When we first met in person, you told me that my socks were weird. They were the blue ones with little green frogs dotted all over them; I still have those socks and I still wear them today. That day, I wore them underneath my shiny red Doc Martens, the tops of the socks peeking just over my calves so that you could see a few bright green frogs.
We met in person for the first time in a Panera a few blocks from my school. Actually, we technically met for the first time in your car, because you picked me up from my dorm there and we drove to Panera. You greeted me with awkward fumbling hands, and I said "surprise! I'm not a murderer, and I look just like my picture." We had met on Tinder; you told me over the messenger that you were going to bring your pocket knife just in case, because you didn't want to take any risks of catfishing. In the five minute drive over to Panera, I asked if you had really brought it, and you said yes. I looked at your backpack in the backseat and could see its handle poking out of the open front pocket.
I don't remember what we talked about in Panera on our first actual date. I do remember staring at the mole on your face, tiny and cute just like mine, and a few inches below your right eye. I remember the kind of soup that I ordered--baked potato--and I remember how for days before meeting you I had sat in the lifeguard chair at the pool in the school fitness center, listening to "Didn't See It Coming" by Parachute, which was somehow endlessly repeated on the gym's pop-centered playlist. Every time the song played, I pictured the messages we sent to each other on Tinder, how there was probably one waiting for me just that minute, with my phone, forbidden and flipped to hide the screen in the lifeguard office.
Before we met in person for the first time, we talked on the phone for three or four hours at a time; I had never spent so much of my voice talking to a boy who seemed so eager to listen. We shared every aspect of our lives, I sat in the common room of my dorm building and the guy across the hall left his room and came back hours later to see me in the same spot, the phone curled to my ear and my fingers wrapped tightly around it.
One night I went out to a bar with my friends, and when the lights and the loud noises and the strange guy who kissed me on the lips quickly, before I could push him away, had gotten to be too much, I walked outside and called you on the phone, drunk and missing you, though we hadn't met in person yet and I hadn't yet learned what it felt like to see your face, inches away from mine and three-dimensional. We stayed on the phone until my friends came outside looking for me, I kept your voice in my ear as we all piled into a cab, me laying horizontally across the laps of my roommates, my view restricted to the fuzzy sky, green and orange from streetlights. I don't remember when I hung up, or when I went to bed, but I hoped you, the 21-year old who didn't drink because he didn't want to, couldn't tell that I was drunk.
When we finally made plans to meet up, we planned for a Wednesday. You drove up to Baltimore from your home in D.C., and for days beforehand my roommate and I wondered aloud if you would try to kiss me, and if I were ready for that. We walked around my campus, you came with me to a movie showing in the library that I had to watch for class, held my hand and made me feel more wanted than I had felt during my entire year so far at school. It rained a little, it was the middle of winter, and we went to Qdoba, the one right next to the Chipotle right by my dorm, even though you told me later that you much preferred Chipotle and refused to eat at Qdoba, as a rule. As you dropped me back off at the parking lot in front of my apartment, I wondered if you would kiss me. I guess you saw the questioning in my face, because you told me that you had decided before, much earlier, that we weren't going to kiss at all, no matter how well things went, because you had a thing against kissing on the first date. I thought it was noble, and I felt mixed feelings of disappointment and relief for being able to evade the awkwardness of first kisses at that moment.
I credit you for opening up my sexuality, allowing it to bloom and mature on my face, in my hands, on my body. Before you, I had only drunken fumblings, nights dark and light at the same time, kisses leading to more before I was ready. I had allowed others unrestricted access on my body, but I never used my own hands to explore others. With you I used my tongue, my teeth, my hands wrapped in a fist.
Here's what was different about you: you didn't go to my school. You didn't drink, you lived in D.C., you were older. You stared at me, straight into my eyes, and told me that I was beautiful, and the next day you still called. You didn't push, never pushed me to let you fuck me, not the way that I was used to. I had grown used to saying no, was pleasantly surprised when I didn't have to, found myself wanting to go further, deeper, press my body warm against yours and let you teach me how to be someone unafraid of sex.
Before you, I remember touching in the dark, tongues stained with alcohol, hands rough and marking like sidewalk chalk. I remember showers, hot and then cold, hangovers, a spoon from the freezer and then a toothbrush, scrubbing until i saw blood. I remember poems, loneliness, wanting.
How is it possible for things to feel so permanent and so temporary at the same time? Each time you came to visit, I gripped your clothes, your hands, whatever I could find, hard, and I didn't let go. One day I read Portia de Rossi's, memoir, and at the part where she described feeling strong and pure happiness, I went into a different room from you and cried, quietly so you wouldn't hear. The sadness passed, and I did nothing to change it, to address it.
Here's another memory that comes to mind: you were living in a dorm at your college for a summer program, and were sharing a room with a boy I had never met before that day. I wanted so badly for him to like me as much as you seemed to like him. We put a towel on the door because we didn't have a tie, and you couldn't decide which sock you wanted to use to showcase what we were doing behind a closed door. You kissed me but it wasn't enough, when we broke away, each breath you took brought in another mouthful of air that didn't include me and I was afraid of what would happen when your lungs filled up.
Being with you made me feel vulnerable, in a way I was not yet used to feeling, and so I held that vulnerability to my chest, offered it to you whenever you asked. A few nights before I left to go to South Africa, I found out you had been having sex with other people, and I was hurt for how stupid it made me feel. To be clear, I had agreed, grudgingly, for the two of us to be in an open relationship, but I had never dreamed that you would follow through with it. When I confronted you, it was via facebook messenger, while I was in the upstairs bathroom getting ready to shower, and you were downstairs in the living room, watching a movie with my mom. It was true, and I took the shock of it like a fall down a cliff; I cried in the shower, then came downstairs to you, and your face was quiet, your voice small. Was I okay? You asked me that first, and I said yes, my eyes pink. Did I want to break up? Yes.
I took the hurt of being surprised as a method of distancing myself from you. We acted normal for the next two days, until we could dig your car out of the snow and you could go back home.
Here's my problem in relationships: I have a tendency to give pieces of myself away until the other person has nowhere left to put them. And yet still, I don't feel that I have given enough.
We met in person for the first time in a Panera a few blocks from my school. Actually, we technically met for the first time in your car, because you picked me up from my dorm there and we drove to Panera. You greeted me with awkward fumbling hands, and I said "surprise! I'm not a murderer, and I look just like my picture." We had met on Tinder; you told me over the messenger that you were going to bring your pocket knife just in case, because you didn't want to take any risks of catfishing. In the five minute drive over to Panera, I asked if you had really brought it, and you said yes. I looked at your backpack in the backseat and could see its handle poking out of the open front pocket.
I don't remember what we talked about in Panera on our first actual date. I do remember staring at the mole on your face, tiny and cute just like mine, and a few inches below your right eye. I remember the kind of soup that I ordered--baked potato--and I remember how for days before meeting you I had sat in the lifeguard chair at the pool in the school fitness center, listening to "Didn't See It Coming" by Parachute, which was somehow endlessly repeated on the gym's pop-centered playlist. Every time the song played, I pictured the messages we sent to each other on Tinder, how there was probably one waiting for me just that minute, with my phone, forbidden and flipped to hide the screen in the lifeguard office.
Before we met in person for the first time, we talked on the phone for three or four hours at a time; I had never spent so much of my voice talking to a boy who seemed so eager to listen. We shared every aspect of our lives, I sat in the common room of my dorm building and the guy across the hall left his room and came back hours later to see me in the same spot, the phone curled to my ear and my fingers wrapped tightly around it.
One night I went out to a bar with my friends, and when the lights and the loud noises and the strange guy who kissed me on the lips quickly, before I could push him away, had gotten to be too much, I walked outside and called you on the phone, drunk and missing you, though we hadn't met in person yet and I hadn't yet learned what it felt like to see your face, inches away from mine and three-dimensional. We stayed on the phone until my friends came outside looking for me, I kept your voice in my ear as we all piled into a cab, me laying horizontally across the laps of my roommates, my view restricted to the fuzzy sky, green and orange from streetlights. I don't remember when I hung up, or when I went to bed, but I hoped you, the 21-year old who didn't drink because he didn't want to, couldn't tell that I was drunk.
When we finally made plans to meet up, we planned for a Wednesday. You drove up to Baltimore from your home in D.C., and for days beforehand my roommate and I wondered aloud if you would try to kiss me, and if I were ready for that. We walked around my campus, you came with me to a movie showing in the library that I had to watch for class, held my hand and made me feel more wanted than I had felt during my entire year so far at school. It rained a little, it was the middle of winter, and we went to Qdoba, the one right next to the Chipotle right by my dorm, even though you told me later that you much preferred Chipotle and refused to eat at Qdoba, as a rule. As you dropped me back off at the parking lot in front of my apartment, I wondered if you would kiss me. I guess you saw the questioning in my face, because you told me that you had decided before, much earlier, that we weren't going to kiss at all, no matter how well things went, because you had a thing against kissing on the first date. I thought it was noble, and I felt mixed feelings of disappointment and relief for being able to evade the awkwardness of first kisses at that moment.
I credit you for opening up my sexuality, allowing it to bloom and mature on my face, in my hands, on my body. Before you, I had only drunken fumblings, nights dark and light at the same time, kisses leading to more before I was ready. I had allowed others unrestricted access on my body, but I never used my own hands to explore others. With you I used my tongue, my teeth, my hands wrapped in a fist.
Here's what was different about you: you didn't go to my school. You didn't drink, you lived in D.C., you were older. You stared at me, straight into my eyes, and told me that I was beautiful, and the next day you still called. You didn't push, never pushed me to let you fuck me, not the way that I was used to. I had grown used to saying no, was pleasantly surprised when I didn't have to, found myself wanting to go further, deeper, press my body warm against yours and let you teach me how to be someone unafraid of sex.
Before you, I remember touching in the dark, tongues stained with alcohol, hands rough and marking like sidewalk chalk. I remember showers, hot and then cold, hangovers, a spoon from the freezer and then a toothbrush, scrubbing until i saw blood. I remember poems, loneliness, wanting.
How is it possible for things to feel so permanent and so temporary at the same time? Each time you came to visit, I gripped your clothes, your hands, whatever I could find, hard, and I didn't let go. One day I read Portia de Rossi's, memoir, and at the part where she described feeling strong and pure happiness, I went into a different room from you and cried, quietly so you wouldn't hear. The sadness passed, and I did nothing to change it, to address it.
Here's another memory that comes to mind: you were living in a dorm at your college for a summer program, and were sharing a room with a boy I had never met before that day. I wanted so badly for him to like me as much as you seemed to like him. We put a towel on the door because we didn't have a tie, and you couldn't decide which sock you wanted to use to showcase what we were doing behind a closed door. You kissed me but it wasn't enough, when we broke away, each breath you took brought in another mouthful of air that didn't include me and I was afraid of what would happen when your lungs filled up.
Being with you made me feel vulnerable, in a way I was not yet used to feeling, and so I held that vulnerability to my chest, offered it to you whenever you asked. A few nights before I left to go to South Africa, I found out you had been having sex with other people, and I was hurt for how stupid it made me feel. To be clear, I had agreed, grudgingly, for the two of us to be in an open relationship, but I had never dreamed that you would follow through with it. When I confronted you, it was via facebook messenger, while I was in the upstairs bathroom getting ready to shower, and you were downstairs in the living room, watching a movie with my mom. It was true, and I took the shock of it like a fall down a cliff; I cried in the shower, then came downstairs to you, and your face was quiet, your voice small. Was I okay? You asked me that first, and I said yes, my eyes pink. Did I want to break up? Yes.
I took the hurt of being surprised as a method of distancing myself from you. We acted normal for the next two days, until we could dig your car out of the snow and you could go back home.
Here's my problem in relationships: I have a tendency to give pieces of myself away until the other person has nowhere left to put them. And yet still, I don't feel that I have given enough.
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