When the World is Not Enough

'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.'

-Angelina Jolie, Interview for OK! magazine.



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.

Fluke

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.

In some ways, perhaps, I was very, very young.

Vertigo

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 I began 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 said and 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 my bed, 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 left under 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.