The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Eight

I’ve read and thought so much about the ways that trauma gets stored in the body, the way that it lives and moves and gets processed in a way that is separate from time and the everyday. Why don’t I know very much about the way love is stored? I’m always pretty dazzled by the way that unexpected things can jostle it loose, can strike a gold vein and expose it, all sparkly and vulnerable and ready for mining.

After the first giddy rush of paintings and artifacts, we got some very strong coffee and sat outside the museum in the chilly sun, catching up. I honestly could have talked to him for five hundred and seventy-two more hours. I didn’t ask him enough about his last thirty years of adventures, I wish I’d talked less and asked more.

In the course of reminding me of my born-again-virginhood at the time we were together (It feels so cringy to even type, I’m sorry!) he said A Thing. It was A Thing that, I’m serious, rewired my entire brain. He was maybe just being campy and probably at least half joking but it hit me right down the middle anyway:

“You could’ve put out more.”

It set me free so much to hear this perfect angel I had idealized for so long just say a horny, jackassy man thing to me. The idea, even the little chance, that he had felt real desire for me shifted my perspective an embarrassing amount, really changed the way I saw myself in the past and present. It was unbalancing and delightful.

As you know if you’ve read this blog in past years, the story I can’t help telling myself about men is, they can (temporarily) want me, but they can’t love me. I believe this even though love has happened to me with men at least three times. I don’t know why the story is so embedded but no amount of paragraphs or therapy has ever dislodged it.

The story I’ve always told myself about The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow is that he was an innocent child whom I tried to corupt with my broken and slutty ways. I was a Bad Kid who hurt him. Seeing myself as a threat in general is one of the most annoying ways that rape culture has gotten under my skin, and I am happy to peel away another layer of it.

(Honestly though, writing this feels like I AM being a threat to him, like I’m still a bad influence on his lovely and put-together and situated life. I’m afraid I’m writing him right out of my life, that paragraphs are predatory in their own way, but I’m writing through it. Maybe I can be a good bad influence or maybe not I’m not even an influence at all, who knows.)

Exploring the rest of the museum felt like one of those dreams where you keep discovering new rooms in old and beloved homes. (Writing this feels like one of those dreams where I meet a man I’m fascinated with then spend the rest of sleep tangled up in dream logic trying to find him again. But not in an unpleasant way.) The time just flew by until he had to go meet his boyfriend for lunch. We made plans to hang out in my city next time, at my local museum.

Sweetie had driven me to visit the Boy, so she finished up her time at the local fancy garden and met us in front of the museum. We waved goodbye and then she and I spent the rest of the day exploring and catching Pokémons.

I was crushy, and giddy, and elated, and trying not to be embarrassed about all those things. I had to admit to myself that teenage me, like Rory Gilmore, had had a wonderful boyfriend. (But way better than Dean and without the Donna Reed cosplay.) More vexingly, I had to (for like the millionth time) admit to myself that I still believe in and long for love, that my erstwhile fantasy life of asexuality and spinsterhood might not actually be what I want. Ugh, longing. I guess I was lucky to avoid it for the few months that I did.

The next day, my whole body felt like spring and I made the super most of it. I got naked on the (very private) back patio and made myself a new chalk mural. I danced in the sun like a goof and then went to bed for a very good long time. I want to give you all the details, but it seems like somehow Favorite Aunt would know.

So I’m trying to think of ways to honor my slutty self this summer—I can’t make the Sparkly Festival, but shall I brave the nude beach? I’ve definitely gone back to swiping, and I’m letting myself think that snuggles might not be too far away. It’s nice to be back in the present tense, grateful and glowing.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Seven

I sometimes wish the other people in the story had just as many paragraphs I could read about their inner lives, but they don’t. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow is now the Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow, walking around another city being almost a complete mystery.

After the stupid Beatles letter, about twenty-five years went by. (What are we, Twin Peaks?)  Then, you know that feeling where you run into your (probably gay) first love at a family funeral and can’t stop flirting? No? Just me?

That’s how, about five years ago, I decided that the Boy-Now-Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow needed to be my friend. I got his number, took his picture to go with it, texted to apologize for being such a jerk in high school, was forgiven, then proceeded to do almost nothing about really making friends. I’d invite him to my yearly Christmas party, he couldn’t make it, we’d talk about making other plans, then not make other plans. Each year, Favorite Aunt would join facebook in reminding me to wish him a happy birthday. (If she was reminding HIM to wish ME a happy birthday, there’s no evidence.)

Then this year, a year in which I’d resolved to remember how to make new friends, a favorite artist got a retrospective in his city. I invited myself for a visit, set monthly reminders to actually remember to make plans, and then, to my great disbelief, there were plans.

I’d been thinking of this kind of the way I would any other awkward new friendship, but a few nights before our visit, texting him about museum logistics, I felt a surprising tide of warmth. It felt as though we’d always been making plans, ordinary and wonderful as making plans with Sweetie or Favorite Aunt or anyone else I readily and easily love. It startled me a little that I could feel that much closeness with someone I really didn’t know at all, even though I guess that’s what this blog is mostly about.

The warmth that spread through my body over this really very ordinary exchange reminded me of the feeling I sometimes got during trauma work—something was being gently prised loose, except this thing that had been stored in me wasn’t a hurt or a breakage but a treasure, a hope.

***

***Note: I watched The Unicorn Store right before writing the first draft of this part, but it probably would have been pretty glittery anyway.

Boy, The Unicorn Store really had my number.

There had been some doubt about whether we’d get to see the exhibit we’d planned for, the one I’d written into my 2019 goals, but there he was with tickets when I arrived, peering down into his phone looking EXACTLY the same except for a little grey and a cute beard and looking EXACTLY right for his way-cooler-than-I-am city. I called his name, we hugged, and we breezed into the museum, a little awkward but mostly in the care of bright colors, details, textures, and happy banter.

We had never hung out together so far from Favorite Aunt (though in a way it didn’t feel far from her at all…) so I thought it would be weird. Objectively, it IS weird to make plans with someone you knew for six months thirty years ago, or, more accurately kissed and loved but never really knew at all.

But really, as we moved from room to room catching up (in between times of me getting in trouble for taking too many pictures) nervousness and oddness gave over to a silly joy that had its own momentum. The sensation, which I’ve felt a couple of times before, was one of my heart unlatching, of becoming unseparated from him, from art, from myself, from love, from every beautiful thing that has ever been in the world.

(Is all)

It was both the old-friend sensation of no time having passed between visits and the mystical feeling of meeting a muse. It was both picking up where we’d left off (wherever THAT was) and noticing a labyrinth-string that I’d been following all along.

As much as I would have liked to be some imaginary cool, restrained person, I couldn’t really stop myself from becoming a high tide, an effervescently glitter-shining sea of exclaiming, gasping, giggling. It was both a Very Big Deal and the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

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.

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.