I'm a Stranger in a Wasteland

in

California is burning through me. I’m a stranger in a wasteland, going everywhere but nowhere in particular, punching holes in the linings of my sneakers, drenching tank tops in Black Opium-scented sweat, melting small slivers of my body off my body and leaving them as keepsakes on the sidewalks. I was here once. I existed. 

The air always hangs low, a centimeter above my body, a mild yet persistent suffocation. Like being wrapped in saran wrap. I lean against the balcony railing, rolling the cigarette back and forth in between my fingers like a mini-skateboard. The orange embers at the end are a brighter, hotter version of tonight’s sky. It’s nearly six p.m. and all the baby blue has dispersed, leaving behind a stretch of smokey, mellow orange. 

There’s a rather intense game of chicken going on below. The water splashes outside the outline of the pool, leaving the grey stone covered in amorphous spots of water and the blue-and-white striped lounge chairs soaking wet. The scent of chlorine swims up my nose and awakens my sleepy body. Mhm. I close my eyes, leaning further against the railing. A supercut of chlorine-coated memories is about to start playing inside of me when I hear a steady two-tap knock at the door. “It’s open!” I shout behind me.

Colin walks in, two cups of coffee in hand, and sets them on the dresser. “I realized that I didn’t ask you if you drink coffee. I just assumed.”

I don’t drink coffee, but every time I go to a new state, I find myself wanting to become a different person. Maybe here I smoke and drink coffee and introduce myself to strangers like Colin.

“I don’t drink coffee, but thank you anyway.”

Or maybe I don’t do those things.

“Sorry,” he blushes, a warm red flush spreading from his cheeks down his neck. He’s about two weeks post-buzzcut and his blond hair has grown in fast. 

He’s beautiful, like most other people in Los Angeles, but what I have found most beautiful about him has been his shyness — and his sincerity. The way he allows silence to permeate a room and makes no attempts to push her away; instead, he lets her take up more and more space if she so wants. Or, the way his fingers will tentatively graze mine, testing the waters, before he wraps his pinky around my pinky — and then he’ll steal a glance to see if I’m feeling how he’s feeling, but by the time I catch it, he’s already looking down at his feet as if he’s been caught red-handed, a smile spreading wide across his face. Or, the way he’ll doodle on napkins when we’re at breakfast and lunch, and when I ask him what he’s drawing he won’t show me, but then a day later I’ll find the napkins tucked inside my shorts pocket or at the bottom of my purse. There’s a boyishness to him, an innocence to him. Like he grew up but his view of the world didn’t. 

“I didn’t know you smoked. You don’t strike me as the type.”

The type. What type am I? Suddenly I want to know what I am inside of his body. Am I a tropical rain shower flowing through his veins or a blistering snowstorm? Does his stomach leap into his chest when I smile or is my smile nothing more than an everyday occurrence to him? Am I the first person he wants to call when something good happens or the last person when something bad happens? What am I to him? Who am I to him?

“I don’t smoke,” I grin.

He’s confused, but a curious smile grows on his face. He’s trying to place me. I like watching people try to figure me out, but especially him. I like watching the real-time Tetris in their eyes. I offer him the cigarette, “But you can have it.”

“Oh, no, I’m good,” he waves his hands in front of him and moves towards me, pulling me into a hug. I burrow my face into his neck. He tells me, “I don’t smoke either,” but the faint trace of smoke trapped in his t-shirt says otherwise. 

I smile. “What a coincidence.”

I Struck Summer Gold.

I struck summer gold.

The countryside is a stretched-out blur behind the glass windows, but when the train doors open I see it all so clearly — and I wish that this was home instead.

Wide-open fields; rolling hills; orange groves; trees that sing to each other; a palette of slightly undersaturated yellows, golds, and greens that leave nothing untouched; a breeze that stays with you long after it’s gone — a warm, tingling breeze that wraps its arms and legs around you and pulls you down with it; a freedom that crawls inside your throat and plants itself there, urging you to disappear from what you know and those who know you. I could be someone here, I could be different here, I could come alive here.

It may be the unfamiliarity of a new place, or maybe the over-familiarity of an old place driving these feelings, but I’m itching to get out. And this might be the place.

Power lines cut through the view. Clouds tattooed gold by the sun hang low; I can almost reach them if I try. 

I’ve always come alive near the mountains, under the sun, by the sea. Back home, I’m regenerative, in constant metamorphosis, killing parts of myself every day in hopes of coming alive. It would be nice to come alive and stay alive for good, even if for a minute.

The wind is howling below the horizon, almost imperceptibly, but I catch her in my palm and nudge her inside my ears. She wobbles at first, needing to adjust to me again (after all, it’s been a while), then starts swimming down my ear canals. She moves further into my body, trying to get to every corner as quickly as possible. Then, she starts vibrating inside of me like a steady drum beat. It’s starting, that feeling, that hunger. 

She tells me, “Move, dance with me, run towards me, let me embrace you, I’ll love you better than they ever could. You’re mine, you’re cut from me, you’re cut from the sun, you’re cut from the moon, you’re all the planets poured into one big body. But you’re mine first so come to me. Be mine the way I’ve always been yours.”

She pulls me like a puppet off the train and towards the field; I’m her personal marionette doll and I don’t mind it one bit. I nearly drop my bags as I get outside the station. in one easy pull, she lifts my hands above my head. She doesn’t care about propriety, she only cares about the rush of being alive. She pulls my right leg outward like a kick and pushes down my torso as if she’s tackling me. She’s disorienting me in the name of exhilaration, euphoria. It’s been a while since I’ve felt either so I say hello.

“Feel it,” she whispers and wraps her hands around my neck. Her fingertips brush against my skin tantalizingly slow, starting in the center of my neck and moving outwards until all I can feel is the lingering remains of where she just was. I plant my feet firmly into the ground for a few final moments of groundedness before she takes over. 

She knows, she remembers. I smile. Someone remembers me. I am someone’s memory. I am permanent to someone. 

“Welcome back,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

I start running — but not for long before she freezes, rather stops me, in place. 

“Not yet.” she erects an invisible wall in front of me, stopping me in my tracks. “Dance first. Run later.”

So I start dancing again. It’s not pretty. It’s quite rough and uncoordinated. There’s no consistency. It’s awkward. I’m spinning on my feet and stretching and pushing my arms and legs away from my body, pirouetting as best I can which is actually not as bad as it could be. I’m moving my body like rain sliding down the orange trees, moving my body the way the stalks of wheat do when the wind tickles them during golden hour, moving my body like the clouds leisurely rolling across the hills, moving my body like nature does every day. 

My hair is hitting my face, I’m breathless, I’m sweating through my shirt, my toes are digging into my sneakers, but I feel the most me that I have in a while so I cannot stop. I won’t.

Everything in the universe is moving through me. I’m no longer my body but a vessel for the wind, for nature to use as an extension of itself. The separation between my body and the rest of reality has disintegrated. Everything is everything. 

“Now run,” she commands, lovingly, and pulls me towards the hills. I lunge forward, nearly tripping over my feet. 

She’s at my feet, wrapping herself around my ankles. She’s at my neck, blowing my hair away from my face. She’s slinking underneath my shirt, up my stomach, spreading herself across my chest and rushing down my bare arms until she reaches my hands and holds them in her gentle grip. She’s my familiar embrace, the warmest embrace, the not-so-quiet friend of mine I’ve had since I was little.

I’m myself right now. I feel like myself more than I do most days. This is why I can never stay still. I was born to move, to dance, to run, and never stop. I’m running, feet hitting the grass in light thumps as if I’m running on clouds. The sun has enveloped everything in a golden glow. Time is at a standstill. Time is imperceptible. Time doesn’t exist here anymore. 

The train doors close. I blink. I press my palm against the glass. She taps — once, twice, three times — against the glass. I smile at my reflection. She did it again.

A Meditation on Time Travel

in

Can I tell you a not-so-secret-secret? I float between worlds — and years, too. 

The years ‘bit’ is a recent revelation. I’ve become a past-tense psychic. Last Friday, when I stepped outside my building, it was the summer of 2015. The morning was crisp, vulnerably bright but cautiously on edge. It didn’t know what could happen but it had that innate optimism working in overdrive to try to make something good happen. That was me in 2015: full of fervor, and unshakeable, overwhelming hunger, but endlessly guarded. I had safety locks in places that, back then, even I didn’t know about. 

The moment I stepped outside, I was washed in a full-body familiarity; it was as if I had stepped through a portal and ended up inside my 19-year-old body again. But how had I managed to truncate eight years of my life into a morsel of time? How had I managed to even go back? Was anyone else seeing this? More importantly, was anyone else feeling this? And why the summer of 2015? What was so special about being 19 years old again? 

The summer of 2015 was divided into two distinct color schemes: 1, a gradient of hazy purples and pinks, and 2, a series of black-and-white photographs. There’s a cloudy layer covering all the events and feelings of that summer, keeping them from erupting and overflowing on everyone. But not well. There was always leakage, always an overshare, always a too-muchness that I couldn’t cover up. 

I always oscillated between being too much and not enough. Balance was a foreign concept, the same way allowing and receiving love was. A single kind word was an instant K.O. I craved love so desperately, yet any time I got close to it, I backed away, tripping over my own feet. Bring me love! But then keep it very far away from me! I know it doesn’t make sense, but neither do I!

I was deeply excitable and easily upset-able; I was rough around all my edges, and soft in all the places the world laughs at. I was constantly teetering on opposite ends of all spectrums but never finding the center that I so desperately craved. Everything was never-ending-ly spilling out of me and I tried doing everything to contain it, but I could never get it right. I was always too much, a little off, kind of wrong, not right, weird. 

Then it happened again today: I went for a walk on the boardwalk and it was the summer of 2016. I looked around, stupefied. Why the summer of 2016? What had become so special about being 20 again? I was dressed for the winter, three layers of pants, a polka-dot scarf wrapped around my neck thrice, but suddenly it was that summer — that beautifully, vibrant summer whose memories are still coated yellow and pink inside my body — and I was wearing a tank top and shorts, with my hair pulled back into a ponytail, inside of a body that loved to run on nothing.

I stood on the boardwalk, but my body had a different texture to it. A different set of colors, a different set of shapes, a different set of energetic identities that comprised it. I was 20 again but way too overqualified to be 20. 

Whenever summers visit me, like a lingering outline, I become tempted to shed my clothes and run into the sky. I wanted to do that today. At the end of the boardwalk, I imagined that the sky’s mouth would open up, its gummy, reddish-pink tongue would unravel like a fruit roll-up for me to step onto, and then it would swallow me up and away. I always want to let go of this corporeal form. It weighs me down sometimes (I’m sorry). 

That’s why I wish someone else could visit my body, pace my hallways, run across my walls, float through my floors, sit on my chairs, sleep in my beds, dance barefooted on my living room carpet, put on my makeup, wear my clothes, and walk around as if they were me. I want someone else to see inside of me and then tell me what they see. What’s it like to be me for a day? Is my body dark and cavernous, a single floorboard wide, a floorboard that’s creaky and rotted? Or is it an endless maze and the exit moves as soon as you get too close to it? Am I all the colors that could possibly exist, undulating in and out of one another? If you answer yes to any of the above, would you still want to be me after a minute or would that be too much for you?

I’m still embarrassed to write about my sensitivity, my ability to feel spectrums of emotions I haven’t seen people put into words yet, because with it comes this undercurrent of ‘too muchness’. I have always been too much, an odd little big thing. There’s so much that I write that is embellished, worded delicately, worded beautifully, because the truth isn’t beautiful. It’s harsh, sharp, pungent, painful. How do you write about being almost murdered without evoking concern? How do you write about a decade of eating disorders without inspiring pity? How do you write about the tragedies of your life in a way that doesn’t change how people see you? Because I just changed how you saw me. I do it with every single sentence.

I used to wonder if tragedy was the best part of me. That’s why I spent most of my time writing about it. How easy it was — and still is — to swim into the pain and drown myself in it over and over just to create something bigger and far more beautiful than I could ever be. I realize now that I was really writing so I could listen to myself. Everything I have ever written, and will ever write, is a love letter to myself, first and foremost. 

It was 2016 today. And it was 2015 last week. And I don’t think I’ll ever be one thing. And I don’t think I’ll never not be too much. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop never-ending-ly spilling out, falling apart to come back together again. I think I am simply endless

vengeance.

in

a mumbled frenzy continues to grow in the underbelly of this city. these scattered brains and empty eyes of hollow bodies too young to die have never had a say in their destiny. their misfortune was fated from the start.

the days are a withering flame, bodies never in a standstill, the shuffling of feet on the street swept away until it’s a faraway echo ready to be squashed by the creeping sunset.

the nights are a balloon frozen in mid-explosion — and there’s always a hungry fist waiting around to crush it. the fist is patient, willing to bide its time, willing to dance its fingers across the fractured crystals starting to disperse outwards. but it is careful when doing so, lest it allows the sharp icicles to pierce its flesh.

“no, not yet,” the fist says. “not now.”

this fist is calculating; the fist is playing a chess game against everyone, and everyone doesn’t know it yet — and they won’t know until the almighty chill hits them. but by then, it’ll be too late.

this city is never at peace, hardly a moment goes by without some sense of unease. the people are on edge. the people are waiting for something else to fall apart the way it always does.

i move in the dark, below the rays of the moon. i watch dreams collapse on the sidewalks, only for nightmares to emerge out of the sewers with a sinister howl. i am as tied to this city as my soul is tied to this body of mine.

i clean the mess. it is my duty. no one needs to know why i do it, or that it’s me who’s doing it. all they need to know is that someone is doing it. some one.

i stuff the nightmares into my pockets, in between my fingers, under my nails, up my nostrils, below my tongue, behind my ears, anywhere that i can, anywhere that isn’t out there. out there these nightmares can stroke panic; in me, they can only deepen the abyss. and from the abyss, my vengeance grows.

the nightmares are relentless, but they’re single-minded. with enough time, i barely notice them anyway. this city needs a shred of hope. maybe i can be the one, some one, to bring it back.

Thursday afternoon voice memo

We have no hot water so we’ve been boiling it on the kitchen stove and carrying the pots to the bathroom to clean ourselves. It’s Thursday afternoon, the rain is back, and I’m sitting on the white shower chair, balancing the largest pot we have on my knees. The pot is no longer scalding, having used up most of the hot water in it, and what is left inside has cooled. I stare at my reflection inside the pot, a modern-day Narcissus. There I am, a black silhouette with a few sharp strands of hair poking out from my neck. 

I cut my hair short so I would have room to breathe, but every day I am gasping for control that has always been two steps ahead. Sleep never comes, and lately I’ve had more nightmares than I’d like to have but reality is what still scares me the most. I see my life crumbling before my eyes and I’m torn between delusional positivity and two fists that are hungry to throw themselves against something. Everyone says that violence isn’t the answer, but why does it seem that every man in my life forgets that when it comes to my body? 

I feel the weight of everyone so heavily. Even alone, I am bogged down by bodies that aren’t mine. Bodies I never asked for. Bodies I do not want. And I’d like to be nice about it, but niceness has left me with a thousand tons on my chest that won’t move, won’t budge, won’t let me breathe, and I am tired, and I am angry. 

People tell me that I “should really do something about that anger,” and here I thought I had done a good job at hiding it. You need to be “nicer”, you need to be more “tolerable”, but what I really need is for everyone to fuck off. 

Drops of water slide down my chin and down the bridge of my nose, landing with silent plops inside the pot. My knees shake from nerves, but nerves from what I’m not sure of. I cradle the pot in my hands, holding it close to my chest. Object permanence. I am here right now, even if parts of me are starting to float away. 

It’s a big pot, black, a handle on each side, four silver bolts in place to keep the handles from breaking off. More water keeps sliding off my face and into the pot. My breath grows shakier, my nose is stuffed, and despite being tall, I felt somewhat small. I’m not sure why or what is happening. But that’s true for a lot of my life, not knowing why I’m scared but being scared nonetheless — and not realizing, until I’m twenty-six, that I’m always scared because I have never been safe. So I constantly travel between two worlds, that of younger me and that of present me, never being fully present and never being fully young, because it’s safer to be a drifter than it is to plant roots. I’m floating, drifting between time, tied to some sense of an outline of me, but not a full outline or an accurate outline of me. Who I am today is not really truly me. A lot of the things I thought were innate personality quirks are not actually me or mine — they’re just trauma responses, coping mechanisms I developed to protect myself from being abused by authority figures in my life (read: men). 

Keep quiet or else you’ll say the wrong thing and set him off. Talk fast because you may not have a chance to explain yourself later. Pay attention to every facial expression he makes so you know when things start flying south so you can do everything in your power to calm him down. Shirk under every touch because no man has ever touched you in a way that wasn’t violent (and even if a man touched you with love, you wouldn’t know how to respond because all you’ve known your whole life is that love = violence). 

There’s water dripping down my body, over and in between my stomach rolls, and down towards my thighs. He’d tell me to fix that, too, so other men would want to be with me. If he didn’t love me as much he did, he’d kill me. His words, not mine. Love has never been love, but death. A slow death. I am resilient, but as a wise woman once said, resilience is forced survival. I am surviving because I have to, because I need to, because I want to. I’m in my body, I’m fighting to be in it, even if some people have tried to take me out of it entirely.  My childhood is over, but the memories aren’t. I’m revisiting each one, even the ones that almost killed me.

The age of innocence is waning and this shyness has always been paper-thin. Underneath it is a match just waiting for the spark. And I know it’s coming. It’s almost here. 

4/28/21

The fresh smell of barbecue captures my attention. It’s a sign: there’s summer rattling on its hinges, waiting to drop its heat onto our bodies and lure us away from the cold and the bad. The cars that drive past me on the streets are mere echoes; they disappear into a void outside my frame of vision. It’s late afternoon so the sun is still around, but its shine is less vibrant, more partially there. The air is self-regulating — cold then cool — because it’s still early spring. But the scent of barbecue is here to say “Well, not for long.” 

I turn the corner and walk down a half-beaten-up sidewalk, a byproduct of the nearby construction on a building that may or may not be finished but I’m too disinterested to look up and draw a conclusion. At the front of the houses that live on this street are half-open fences, empty and overflowing garbage cans, and objects strewn around or precariously propped up. Every object has its place. On the street across from the one I’m walking down is a modern-day apartment complex that sticks out like a sore thumb. Next to it is a two-story house, its exterior walls painted a bright, sunny yellow. Right in front of its door, a young brown boy with rich black hair, wearing all black, sprawls himself across the entryway, his arms and legs hanging off the quarter-railings on the sides. He has headphones in and he is engrossed in his phone. I find the way he lays there, comfortable in such a seemingly uncomfortable position, to be both refreshing and perplexing. Beside him, the yellow paint is more obvious than ever, and it continues to stick out in a sea of silver and white and grey. 

I move further down the street and when Iiget near this one car, my ears catch a familiar tune (“Pon De Replay” by Rihanna) that takes me back to the 2000s when MySpace was big, when TRL was big, and when life seemed big even though I was still so small.

i leave my body for the next several minutes, coming back into it inside a grocery store. for all the times i’ve been inside this store i still can’t recall it ever having a smell; there’s just nothing. i relax when the store owner walks down the aisle and not the pleasant store manager whose daughter i went to school with. i wince internally every time i lock eyes with her, and secretly hope she won’t recognize me, let alone come over and create small talk. my biggest fear is she sees me and compares me to me last month, me last year, and me when she first me. will she put the pieces together and figure out when the slow descent into madness started? i doubt it, because i never make things too obvious, but other things ae=re not so easy to hide. 

i hold a large, bigger-than-my-palm, sticky grapefruit in my hand, and toss it into a plastic bag that i then toss into a red shopping cart that rests sideways against my hip. i look at packaged up treats that i cannot have for a laundry-list of reasons depending on the day. there is movement all across this small store, from the short man who stocks the vegetables, to the cashiers up at the front who talk amongst themselves, to the random customers who walk amongst the two, tight aisles picking things out then disappearing out into the world again. even if there were no customers, the low hum of the fridge that lacks static but is full of empty space would be enough to keep my company. 

i don’t really need to be here right now, but i have entered that all-too-familiar cyclical stage of my existence where i am mentally checked out because my emotions are drowning me. that’s not to say that i am not in my head, but it’s to say that currently my head is filtering several hundred thoughts every second and all of them are telling me to do the things that numb me out and keep me distracted from actual reality. in other words, the speed of which my brain is operating at, this frenzied anxiety pushes me out of my head, but my body doesn’t want me either so i am floating between both, forever on the verge. 

everything is too in motion and i am overloaded. i can only go so long depriving my senses before they rush out and smother me whole. an older, olive-skinned woman, with coarse dark brown hair that pushes out from underneath her fancy black hat, stands in the middle of the aisle, blocking me from moving back to the register. i sigh, resigning myself to this purgatory for several more moments. suddenly, a voice comes from her pocket letting her know that she never dropped the phone call, and in a sickly sweet tone that feels ever-so disingenuous, she responds with an affectionate nickname. all her words are coated in molasses, and i am doing my best to keep my distance. in this part of the cycle of my being, i cling to anger rather easily. i find rage, casually sitting at the base of my throat and the colorless mass envisions shoving the woman out of the way. depression manifests as internal rage that never had an outlet outside of me so now it free-falls within. 

eventually, she moves enough inches forward towards the vegetable shelves so that I can pass by her. 

Outside, a blonde-haired, white woman in her 50s holds a quarter-bitten pirozhki in her hand. She stares past me, through me, into the store that is now behind me as I walk out the front door. Our our left, several plastic containers house freshly made Russian and Ukrainian dishes. I miss the days of buying cabbage pirozhkis and eating all their fried dough, discarding most of the cabbage because the real reason I would eat the pirozhki was for the overly-greased, crusted-in-certain-parts-and-fluffy-in-other-parts dough. Isn’t it interesting how the familiar, the things we yearn for and crave and beg to receive, one day become choices we have the _____ to reject? 

December Blues and Crescent Moons

in

December blues began to pour into our conversations, leaving us hungover for days on end. we slept through the mornings and well into the afternoons on an unmade bed fit for two. our bodies were nothing more than skin and bones that crisscrossed at odd angles on eggshell-colored sheets and pillows. we had stayed indoors so much the past few weeks — a trait of our similar introverted natures as well an unspoken hunger between us to spend as much time together as we possibly could away from everyone else — that our skin had lost both color and vibrancy. when we would finally awake late in the afternoon, and look at ourselves in the bathroom mirror, we would find dark violet-grey crescent moons buried beneath our eyes. in turn, Robert would splash water on his face and i would rub a baby blue gel-cream onto my skin, hoping that the crescents would disappear; i much preferred them shining bright in the sky than hanging on my face. 

as the december days hid — and in their place the december nights entered through the cracked-open slit in our kitchen window — we were overcome with a hunger to be more than we were, a yearning for a different stroke of life. 

fall had been odd, peculiar, unmanageable, and unimaginable: Robert struggled with his work while i fought with all the versions of myself that no longer served me any purpose. i had to let go of them, but i was incapable; i hated change, even if it was good for me. 

our relationship also had its ups and downs during this time. we found ourselves deeply in love one day, then silent friends the next. we went from spending all day together in bed, listening to records and talking about a vastitude of topics — from poetry to film to our upstairs neighbor’s weird insistence that we were siblings because we looked so much alike — to spending several days in succession without speaking more than a few words to one another. and though this behavior could be seen as normal, for partners are not always attached at the hip, i suppose it was the way that we oscillated between matching our language, both body and mind, to one another’s to then hardly speaking at all that left me constantly feeling displaced in our relationship. 

but even in silence and stillness, there was still a magnetism between us that existed far beyond the physical. the waning embers of our love glowed all around us, that i knew — and Robert did, too; we just never said anything about them. and on the days where we existed apart from one another, i held onto those embers a a little bit tighter. i had always been fiercely independent and counter-dependent, but with Robert, i couldn’t help myself from becoming more and more codependent, hungry for even the tiniest morsel of his approval, validation, and love. 

i was used to this rollercoaster of emotions, and i had learned long ago how to exist in this grey space (and even thrive in it), but i found it especially difficult to deal with this time around because of how much i adored Robert. i was torn between myself — who i was, who i had created myself to be in order to stay safe, and who i was becoming — and how i felt for Robert and what we had created together. my love had always been warm, generous, and giving, but over the years, i had learned how to quell it to be lukewarm at best. i had met far too many people who hadn’t deserved my love and affection, so i taught myself how to shut it down and how to keep any feelings i had for anyone to a minimum, if at all. yet, and despite all of my attempts to squash it, deep down inside of me there still burned a love so bright and so unforgiving that it was waiting to be let out. i wanted to share it with Robert, but i couldn’t tell if he wanted this love of mine. i also could never tell if Robert knew how much i cared for him to begin with because i was so cautious with my love. by all accounts, he seemed happy with our arrangement, so that became good enough for me, most of the time at least. 

however, when we had lulls in our relationship, i grew antsy and anxious. fearing that i had done something to drive him away, i felt a compulsive need to get his attention without outwardly saying so. the logical thing to do was to have a conversation with him, to share my worries and fears, but my anxieties always triumphed logic; that, and i was conflict-avoidant. i had no interest in honest conversations. honest conversations always carried risks with them and one of those risks was physical altercation. i had experienced it before and i had enough physical scars to prove it. i also had no masochistic streak in my body to explore that part of my life again, so honest conversations were off the table.

but Robert was different and i knew that. i felt that. he was kind, he never raised his voice, and his touch warmed my body. he made me feel safe in a way that no one ever had. yet, a part of me still worried that maybe i hadn’t read him right, that maybe one day he would snap, hit me, and push me up against a wall, threatening to hurt me in ways that i couldn’t even imagine. i recognized that he wasn’t capable of doing such a thing, but what if he was? what if he was?

i resented myself for thinking so poorly of him, but could you blame me? it was my brain’s evolutionary protection mechanism kicking in. i just wanted to be safe. and if being safe meant keeping my mouth shut, while doing everything to get him to notice me on his own accord, then so be it. old habits die hard.

one evening in mid-November, while Robert read a book in the kitchen and enjoyed a glass of whiskey, i snuck into our bathroom to cut my hair and dye it blonde. a part of me grew tired of staring at the same person in the mirror, and another part of me wanted Robert’s attention in any way that i could get it. once i was done, i sheepishly entered the kitchen and waited for him to take notice. i expected Robert to get mad (for every reason already stated, but more so, in that moment, because of a pronounced side-effect of dating a string of physically and emotionally abusive men before him), but he didn’t. instead, he looked at me with his big brown eyes and smiled from ear-to-ear with his signature childlike grin. 

“you look electric,” he said and immediately dropped his book onto the table. he walked over to me and i counted every step. when he began to run his fingers through my hair, i held my breath. i watched the way he marveled at me, like i was a piece of art only he had access to. he scratched at my temples and tugged on my hair, feeling its new, choppy texture in between his fingers. i closed my eyes and faded away into the sensation of his touch. his fingers moved down to my cheeks and then down to my jawline until he had his index finger resting underneath my chin. he raised it ever-so-slightly to get my attention. i opened my eyes and met his. 

“why are you running from me?” he asked, his voice tender and full of concern. Robert had this inexplicable ability to melt time and space and unravel you in ways that you didn’t think were possible. i had always been the person strangers told their secrets to, yet the first time i met Robert, i found myself sharing secrets i thought i would never tell a soul. he didn’t ask the question again out loud, but i heard it again once more: “why are you running from me?”. i suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to both cry and collapse in his arms. i was so tired of running, but if i stopped, who would i be? would he be able to handle that version of me? no one had been able to handle me in any version of me before this so why should this time be any different? 

“hey.” 

his voice cut through the sandstorm of thoughts swirling in my head. almost as if he was reading my mind, and it often felt like he was, he said “i’m not going anywhere” and dragged his thumb slowly across my lips before leaning in to kiss them. every kiss with Robert felt like the first and the last: the first because it always felt gentle, new, and innocent, and the last because i always feared that he would realize he wasn’t really in love with me but some idea of me that i had let him think existed.

i leaned into his embrace and wrapped my arms around his body. i could run away another time, this i reasoned with myself, but for now, i really wanted to stop running — and, for long enough to enjoy this moment and him and us before i felt that urge to start running kick in again.