Sweetie.

After I’d splashed through the rain to my car, the dash clock read 12:06. I’d aimed to turn myself into a pumpkin by midnight and he had (inadvertently, I hope) helped me along.

I wish I could say that I feel righteous and free after that, but I just miss him. I feel lonely about it, and sad. I’m glad I blocked his number and deleted his texts, because I keep wishing I could reach out, somehow repair the connection, somehow be in those arms again.

But even causally, I can’t be with someone who doesn’t live, at least mostly, in the same reality as I do. America has changed so deeply since 2016, and I’m one of the lucky many who can see the underlying positivity: The networks of activism, the interlocking movements full of loving, fiery momentum. Resistbot, Pantsuit Nation, Solidarity Sundays. THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES KIDS, for god’s sake. The way PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARED about the Midterms!

I want a partner who, no matter how bleak and scary things get, can see the goodness and care that’s growing every day. I wish, in that afterglow moment, I’d mustered the empathy and strength to convince him, to bring him into that hopeful view and keep him safe there. I know I can’t keep him safe, can’t keep anyone safe no matter what. So I run when my body tells me to run, fight when it tells me to fight, and I hope for the best.

A Brief Gilmore Guy Revival: Part One

When I got his text, I was in a good mood. It was Friday and I’d just stopped at the bank to make my deposit, then took a rainy stroll in a nearby twinkle-light-filled, very window-shoppingy neighborhood. My life was just so perfectly my life. I got home, got in my PJs, lit all the scented candles, (hygge!) made some tea and settled in for some Gilmore episodes.

After a friendly back and forth about what episode I was on (Season 2, Episode 7: Rory gets Puffed because there’s no Reading and Walkman-Listening Club at Chilton.) (Lorelai and Emily mother-daughtering in the Booster Club fashion show is one of my favorite moments of the whole series.) Gilmore Guy asked, “How would you feel about seeing me?”

When I told him I wasn’t ready to be friends because I still had snuggly feeling for him (I did? I do? Honestly, I thought I’d moved on.) he made it clear that snuggles were what he was after. My body filled with hopeful light and heat. Okay, I said. A treat.

I brought him the painting above, it doesn’t really seem like street art anyway. He made me a gin and tonic, remembering that the fancy Bombay was my favorite from his collection. (“A gin-clear mind…” says The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in my head for no reason.)

“Should we kiss?” he asked as we settled into Season 2, Episode 8. (Jess is the WORST. Team Wookie forever.)

“Should we? Probably not.” I said, already kissing him.

I’m fascinated and mystified by the way that our bodies were so SMART together. Making out on the couch, we fit together so smoothly, easily, power trading back and forth between us in such a seamless, joyful way. As we made our way horizontal, the closeness I felt to him was startling. Sometimes I held him so close to me like this was something romantic. I guess in my head, it always will be.

Hours later, when I asked him to hold me down, I felt such pure, uninterrupted happiness as I giggled and struggled. The instinct of our bodies together is a monument in my heart, a shiny obelisk of mystery. I know, I know, I KNOW it’s just sex, but I can’t understand how our bodies seemed to know each other so well. Creating such beauty together, and then not, I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. I’m more than happy to keep trying, though sadly not with him.