'I had started having sex with my boyfriend and the sex and the emotions didn't feel enough. 'I was no longer a little girl. In a moment of wanting to feel closer to my boyfriend I grabbed a knife and cut him. He cut me back.' 'We had an exchange of something and we were covered in blood, my heart was racing. Then whenever I felt trapped, I'd cut myself. I have a lot of scars.'
In high school I tried to cut and scar myself but failed, after many attempts to produce more than a tiny cut on my arm. I wanted to prove my love to a boy who probably doesn’t remember my name. It was infatuation, not love and entirely one sided as such things often are. I made myself bleed for him and he was never the wiser.
I did it because I wanted to feel something intense and real. Perhaps the whole infatuation was based on that yearning though I was looking for a connection that would never be made. Cutting, obviously wasn’t my thing. But I understand what made Angelina pick up that knife- sometimes even the connections that are supposed to feel the most intimate don’t feel intense enough. I wonder how many other people feel that way. I feel like I’m constantly struggling to feel something real.
I'm writing a paper when the phone rings. It's Sunday, voice warm and deep and... I detect a quietness, a hesitancy, guilt maybe, that isn't ordinarily there. I pull myself into bed with the phone, huddle under the covers. I am shaking. It has been a rough couple of days since we last talked, partially his fault, maybe? I can't tell you- there were hormones involved too and none of it really makes sense. I blame it on my period and he says "I'm really sorry to hear that darlin" and sounds like he means it.
I ask him about his weekend, about his birthday and the shame rises in his voice and he mumbles something fast about it being long and drinking too much and questionably legal activities. I say "what was that?" and then, because my brain has been addled the last couple days, "whatever if you're not going to tell me." But then he spills out in a rush, like he meant to tell me all along: He got too drunk. He did stupid and silly and more or less innocent things that he can't remember and then he punched a guy. And the next night, went to a party with the girlfriend. Drank too much. Punched another guy and got a bunch of underage girls so drunk they were sitting in a corner crying because... because he thought that was better than the possible alternatives- because he was afraid of what he or the other guys might be unable to keep themselves from doing to them once intoxicated.
It used to be he'd get too drunk and have to be restrained from kissing a girl or two. Now what? I worry for who he is becoming, who he has become, particularly how he's thinking about girls and sex and wondering what separates me from those girls except a couple of years and a refusal to drink anything an alcoholic pours into my cup. But it doesn't make me care any less for him. It makes me feel like he needs that caring more than ever now to help him learn to take care of himself.
But no one ever said caring was letting someone get away with what they shouldn't.
Answering machine voice: You have five messages I think: OMG, in one day? I bet they're all from mom. 1: Hey March, this is mom, I was wondering if you'd watched that Indian movie...etc. 2 (mom again): Hey March, I rented this dance movie... 3 (friend, D. who I had called in a state of despair the night before): Hey, sorry I missed your call last night I was asleep, hope you're OK." 4 (friend, B., whom I had been late in meeting for a tango photoshoot): Where are you? I hope you haven't been attacked by ninjas... 5 (mom): Hey March, I need you to call me....
This is one of my best memories of Sunday, my worst of Kenny. I fear I haven't captured Sunday or his voice quite right, but a work in progress, I suppose.
Kenny had had Kitton over the night before and I had come over as was my habit, eager to get to know the notoriously eccentric Kitton. I remember she was wearing her long, long hair under a pink bobbed wig and a very short skirt. She sat next to me on Kenny’s couch and leaned in close. I felt a slight charge run between us, an exhilaration. Was she flirting with me? Was she interested? I wanted her to be, but not desperately. We chatted about her modeling projects, about her history in the circus while Kenny flitted lazily around, his ubiquitous glass tumbler of vodka, tonic and cran in one hand, ice clinking and watching us with his sleepy eyes. Kenny’s friend Bruce came over, and I went out to use the restroom and came back to find everyone seated for whatever atrocious movie we were going to watch and make fun of. Kenny and Kitton were sitting close on the couch and she was holding his hand, something I never did with him in public, despite intensely touchy-feely tendencies, because he had said he didn’t want us to look too much like a couple. There was nowhere left for me to sit except on the other side of Kitton and I was angry not to be able to show my affection for Kenny, not to have my role as something more than friends acknowledged or introduced to her. I didn’t care if there was one of us on either side of him cuddling, I would have welcomed a threesome but being unacknowledged and cast aside rather pissed me off. Yet I didn’t know what to do. So I sat. And I watched the stupid movie and I stewed.
And it got late. Kitton asked Bruce “Should I get a ride home?” Kenny interrupted “Why don’t you spend the night? You can borrow a pair of my pajamas.” And I knew he sure as hell wasn’t planning to have either of them spend the night on the couch.
At last Bruce left. I stayed, angry and wanting to be acknowledged, and yet powerless so I too left and went to bed thinking maybe they were just going to spend the night snuggling like we sometimes did.
The next morning Kenny had the hotel “Do Not Disturb” sign that I’d grown to loathe hooked over his door knob. I remember having something important and frustratingly academic that needed doing but being so angry about the night before and the sign that I could hardly concentrate. I glared at it every time I had to walk past his door to use the bathroom and the drinking fountain and every time it made me angry. Suddenly I was recalling how Kenny was always oddly pointing out that Kitton was on her period when I was and how long he’d been away when he went to see her the last time, and the marks I had found on his body when he came back. And I was angry at myself for not noticing before and angry for being angry at all and letting something so stupid distract me. This was not how I had wanted things to be.
Finally, unable to take it anymore, I left, hauling my heavy computer bag up the million flights of stairs to the Apartment to study. I sat huddled at the dining room table, stewing and unable to concentrate while the boys watched something loud on TV.
Sunday came breezing in before I had gotten out so much as a sentence.
“Hey gorgeous.” He said in his usual greeting. He stood bending over the back of my chair, hands gently stroking my shoulders. I leaned back into him.
“What are you working on?” He asked surely, though I could not see his face, peering with comically screwed up eyes at my computer screen. “Mph.” I mumbled into his arm. “Stress. I couldn’t concentrate in the dorm, but I’ve got to get this done so I’m here, though I haven’t been terribly productive here either. Don’t stop doing that with my shoulders, it feels so good.”
“Mmmhmm.” He chuckled. His voice deep and vibrating into me where my back was pressed to him.
“If you want you can study in my room, I’m going out for a while so you can have it all to yourself, it will be quieter there.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little better already “that would be amazing.”
He helped me carry my things to his room and set up at his desk and finally I let it spill.
“Kenny had Kitton over last night and I think she’s still there.” I told him “He’s had his stupid ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door since I’ve been up this morning, and I think he’s still holed up in there with her doing god knows what. I got more angry every time I saw the damn sign until I couldn’t stand being over there anymore. And I can’t stand being angry about it, it’s so stupid, so not worth it and I need to have a serious talk with him but I can’t because she’s still over there.”
He sucked in a breath. “So they’re having sex.” It wasn’t really a question.
“I don’t know. They could have just cuddled, that’s more or less what we did in the beginning.”
This sounded flimsy even to me and I could tell from his expression that he thought it unlikely. I wondered what judgments he had already passed on me and how I was different from the Kittons of the world.
“I’m really sorry hun.” He said and he wrapped me up in his arms. I buried my face in his chest and relaxed gratefully into his warmth, the softness of his t shirt, his smell like clean laundry and musk and a hint of cigarettes and his solidness around me. He closed his chin over my head and held me for a long, long time and I felt so safe.
“What do you want to do about Kenny?” He asked after a while, warm and quiet into my hair. “I think I need to tell him it’s not going to work if he’s going to keep treating me like this, and I think…” I made up my mind; “I think I’d better do that right now so I can get it over with and get to the school work, and if she’s there, well, I’ll just have to drag him out.”
“Good girl.” He said and kissed my forehead. And I smiled weakly at him, feeling warm and fuzzy and cared for even as I rallied to march off to confront my lover.
----
Did I cry, I think I cried. But I had pulled myself together by the time I got back to the Apartment. I went strait into Sunday’s room and Sunday was still there and I let myself be swept up in his arms again.
“How did it go?” “Done, over with, gone. I asked him if he’d had sex with her and he wouldn’t tell me. I told him I thought I had made it clear that I wanted to know who else he was involved with and how if I was going to be involved with him and he said he didn’t believe our casual and infrequently serious sexual relationship warranted that so I broke up with him.”
“Congratulations.” He said, and he wouldn’t be the last to say it. “Darling, you do know that you’re gorgeous and smart and an incredible person and that you deserve to be with someone who can take care of you and isn’t emotionally retarded like Kenny is?”
“I know” I whispered back laughing softly. And I did. And I was starting to feel, for the first time, what it could be like to be really taken care of when I needed it and it felt so good.
I was suddenly very tired.
I told him sagging deeper into his embrace, eyelids feeling very, very heavy. He scooped me up and tossed me gently onto his mattress-on-the-floor bed.
“Lie down and rest for a little while.” He said, pulling the covers up around me.
“But the paper,” I protested, hardly convincing myself, “I’ve got to work on it….” My eyelids were already drooping shut.
“Sleep” he whispered. “I’m going to be out tonight so you can stay as long as you like.” He stroked and kissed my hair. “Goodnight darling, sleep well.” “Thank you.” I said. He turned out the lights and left locking the door behind him.
I hadn’t thought that I would be able to fall asleep but I drifted quickly, hopelessly and in the way I love best. I floated in a darkness of thankful half sleep until he brought me back to reality, softly opening the door. I tried to stand, to get back to work, I hadn’t intended to really take a nap but sleep’s gravity pulled me back to the bed again. He chuckled softly at my failed attempt to stand.
“Hey beautiful, you look so comfortable, don’t get up yet.” he lay down on the floor next to the mattress and I rolled over to be close to him. He spooned me through the duvet, with the half of him that got over the mattress. With that much between us, it didn’t feel like much of a transgression against Austin and yet it still felt indefinably sweet.
After some time he climbed up to his roommate’s bed and did take a nap, sprawled over the covers. He snored like a freight train, too loud for me to sleep through but I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all.
At last he woke up and finally went out as he’d been planning to. I stayed in his bed for a while, feeling so warm and whole even remembering what had happened with Kenny. I didn’t spend the night, it seemed somehow dangerous, like Austin would come back with him in the morning and find me there or he would come home and forget why I was there. I wanted to, I wanted his face to be the first thing I saw in the morning and I think he wanted that too but the time wasn’t right.
You might say I started loving Sunday that day, as a friend, as a human being. He had fulfilled a deep craving I had had for as long as I could remember, to be picked up off my feet on a really bad day and selflessly taken care of by someone who wasn’t doing it because he was supposed to or to get something out of it but because he wanted to and because, for whatever reason, he cared. Whatever happens between Sunday and I, it is a memory I will always treasure.
My relationship with Dizzy, even my attraction to him, was, I think, a kind of fluke.
He really wasn’t much of anything special, he never struck anything deep inside me. Perhaps when I met him I was caring more about what he wasn’t which was my first boyfriend who’s memory I was still trying to escape. Dizzy was as different from him as peas are different from a pick-up truck but that didn’t make him much better of a lover than the first had been though it took me a long while to realize that.
It started on the Internet. I had joined this silly dating website, partially as some kind of social experiment born of extreme boredom and partially out of an irrational fear that I wouldn’t meet anyone worth dating in the real world for a long, long time.
It was late summer before my second year of college. I had just returned from a several week long adventure in Costa Rica with my mother, several weeks of heat, warm surf and fecund rain forest. Several weeks of feeling myself undressed in the smoldering gazes of the local men and being unable to do anything about it, two months of no Internet and no privacy in which to rub out a quick orgasm. I returned home with all the pent up desire of a pubescent boy in a chastity belt and when I finally got back to my own room, my pussy and the Internet received a lot of my attention. It was in this frenzy that Dizzy first found me in.
No sooner had I set up my profile when the messages started pouring in, they were mostly from ridiculously flirtatious old men. I giggled at most of the messages but didn’t respond. And then I found Dizzy’s, Dizzy who was only a few years older than I. “Smile” he wrote in closing and his name. And it touched my heart.
We wrote each other long emails nearly every day. It was summer and he was working in our college town while I was stuck at home, miles away. It might have been wise to talk on the phone, but I was phone shy so writing was all we had.
Dizzy sounded far more thoughtful and sophisticated in writing than he actually turned out to be, though perhaps that was just what I wanted to see, my imagination, if I haven’t said already, can be far too vivid and inventive for my own good. That went for how he looked as well. It didn’t help that his profile picture was four years old, and a good hunk of pounds lighter.
And I can’t say there weren’t hints of who he actually was, hints of things that didn’t quite sit right with me. I squashed those things to the back of my mind, already I felt like I had too much invested in him.
By the time I met him, I’d already grown attached to my idea of who he was, “I’m developing quite a crush on you,” I remember writing in one of my last emails.
He was wearing pajamas when we finally met and an awful pair of slippers much in need of a wash. These were things I noticed arbitrarily. I didn’t care so much about nice clothes and dressing well then, it didn’t seem like something I could expect from a guy. I did notice that he was significantly heavier than I’d expected and significantly plainer. And I noticed as we began talking that his personality was significantly less charming.
He was kind of a bro, really. He dressed simply, thought simply, enjoyed the keg style parties his friends threw, friends who I mostly never cared for which was probably a bad sign from the start. He was, I started to feel as I got to know him better, rather dumb and yet he almost always seemed to talk to me like I was dumber which I certainly wasn’t.
I left him that night rather disappointed, finally forced to confront the very obvious evidence that my Dizzy was not all that. And then several days later I ran into him at a bus stop and he touched my arm and just that one little touch set my heart racing and my skin tingling and all of a sudden, brought that summer’s lust simmering back through me and I wanted those hands all over me.
I soon learned that when Dizzy said “Let’s watch a movie” he really meant let’s fool around with the movie playing in the background. Even the first night, when he had me sit on his queen sized bed while he adjusted his twin monitors to play a purple and green toned bootleg copy of some movie or another that I can no longer remember, I had an idea of where things might be headed, a girl, a boy and a bed in the night.
I perched strait backed and far away from him, my lust shy and unsure in the proximity of realization. He came up behind me, softly, not too close yet and began to caress my back, as if soothing a poppet of a girl, a finicky colt who might lurch from his touch if frightened.
My skin was cold and lonely when he took his hand away. “Come over here” he said, Humbert Humbert the bloated spider luring in his little Lolita. “Come over here and snuggle with me.” And I did. At first stiff in his embrace I slowly relaxed under his petting fingers. We were turned towards each other, two spoons turned the wrong way. It was easy for him to kiss me, bringing his face to mine in the flickering light of the movie. His lips were thin on mine startling me with their strange presence. It was a similar sensation to that which I felt the first time my first boyfriend, Rickman, had kissed me. Strange and not entirely pleasant, foreign.
The first kiss I took passively. He drew back to look at me, to gage my reaction and when I didn’t pull away brought his lips to mine again and I closed my eyes and kissed him back, slowly easing the shock and the strangeness.
The rest of the night is blurry with forgotten moments. I think we rolled around greedily kissing one another. I think he must have kissed and licked and teased the skin of my neck until I shivered with pleasure, hardly able to bear the onslaught of sensation. I have dark memories of his hands sliding under my shirt to cover my tummy, to explore and squeeze my breasts like ripe grapefruit first on the outside of my bra and then inside it. I think I remember him taking off my shirt to kiss my stomach, and nuzzle into the crevices of my belly button, the cleft of my breasts, the curve of my waist, and sending me into a euphoria that he would be unable to replicate by any other means.
I think I remember him taking my hand and putting it on the cock straining against his pants. And I remember feeling like it was far too early for me to want to touch his cock.
Once there was a boy who maybe loved me but stumbled into a very wrong way of showing it. Try as I might I couldn’t make him understand how he had been wrong, he didn’t want to see and when I finally said what I really thought, when I gave it to him strait and pure and undiluted, he couldn’t hear it right, he just couldn’t, and now there is nothing left to say. Though so many words wish to be spoken, what once was is now too broken for repair, any new attempts to explain, to mollify, to communicate will only reopen the wounds and start the battle raging again.
Mostly I keep this broken thing hidden beyond the reach of memory’s eager fingers but occasionally it comes back to me, a dusty old VHS tape that I must watch again every time I stumble across it, an album of snapshots that my mind must flip through slowly, running those inquisitive fingers over each photo, absorbing, remembering, reliving every second. Sometimes, I go out and, for no good reason, I think, with heart faltering shock, that I see him everywhere: sitting on the bus I am about to board, passing me on the sidewalk as I’m walking to a dance class, and I remember everything, the good and the bad, how I must have hurt him, how he hurt me, how it seems to have been beyond us not to.
I’ll rechristen him Dizzy, I know it's a goofy name but he was a goofy guy, like a big dog dizzy from chasing his own tail, or bounding back to you, with a stick in his mouth, full of mud and smiling a big, sloppy, doggy smile like that stick he’s bringing you is the best thing in the world.
He was big, tall, red-auburn haired which I loved, being in a rather Weasley-loving phase of things, though he refused to admit his hair was anything but brown.
He wasn’t pretty. Even my mother, who seems to be far more capable of finding physical beauty in a man than I, never found him attractive. He had horrendous feet, huge bent toed things with graying, talon nails that I could imagine lurking in a swamp waiting to drown some innocent creature for their dinner. He had a big belly which managed to look rather charming under a blazer, but not terribly so when flapping about naked. He tended to dress very casually, jeans, hoodie, T-shirt, but ended up out of the house in PJ bottoms and slippers often enough as well.
He was friendly, teasing, and happy. He had an adorable, warm, friendly smile that lit up his plain face and transformed him, for that brief time before it all went to hell, into someone I could see as beautiful.
He was my boyfriend. Kind of. Actually he was my boyfriend for all of a couple weeks before we broke up and, then in a very complicated dating maneuver which I will not even attempt to explain now, got back together as friends with benefits, only we ended up being about the most boyfriend/girlfriendy friends with benefits I've ever seen. This suited both of us just fine. I was a sophomore in college, he a fifth year senior and we knew whatever kind of relationship we ended up having couldn't last long because he was going to graduate in a matter of months and move to live far enough away for things to not work out so easily.
When he did move, I was, at first, desolate without him, so lonely I spent my whole winter break hugging the family pet chicken to my breast as much as she would tolerate. I begged him to come to visit me, to go to bed with me, to let the relationship continue in one way or another but as much as I begged, he refused me until, by the time school resumed, that desire had faded and my attraction to him with it. It was as if I had suddenly put on new glasses with a better prescription, I went back to feeling about him more or less as I had the first night I met him, and I wondered what I had liked so much about him anyway?
Yet just as I was beginning to feel less attached to him, he seemed to realize that he didn’t want to let me go. He began to come, every month or so to visit and every time he tried to seduce me.
The first time I refused to be swayed. I was just getting over losing him the first time and I didn’t want to make it harder for myself to say goodbye to him again. He had a very hard time taking no for an answer. He kept trying to convince me to convince me to sleep with him but the more he pushed the less I wanted to give in, it would have felt wrong too.
But come February Ibegan to soften, he sent me a Valentine’s Day card- it had a picture of Winnie the Pooh on it and it said "you're sweet as honey", and naive, silly me, having never had a personal Valentine Card from a boy before, I proved far too easily swayed. Though it probably wasn’t just the card, I was wound up with desire like a wind up toy ready to be set loose, he was coming that weekend and I couldn’t wait to have his hands all over me again.
He drove me nearly an hour to a fancy restaurant where his friend worked as a waiter. The restaurant hadn't opened yet, they were running a kind of preview to make sure that everything would run smoothly when they did and all employees were encouraged to invite guests for a free meal. It seemed so grand, we tried nearly every appetizer, and liberally sampled what must have been very expensive wine. I left floating in a haze of satisfaction, utterly stuffed.
Back in my little dorm room, he covered me in kisses, licking and caressing my throat, my breasts, my tummy, my thighs, my cunt. I lost interest when he got there, the old intimacy that had made it all feel so good when we were dating was gone and I was thoroughly bored by the time I came. His cock burned when he put it in me, it just felt bad. I gritted my teeth and took it and the next morning I told him I didn't want to have sex again. Only that evening it somehow managed to happen anyway.
He left again and I was glad. When he told me he was coming to visit again a month later I found myself getting anxious, any last vestiges of attraction I’d harbored for him had faded, I was done but it didn’t seem like he was. Then he called to say some girl he'd slept with before had asked him to visit her and would I mind? I was so relieved "Please have sex with her." I told him. "I don't want to have sex with you, I’m really ready to move on, aren’t you?"
But he didn’t visit her, he came to me instead and that night everything broke.
I remember seeing Sunday in the parking lot as we were walking to Dizzy.'s car to go out. I hardly knew Sunday then but he must already have begun to have an effect on me because I was suddenly embarrassed to be seen with Dizzy., his arm wrapped around me as if he owned me, as if he were showing me off. I remember wanting Sunday to think I had better taste in men. "Don't see me, don't see me," I thought at him but he did. "Hi" he saidand my name. I waved defeated and wished there was no Dizzy, wished, though I didn’t entirely know it yet, that Sunday had taken his place.
I shouldn't have let Dizzy. into my room that night. I shouldn't have let him kiss me on mybed, shouldn't have let him lay me down and trace tingling curlicues into my flesh, each touch exploding behind my eyes in delicate patterns and deep colors. It felt so good and I had already told him quite firmly that I didn't want to do anything sexual, no clothes off, no touching genitals- I had thought that would be enough.
It wasn't.
His fingers brushed my pussy once, I pushed them away. They were back all too soon, I pushed them away again. And again. And when they came back, oh so sneakily, slowly working up my thigh until my pelvis was so enflamed with desire that I couldn't tell what he was touching and I felt like I couldn't say no, not because it felt good, not because I wanted him to keep going but because I forgot how- I had put so much faith in my request that something in my brain short-circuited and I couldn't make myself open my mouth to speak, couldn't make my arms work to push him away, to kick him out- that's all it would have taken- but at that moment I couldn't even think to do anything to stop it.
I was wearing a skirt and all he had to do was pull my underwear aside to start caressing my pussy. I didn't open my legs for him, I just lay there frozen while a voice in my head told me "act natural, he can't know you don't want this. Secretly you do want it, don't you; you've always fantasized about being raped, haven't you? So shut up and enjoy it."
Rape.
It wasn't really rape. He didn't put his cock in me, just his fingers, just his tongue. And I hardly did anything to stop him, hardly anything at all, I kind of played possum, hoping he would get that something was wrong and stop. But he didn't. Instead he said "Kiss me, please kiss me." And I did because if I didn’t it would have been like telling him no and part of me had the other part of me hostage, and I couldn’t do anything too obvious. I was dizzy, dazed, the world slipped away from me and when he went down on me there was a moment when I lost track of where I was and who I was with and for a moment, as clear as day I saw Sunday's black haired head and broad back between my legs in place of Dizzy’s red. Sunday, who, as far as I can recall I wouldn't have started fantasizing about for another couple months. He felt so real, and for a moment it felt truly as if there was someone else there with me, as if someone cared about me in that awful moment and then it was all gone and I felt so alone.
Sometime after he had made me come and after I had made him come there was a knock on my door and I scrambled to put something on and answer it to find my friend Jack, small and inextricably hobbitlike standing outside my door. Dizzy was still in his boxers on my bed and he lounged their looking so smug like “Buddy, I bet you wish you were me right now.”
I didn’t want Jack to leave, I didn’t want to be alone with Dizzy’s and what had just happened again but he was already backing away, repelled by the intimacy Dizzy implied.
With Jack gone I tried to explain that what had just happened actually wasn’t something I had wanted to happen at all, that it hadn’t felt good or right or loving but I was still numb, the hurt part of me was still a bound hostage behind the calm smokescreen and he leftunder the impression that everything was fine and dandy, that what had happened hadn’t exactly been what I said I wanted but we’d both had fun anyway.
That was the last time I saw Dizzy. The impact of that night slowly grew inside me. I had always thought, naive as this may sound, that I was special, that there was something precious about me that anyone I dated couldn’t help but fall in love with, that I was too smart to date a man who wouldn’t, too smart to date someone who would abuse me, too smart to make the kinds of bad mistakes that other people made, too smart to be nearly raped by someone I cared about but then I was, and all of those assumptions came quietly tumbling down.
The worst part was that I had brought it on myself, I had raped myself as surely as Dizzy had. I had forgotten that I had gotten so caught up in believing that he would keep his word that I couldn’t stand up for myself and enforce my word myself.
But it was a soft catastrophe, a numb catastrophe that never made me feel acutely sad, only deeply yet dully anguished like I was hurt somewhere but I couldn’t tell where or how badly because I was too anesthetized to feel it. The friends I told said ‘well you look like you’re handling it well so you must be fine.’ I told my mom what had happened and my therapist and neither of them seemed to think it was a big deal either so I thought well, I suppose this is just life. Better suck it up and keep truckin’.
From time to time, Dizzy would find me online and try to talk to me. Our conversations always ended in fights, fights that never brought us any closer to accepting the other’s perspective.
And then, almost as a joke, I told new friends about what had happened with Dizzy and they gasped and worried if I was OK and stared at me, saucer eyed with concern. And I started to wonder whether I was OK, whether almost rape and losing faith in myself should just be accepted as another, no-big deal disappointment of life.
And one day Dizzy started talking to me over instant messenger and I realized I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, that it hurt to talk to him and no matter how much we fought it never got any better and I realized that I didn’t have to do that anymore. I also realized that I’d been holding back. I’d been saying that what had happened was mostly my fault, and it was, partially but he needed to take responsibility too so I told him I felt like he had, in a small and not so dramatic way, raped me. And he went off the wall. And he said he had loved me. And he said I hoped I didn’t seriously think he had raped me and how I was too immature to deal with a relationship ending in a reasonable way. And I said nothing. I removed him from my friends on facebook, I blocked him on instant messenger, I may have blocked him from sending me messages on facebook too. And I went on with my life. There was nothing left to say to him, nothing that could make it better for him or for me.
Once while diving deep into my facebook message history I found a message from him, I didn’t read it, I couldn’t but I couldn’t help but look at his picture, Dizzy and a girl, both smiling, I had nearly forgotten the sweetness of his smile. And he was wearing a shirt, a white shirt that said in big red letters “I Hate Rape.” And I wondered if that was him trying to say, in the only way he could think to say it- “I never meant to be that person to you, to anyone.”
I almost want to say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I feel like I deserve to be really raped, brutally, forcibly, violently raped for thinking about this one, stupid little thing so much, for being so affected by it. Sometimes I feel like I raped myself and I’m some kind of severely messed up girl who shouldn’t be trusted to take care of herself, sometimes I feel like I was so wrong to accuse him of rape, sometimes I just feel empty like the whole time with him was a mistake a delusion and I wonder how I could once have been so close to someone who is now a such a complete stranger, for whom I am nothing more than a bad memory. But there is nothing to do now but move on and nothing left that either of us can say that will make it any better.
When I say I dance, 99% of the time, I mean I dance tango, Argentine Tango, the kind that sinks it's teeth into your heart and never lets go. I began taking lessons in tango around this time last year, perhaps if I had kept track of the exact date, I would be celebrating my one year anniversary this week: the last session of classes for the summer, the session I took last year, has just begun.
I didn't really know what tango was at first. I had a vague impression of promenades, snapping heads and roses held between teeth- a dance of intensity, passion, sex, desire. I couldn't have told you the difference between Argentine and any other kind of tango if my life depended on it, I wouldn't have known tango music if it leapt up and bit my ass. I did know that Sunday and his then girlfriend, Austin, took tango lessons every week in our college town. I, who, for reasons I still cannot understand, so envied their relationship (though it was hardly a relationship worth envying) and had always wanted to learn the art of partner dance, had wanted to get back into dance any way I could, found myself wanting to learn to tango.
And I had danced before, I began modern dance (or the watered down, little kid equivelent of modern) when I was in kindergarten and, dispite rather hating my teacher, and really wanting to take ballet instead (which my mother, convinced it did unhealthy things to the growing body, refused to allow), continued taking for five, impressionable years, then, finally, fed up with my teacher, quit. I took up acting and acting led me back to dance. In high school I studied jazz dancing most days of the week- I wanted to be a star, dancing in front of huge crowds, catching each and every one of them in my spell, I always had. And then both dance and acting stopped working for me and I quit altogether for a couple years but always craved going back to it- I particularly wanted to learn partner dance, but was nervous of dancing with strangers. I told myself when I had a boyfriend we would take dance classes together but, not so unpradictably, my first boyfriend shot that idea to hell and back. Seeing Sunday and Austin traipsing off to their dance lessons I suddenly realized how much time I was wasting sitting on my ass and not doing what I really wanted which was partially getting off my ass and learning to dance the incredible, sexy latin dances I was in love with and was probably also partially wanting to get a little something of what I thought they had that I so envied them for.
Returning home that summer, I swiftly moved through the levels of swing classes offered, dabbled in salsa, and then discovering an advertisement for Argentine Tango lessons, began my first forays into the dance that would consume my life.
That first class didn't exactly make me fall in love. Argentine Tango is one of the most complex and difficult dances to learn and the instructors here take what they do very seriously, insisting that their students learn the slow, traditional way: the beginning level classes here are primarily a practice in relearning to walk, for six weeks. I only got through the first series of classes here before I had to return to school and didn't have much of a sense of what tango was all about.
Then, back at school, flipping through my university's rec guide, I found it: our very own Argentine Tango club, the first meeting that weekend. There was a slew of other dance clubs and I planned on going to all of them but the tango club meeting was the first.
The day of, I dressed in one of my nicest skirts, flattering on me when I wasn't moving, magical when I danced. I put on the only pair of heels I had, dirty silver satin sandals that my mother, ever hateful of heals had bought at my pleading for some high school dance or another. They were not particularly elegant, nor particularly good for dancing but I was loathe to be seen in my jazz shoes. I trekked in my heals from my dorm to the gym, rushing up hills, down dusty paths, through tall dry grasses. I gave my money to the girl at the door of the dance studio and it began.
I don't remember what we learned that day, the instructors, Ben, a senior and Alicia a grad student had been tangoing three years and believed that the only way to keep the interest of college students, who had probably never danced tango before, was to teach them crazy moves and sequences which, if not succeeding in teaching them to dance, would at least leave them feeling like they could do something exciting.
The first hour beginning lesson whirled by, I was passed from boy to boy, some of whom knew what they were doing and some of whom had never danced a day of their lives. I flirted outrageously with all of them because that was what I did before dancing became my element and it began to feel natural to fall into a stranger's embrace.
The beginning lesson ended and Macy, the girl who had taken my money at the door told me I could stay for the intermediate lesson, and, nervously, I did, and found myself not so much more clueness than the others.
All too soon the intermediate lesson too came to an end.
"Anyone who's interested in the performance team can stay," Ben said, announcer voiced. "You don't need to be an advanced dancer to be on team, performance pieces are all choreography so anyone can learn them and all the extra hours of rehearsal will be the fastest way for you to improve your dancing."
The slow exactitude and perfectionism of my home town tango lessons had me convinced that I shouldn't be good enough for this but, oh, how I wanted to perform, how I wanted to excellerate my learning curve to the speed of light. I stayed.
I stayed for three hours, learning the choreography for a group number which required an assortment of advanced moves that I had never done before, let alone while standing on a chair which was exactly what we were meant to do. I stayed until the bitter end and then limped home, exhausted, hungry. But I already knew that I wanted to get really good at tango, I wanted to be amazing. All thoughts of other dance lessons, other clubs, were erased from my head, five hours and then some of dance a week was quite enough to be getting on with.
Within a week I'd been selected as one of the most promising new girls on team and was entrusted with a solo and from there my love, and involvement grew and grew. Knowing that I couldn't learn the dance as well or as quickly as I wanted to from club alone I began attending the same lessons Sunday and Austin had, I spent hours in rehearsal learning the routines, learning the rules of the dance and learning to tell a story through a dance. I got my first pair or tango shoes, my first real pair of heels, 3 inch black, stiletto t-straps. I started dressing more nicely, more sexily, I started wearing a lot of black. I started wearing make up again and taking time to do my hair, I discovered who I was as a woman, as a dancer. I began to feel sexy, hot, like I had this incredible secret super power of dance in my bones that would stun and dazzle my peers. I fell in love, fell madly and deeply in love with the dance, the life it gave me and the family of friends I gained in the process. And the way it makes me feel because I've found that through dance I can express myself more perfectly than I can through writing or the visual arts. When I dance a good dance, I feel whole, perfect, my partner and the music and I are one, we are inseperable from the dance and the deepest feelings inside that I could never truly name or fully describe flow between us, flow out of us, imbue our dance like ink spreading, coiling, dancing in water.
