Reams of Nonsense

When the man you loved says he’ll hurt himself, the right thing to do isn’t immediately visible.

This is the man you would welcome into your bed at 3 a.m. after he’s just finished a ten hour shift and his aching body smells of salt and grime and fear. This is the man who loved you even when you had the flu and hadn't gotten out of bed in three days; the man who kissed your feverish forehead and pulled your weakened body atop his beastly-sized chest. This is the man whose hands you held, knowing they could crush you as they had others. This man, this massive bull of a man, is a puppy in your presence. But now he sees you growing distant, growing up. He cannot physically hurt you; he could not bear it. So, after days without sleeping by your side, he texts to say,

“I took something.”

These are the three words that scare you more than the I and love and you that were spoken mere weeks after meeting.

“What did you take?”

“I feel tired.”

“What did you take?”

He does not respond. For at least an hour, he stays quiet. He is testing you. He is hurting you in a way more brutal than with his fists. He is making you believe you have killed him.

You call.

He does not answer.

“Are you okay?” Your desperate words hang on the screen beneath the 4:30 a.m. time stamp.

At last the bouncing ellipses appears like a beating heart and you sigh in relief.

You cannot leave him now. Not now that you almost lost him. But you’re scared. So you tell him he cannot come over.

The following week he pulls up to your house in the middle of the night and calls your cell phone. You can see his headlights beaming through your sheer curtains. The rumble of his truck engine rattles the window frame.

Thinking you’re asleep, he tries to wake you. He calls your phone again, and again.

The engine shuts off, but you didn’t hear him pull away so you know he’s still there. You hear a car door shut and the footsteps of his steel-toed boots on your porch.

“Go home,” you whisper. “Go home.”

Because the man you once loved for the power he had to protect you is now your biggest fear. His six foot frame, his 265 pounds of muscle and angst make your hands shake when you open the front door to leave for school. So you skip lecture after lecture to avoid leaving the house.

You begin to fail classes you once excelled in. But you’re graduating soon, so if you can just hold on, you can escape it all.

If you can just hold on.

Your favorite professor calls. She wants to set up a meeting. The entire time you’re in her office, you push the pad of your thumb over the opposite palm, rubbing away eraser-like pieces of skin.

You haven’t told anyone that the man you love has become your worst fear. But you’re sitting there alone with her, and she knows something is wrong, and she asks you

“Are you okay?”

So you tell her about the steel-toed boots, and the pills he took, and his massive hands. You tell her that he shows up at your home in the night and doesn’t leave unless you answer.

She allows you to make up two of your assignments. She says she knows you’re capable of the work. She asks if you’re leaving town after graduation.

“I’m moving back with my parents.”

“Does he know their address?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell him.”

There are so many unsettling problems with this video that I can't quite put it all into words. This is nothing but an uninformed YouTube star exploiting violence against women in order to make entertaining click-bait. There is no useful information here for young women. If anything, this "experiment" does nothing but traumatize them. A perfect example of #‎rapeculture.

If you’re not already at your point of tl;dr, I’ll continue…

A 12-year-old, girl or boy, does not possess the cognizance or judgment to accurately weigh the consequences of meeting up with someone he or she met online. None of these girls are "idiots" for doing what they did. They are young. They should be warned to avoid situations like this, but they should not be blamed for being involved in them.

Talk to your daughters. Talk to your sons. Teach them consent. Teach them that we live in a world where, unfortunately, they have to be cautious. But don’t teach them that they are the cause for their own rape. Don’t teach them that it’s a victim’s fault for allowing abuse to take place. Sexual violence is a complicated matter that spans far beyond these black and white rules we lay out in order for women to prevent attacks made against them.

I am disgusted to read comments like, “when did 12-year-olds become such sluts?” The man in this video intentionally lured each one of these girls by posing as one of their peers. And yet in the end, he’s lauded as a hero for getting them to fall for his trap. What is most concerning here is that we do not villainize the perpetrator, but rather focus on scandalizing and humiliating the victims.

It’s late; too late to be browsing through photos of memories I barely remember anymore. My fingers move hesitantly across the screen like a newborn mammal finding his footing. They type the questions I cannot muster the strength to say aloud: Can I call you?

There is no greater pain than waiting for you to respond to my deeply vulnerable request. I’ve tried so hard to seem strong, indifferent. But now I am exposed, peeling back bandages with which I haphazardly pieced myself together. After five minutes pass, I’m sure that you hate me. It’s right in this desperate moment when I hear the soothing sound of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” begin to buzz through my broken phone speakers. It was our song; I’d forced myself not to listen to it, not since the last time you called. But now he sings to the image of your face, cooing words you’d once whispered as we danced alone, naked in the kitchen:      I wanna rock your gypsy soul.

Listening to Sinatra over coffee midmorning, late for work again. His voice, smoother than the swirls of hazelnut cream in my cup, anchors my ear to the crackling record I inherited from my late grandfather: a staunch Sinatra-man himself.

Yesterday, I had dinner with his oldest friends. We drank cocktails and listened to George Gershwin, ate a full meal then berry pie and lemon cookies for dessert, followed by decaf coffee with steamed milk. A larger woman with an even larger persona told a story about the last time she saw my grandfather some fifteen years before. She’d taken him to the opera and upon seeing a young, blonde soprano, he remarked in his thick New York accent, “Not a bad looking broad!” “Sounds about right,” someone said, and we laughed and sipped our coffee.

I’m sitting in the empty kitchen now, amongst a few newspaper-wrapped plates and bowls, watching gruff and muscled men disembowel the remaining contents of my childhood home. They lift the heaviest objects with ease: My parents’ bed, the dining cabinet, the family table. I remember searching the yard for Easter eggs in the middle of December, Certain there were leftover treats and treasures hidden away, ones I’d missed the first time around. Waiting , longing to be found. It wasn’t improbable that they might still be lost in there. The bushes in the yard of this old house grow wild and unruly. At times I felt lost in them too.

They load it all onto a truck. One man stumbles and drops a box marked fragile. Wouldn’t it be convenient if we were all marked that way? Then again, maybe it wouldn’t make a difference. I sweep up broken pieces; He apologizes, and tells me not to bother.

I come across a photo-printed mug of my sister and I in matching Dalmatian pajamas, just learning to climb the double staircases to my parents’ bedroom… It would become a trip I’d make often in the night to ask for a glass of water, or to crawl between them to sleep. Sometimes now, when I’m lying awake, still worrying and scared but with problems much bigger, I wish I still could.

I am only 24-years-old, but for 25 I have lived behind these creaking walls. It’s changed a bit, especially since they decided to sell. She’s done up, gotten a makeover: The paint is a different color, my bedroom’s gaudy floral wallpaper gone, the lawn ripped out and replaced with stone and drought-tolerant plants to accommodate the ever-worsening California climate. But I still recognize her.

Last night I slept on the floor in my empty bedroom, using a tablecloth as a blanket. I was too cold to sleep, or maybe too nostalgic. After all the memories I’ve had here, for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about my ex. We’d fallen in love in that house. Or at least I had. I tried to remember him; I tried to remember what it felt like to kiss him in that room. But I don’t really remember him anymore, only that I was in love.

This morning my mom came to my bedroom and started to cry when she told me that her best memories were in that room: the room that my sister and I shared for a short while, before she grew up and decided she was too old to be sharing a room, to play games, to be my friend.

I only moved out less than six months before the house went on the market. It’s unfortunate that my last memories of that place are not as pleasant as the 25 Christmases, 25 birthdays, and 12 first days of school. It’s unfortunate that, sitting in my kitchen now, I remember the terrible yelling. That when I walk into my sister’s room, I remember the bottles she hid in the closet. The living room reminds me of my heart breaking when he told me he was done. The backyard, the place I first learned of my father’s still raging cancer.

Those last few months of the years I spent in this home were all very …unfortunate.

I cannot think of a better word than that to describe all those moments and emotions I’d never felt before and then forced to feel all at once.

The moving truck has finally pulled away, and I lock the red front door for the last of a million times. Walking down the staircase still feels normal. Staring at the 989 tiles on the mailbox from my car across the street does too. I watch as my father waters the unruly bushes we no longer own. None of it feels like the last time. None of it feels like goodbye. After I leave, I’m plagued with that feeling of having forgotten something…

I keep waiting for you to rescue me. When he’s touching me, when he’s kissing me, when he tells me I’m selfish for not wanting him, I wait for you to save me.

You used to be the one I could call when everything fell apart and buried me in the rubble. You used to come running when I called.

I think maybe you grew tired of being my hero.

There’s an eeriness to this morning. An unusual haze for a California spring day rests heavily on the horizon, looming over the stunted apartment buildings that popped up like skin sores across the once green hills of Dublin. The sounds of construction, of hammers and skill saws and nail guns, pound like my own irregular heartbeat, drowning out the songs of chirping mockingbirds and igniting a wincing pain in my ears.

In my dimly-lit office, in my squeaky office chair, I am unable to concentrate on the stack of invoices in front of me. Instead, I rub the sore muscles in my shoulder and think back to last night: His thumb softly stroking my lower lip; the heat of his body as it leaned against mine; the scent of his skin that I could still smell on my t-shirt this morning. I’d almost fallen asleep when he tenderly kissed my forehead. I didn’t move. I wanted to kiss him, but I knew that I shouldn’t. And so I pretended to sleep. 

He kissed my cheek, and brushed his guitar string-calloused fingertips along my hairline. With a hand propped gently beneath my chin, he softly kissed my lips, as if it might wake me from my heartbreak.

In an instant, it was over. There was no us. There would be no more anniversaries of first dates, first kisses, or first I love you’s.

There would be no more I love you’s.

Without knowing I was lost, I found myself in you. You, a new bulb for one I hadn’t noticed burned out; You, a lighthouse leading me to shore. You, illuminating pieces of me.           Pieces that had drowned deep in the dark           once the sea grew too black to see where I was swimming           and waves swallowed what dim light was left in my sinking heart. You, diving deep, dragging me. Pulling me away from the overwhelming tide.

I disguised my I love You as a joke. We both know it was true. I hope You know it was true. I hope You know it’s still true. I love You, your thick arms tightly wrapped around me, around my weakened body, like bandages holding me together, securing my insanity, suffocating me. I love You, your thick arms tightly wrapped around me, around my weakened body, like serpent’s tentacles holding me, securing my insanity. suffocating me.