I will the machine.

Tag: love

  • If You Can’t Say Something Honest

    I will know.

    I will cut off the elephant’s head

    and mount it to my wall

    there is no tension, or unspoken truth

    left standing in this hall

    The greatest devastation in my life actually isn’t not having parents. It isn’t that I’m rootless and uncertain of my immediate future, consistently. It’s not the constant coming and going of people that is a fairly universal experience, but perhaps a more detrimental one when you don’t meet them with a protective mask.

    It’s that those people are in and out because they expect me to step through a door they won’t walk out of themselves, and won’t tell me. Most would prefer to wrap themselves in their dissonance so securely that they aren’t fully conscious that its harm still comes from what they won’t say. It’s cold outside, and it’s uncomfortable.

    And I find myself a loner in every space because I can’t live that way.

    “Your blog is definitely resonating with me. I appreciate your honesty and transparency as we need more of that these days. Makes me not feel alone.”

    I receive a message like this once or twice per post. I answer these with a full willingness to connect rather than a passive “thank you,” because it matters to me.

    This time, that reply led to a connection with someone that, upon first impression, seemed as willing to let me know them as I am. I’ve experienced it before- you put two people like that in the same arena and the show moves at warp speed. He drove two hours to visit me, and the energy was just as I had hoped it would be.

    All of the week to follow was ceaseless banter and vulnerability. I was wary of that because I had seen this used by a manipulator in my past as a way to get me attached so that I’d be more likely to tolerate the toxic behaviors to come later. But I allow people to be different than those I have known, and leaned in with my eyes open.

    During the course of our conversations, I was clear that my life was messy, and unpredictable. I had a habit of just… having enough and leaving relationships, jobs, states even. And he told me he was in the middle of some legal matters to which I collected enough context and asked- were you married?

    He was. It wasn’t until later that it clicked that he still is. But the context mattered, and I stayed present because part of valuing transparency is allowing for the mess it always reveals. What I didn’t do was lose my discernment.

    Fairly impulsively, he decided to come visit again the next weekend. I was on the phone with him on my drive home from work that Friday when he talked indirectly about how he really needs his own space at home, and so I was forced to ask- wait, do you still live together? The pause on the other side had already answered for him, but he admitted that to me too.

    But only after I had asked. He explained it away and we hung up the phone. I chewed on that for a little while but the softness I had was already dishonored. The lightness in my step was gone, just like that.

    I called him again after he had begun the drive my direction. I said, “Before you get too far from home, I think you should turn around. I’m not comfortable with this.”

    He explained it away again, and kept driving. And in the freeze of wanting to be gracious, but not walked all over, I let him show up. Because don’t I know the complication of being stuck somewhere toxic, fully checked out in all ways except physical. I understood the deep need for somebody safe, and it’s a privilege that because of my writing, people feel safe with me.

    But I was never on board with being someone’s escape when I wanted something sustainable. I am not an emotional crash pad just because I am open. And despite another awesome weekend with a person that matched my emotional fluency, I still found the incongruence between action and word. He spoke respect, but still drove to me despite my asking him to turn around. He didn’t disclose major information about himself despite his admiration for my honesty. He still danced past a couple other boundaries and wrote it off as play. He opted out of uploading a ride we did together on Strava despite saying it was “silly to worry about” being seen with me. Even a joke about “are you going to write about me too?” was a subtle tell.

    And none of that is actually, truly honest. And so, I do the thing I’m so painfully well-practiced at now- I walked away.

    That was yesterday. I’m writing about it because people either need to understand this, or feel understood. It takes me so little time to decide that a potential relationship isn’t built on anything stable even when my emotions haven’t accepted it, and I went from “let’s talk more about this,” to “this isn’t going to work,” inside 45-minutes. It’s that sword-brandishing, automatic pilot that keeps me safe when I haven’t fully digested what’s happening in front of me.

    Today is the sad and angry part. The part where I’m showing my teeth again because another person came to me, and still didn’t come fully as themselves because they thought I might walk away.

    But the kindest thing you can do for someone you feel something for is give them their freedom to make that choice. A mask is still deceptive even if it only frames the eyes. I stand a chance of standing next to you in the middle of your storm if you show me exactly where you are.

    But I can’t, if you won’t.

    Let me.

    _____

    My next post, ‘Projection, Your Honor: Learning to Trust the Part of You that Knows,’ deconstructs the subliminal messaging I learned to read in toxic dynamics in my past. The intuition that something is off in any given situation is a primordial trait we all have- learning to decipher it and respond in real-time is something that gets talked about less. Let’s get into that.

  • If You’d Known Me When I Was Older

    Here lately, I’ve been going to bed at night and wandering Grandma and Papa’s house while the worries of my adult life wait outside. I wake up in the Blue Room; it’s 9:00 a.m. and Papa insists I’ve slept long enough. I walk down the hallway, past the laminated world map with the USSR still labelled on it, through the living room with the tan carpet and the slightly purple, maroon curtains, past the basement door where I threw up once, and into the warm kitchen. The morning sun touches that one corner of the linoleum floor again while the subtle smoke of breakfast dances above it. The woods through the window are glittering over the grass that was sometimes charred after Papa, by mistake or purposefully, let the flame in the burn pile get carried away. I open up the glass cabinets and remember the bowls with the stars on them, the mugs for coffee I hadn’t acquired the taste for yet, the tall, clear, angled glasses I would pour Diet Coke into for Grandma, slowly so that it didn’t fizz too much and go flat. I take the plate of eggs and bacon and grits and walk into the sunroom, where they both sit, and eat with them while Fox News blares on TV.

    I ask Papa if I can play on the computer and then go swap between countless CD-ROMs. I run with Spirit the Stallion, giggle at the characters with Reader Rabbit, shiver as Mathra flies overhead on The Cluefinders, and run from a t-rex on Dinosaur Adventure 3-D. Inevitably, I can’t sit still anymore and head outside to run the trails Papa cut in the field with the bush hog and look for rat snakes under sheet metal. When I come back in he scolds me for eating directly out of the peanut butter jar, but forgets about it when I tell him I caught a catfish in the net he had made longer by duct taping a 2×4 to it. The fish had a hook stuck in its mouth and I still don’t know if he ever figured out I had stolen one of his poles, couldn’t get the fish off, and cut the line in panic.

    In the evening, without fail, Papa calls that supper is ready, and I join them for another meal. Tonight it’s “shit-on-a-shingle,” ground beef and gravy over toast. I clean my plate and put it in the washer, and as the light outside fades, just before bedtime comes and I hear Papa push in the foot of his recliner from another room, something shrieks at me- “you’re so ungrateful.”

    Through the ether my peace is dispelled by the wrath of How Dare You, an invisible cobra that spits venom anytime I remember what I had and through it recognize what was stolen. It’s like she feels personally betrayed by the fact that I knew what love is, and is not, and the girl she flexes her brutish dominion over can’t find that in her heavy shadow. From light into dark, we both grow angrier, but surely I can’t understand her plight because I am so small and clueless and ungrateful and a spoiled brat toward everything she has provided for me too, right?

    But dear reader I met Gratitude so early I lost memory of her first lessons, and her and Submission were never at the pulpit together. Gratitude was quiet, simple, and naked. She would often be in rooms and recognized only as the heat coming through the vents on a winter morning or that single streak of sun on the linoleum floor. She needn’t announce herself because those who knew her well could trust her to stay where she belonged, and understood the breathless language of her ever exiting the room. She didn’t leave when Suffering would scream, and merely tipped her hat when Grief walked in.

    Gratitude answered to no one, and she was not to carry the burdens of service.

    Nor was she a debt to be paid.

    ~

    It’s been a year and a half since Papa died and almost 20 since I last lived with him and Grandma. A few nights ago I experienced the most vivid dream that he had come back to visit with everyone. I didn’t get many words with him before he said he had to go, but as he slipped away again I held his hands and said “thank you for being my dad.”

    When I moved back in with my parents, Gratitude waited for me. She planted her feet and stared blankly despite my parents demands. She was stoic, feral, and indomitable. She wouldn’t come when announced on stage and said nothing each time the knife was held to her throat. She’d side-step every request, politely decline every invitation, and retreat into the cosmos somewhere between that moment and the next time Memory brought me back there and only on her perfect timing, came back to me in golden light.

    And so now I leave the door unlocked for her to come in when she pleases, keep a mug just for her in the cabinet, and talk with her about how the smell of breakfast makes me shed tears more frequently than anything else. I tell her how on the day Papa left I had made the coffee I had acquired the taste for and left some of it as a toast to what we might have talked about over it, and then I thank them both.