I've been doing some early spring cleaning and accidentally came across a "mystery" thumb drive of writings I thought I had gotten rid of years ago. At first I didn't know what was on it, but when I popped it in my laptop and called up my documents I found dozens of short stories and an early draft of a 623 page novel I started writing around 2011.
It was considerably different than the version I finished in the mid-teens (and threw away) and I remember now that I thought I also got rid of the first version because parts of it were just too emotionally real for me, despite how it was pretty much 99.99999% (you get the picture) fiction.
I recently read that imagining conversations, known as jouska, can make the brain react similarly to real experiences because mental simulation activates the same neurological networks involved in actual speech and social processing.
This creeps me out more than I can say because I very much like to separate fact from fiction and not imagine insanely unrealistic or hopeful things. I did this when I was much, much younger and it did nothing but cause anguish and trouble.
I've never quite gotten the grasp of taking a very small real life thing and turning it into completely different fiction...it feels very, very wrong, somehow, like I'm even more unwell than I previously thought. So why I'm sharing the first part of it, I honestly have no clue. Perhaps I'm trying to exorcise something within myself.
Most of the novel turn a sharp turn after page 30 and went in a completely different, bonkers direction, which is one reason I threw away the second draft (that at the time I thought was the only draft). Besides the rather bad, definitely melodramatic writing in it, there was an inherent sickness about all of it, embedded deep within what I stupidly thought was love and romance with an imaginary woman I pulled out of my warped imagination back then.
*(I am happy, though, to discover that Exodus disbanded in 2013 and that its president, Alan Chambers, apologized for the pain caused by promoting "reparative" therapy and admitted that sexual orientation cannot be changed, acknowledging the group had failed).
No Coming Back From This One
Nancy didn’t come out and tell me she didn’t love me anymore. In fact, she desperately tried to hide the fact. But it was in her eyes, in their sadness and in the guilt she could never quite hide.
I knew that if I confronted her, she’d only deny it and that she would feel even worse than she already did. I thought about making myself the bad guy and leaving, but I wasn’t sure I was strong enough. On the other hand, I knew between her commitment and my inability to let her go, things could continue to be heart-breaking but non-moving for a long, long time.
Her idea of love and my idea were completely different. She thought you should stay no matter what or, rather, she would have if our circumstances had been “normal.” I thought pity was the cruelest form of love. I'd rather she hate me with all of her heart than love me lukewarm affection and solid obligation.
Could there be any relationship out there in the world stranger than ours, I used to ask myself the first year we were together. Not counting the non-lesbian lesbian factor, of course.
We never mentioned the l word. We both thought it sounded ugly and that it instantly brought to mind women clad in plaid who wore their hair slicked back and spoke like the very men they supposedly hated, if you went by the stereotypes. We were different from them, wanted no part of what seemed more political identity than honest love.
We referred to ourselves, just between us, as ‘romantic friends.’ Because there was romance (some) and there was friendship (lots) but not much more.
We had secrets, both shared and separate, all almost as old as we were. We had known each other in high school and the night we had bumped into each other decades later had sparked one of the biggest shocks of my life. It had also brought memories back I hoped I'd lost forever, thought for sure I’d lost forever.
Nancy, I strongly suspected, was working up the courage to tell me she had recently realized she might very well like men as well as women, or even maybe instead of, though I’m not so sure that was the right way to phrase exactly what was going on. I wasn’t really sure, never had been, that she was gay at all.
Two weeks ago, when I was picking up her gym bag after it fell over in the hallway, some literature from *Exodus slipped out. There was no way I could miss the bold print strongly proclaiming anyone could leave the "sinful lifestyle of homosexuality." I felt as sick about the flier as the people who wrote it probably would about me.
Instead of maturely and gently confronting her I fell into deep despair and had recently returned to drinking in secret to alleviate that and the fact that lately she often came home from work faintly smelling of cologne.
Nancy had never been comfortable with labeling and that had made perfect sense, but there was a distinct difference between refusal to be pinned down by labels and the shame of what lay behind those labels.
One night I arrived at our apartment early because we had lost power at the library in the middle of a heat wave and been given the option of taking personal leave instead of going to another branch.
I walked in the door, half closing my eyes in case I saw something I’d never be able to un-see. I didn't think Nancy would ever bring someone home to fool around with, but my insecurities and paranoia had been growing.
Her fidelity, in my mind, was hanging by a thin thread. And if she had acted on any of her feelings, it wouldn't have been her fault. There's only so much that makes you want to stay when you fall out of love with someone.
How could it really be cheating, anyway, when we what had was so undefinable, so non-eternal?
And if she were going to Exodus meetings? That discussion would probably go a whole different way and wouldn't explain the intense guilt she seemed to be experiencing for what she saw as hurting me. Anyone who firmly believed homosexuality was a sin wouldn’t feel guilty about feeling guilty about it, right?
I remained this way for a few seconds, not realizing Nancy sat at our small kitchen table, watching me, her finely shaped hands clasped around a coffee cup as if using it for a heater. If I had looked closer, I might have even seen her shivering the slightest.
If I’d had my eyes open, maybe I would have seen that something was wrong. If I hadn’t been so self-absorbed, maybe I would have asked about it. But I didn’t really have to ask because I would have known, did know. She was waiting for the right time to confess her dying love.
“Are you okay?” She asked and I opened my eyes more to find her looking a bit alarmed and very concerned. It touched me and, for a second, tricked me into thinking I was wrong about everything related to us. I couldn’t remember her ever looking at me with such intense concern before.
Maybe she did love me the way I longed for her to. No one, short of my mother before she had thrown me out when I came out, had ever shown such genuine worry for me before.
But her gentleness, her uncanny ability to size up exactly what was going on no matter what you said might be happening otherwise…well, that was easy to mistake for something bigger, something more life-lasting and loving.
I'd never known anyone else like Nancy before. Ever. She was both so reserved and the most vital person I knew, quiet but present everywhere and she made everything, from chores to her clothes, seem magical.
I cleared my throat, hoped it didn’t show that I’d been crying. “Um, yeah. Just getting a migraine, that’s all.”
I know! I know, I wanted to tell her. You don’t have to stay. You. Don’t. Have to stay. (You’re free to go. You can leave right now! I wanted to scream.)
It kind of sickened me (even now) to realize that I had always thought of her through the years well before we'd met again that night. Who holds on to a high school crush that long?
“Oh no! That's terrible!” Her intense exclamation wasn’t one of sarcasm. She always felt bad for anyone under the weather. “Why don’t you get ready for bed and get under the covers and I’ll bring you some tea and get a heating pad for your forehead?”
Now her kindness threatened to undo me and there was no holding back the tears. Her brown eyes widened and her brown pony-tailed hair bounced back and forth as she leaped up from the table to come over and hug me.
“Don’t touch me,” I wanted to scream, but didn’t, of course.
Ever since I'd had known her there had been something so appealing and unique about her sincere capacity to care, whether it came through in her gentle touch or the way she really listened to people. She didn’t care if you were rich or poor, popular or geeky, pretty or ugly. She just wanted to help.
“Oh, Aggie. What is it? What’s wrong?” She stood right in front of me, brushed the hair out of my eyes and placed the back of her hand against my forehead.
Even her long and slender fingers were full of kindness. Her sad eyes came from that kindness because if she didn’t care about my feelings, about the guilt, she would just go on, happy as can be. She should be happy. She should.
“You’re burning up!”
I tried to deny it, but it was obvious (and a complete surprise to me) that I actually was sick and I just avoided throwing up the lunch I’d shakily eaten earlier that day. At least until I made it to the bathroom.
Deep down in my heart I knew I should have refused her help, refused the way she stayed with me through the night, next to the toilet, pulling my hair back from my face, until I stopped throwing up, hugging me tight when I had uncontrollable shakes.
But the comfort of her arms around me and the way she held back my hair proved irresistible and when she continued to ask me why I was crying, I blamed it on how tired and sick I was and just cried more.
Even after it was clear I had thrown up all I could throw up, she stayed there, rocking me back and forth while saying, “I’m so sorry, Aggie. I am so sorry.”
Even she couldn't add, "It'll get better. You'll see," like she usually did when I was sick. It would have been a lie. She knew the real reason I was sick just as I knew why her apologies filled with sorrow.
She had tried so very very hard to be there for me in every kind of way, her pain so clear when she couldn’t. I should be the one comforting her.
The sickest, most shameful, painful thing about love, I always thought, was when you kept on loving someone long after you knew she didn’t want you to.
No comments:
Post a Comment