dad/dra

I am seventeen, and things feel both permanent and temporary at the same time. I've never fallen in love, I've never had sex, I've only had my heart broken in distant, gentle ways. I don't know what it feels like, yet, to be able to hold someone's hand whenever I want, to kiss them everywhere, and then suddenly, to stop doing that forever, while always remembering exactly what it felt like. I can only guess at what gentleness feels like, what love feels like, incarnate and shown by someone else's fingers tracing softly across your skin. My world is big and small at the same time. I look at the sky and feel myself pulsating with possibility, I stay up all night writing things that when I read them later seem pregnant with promise, with prospects of a future as a writer, because I deserve it. I'm seventeen, and in a few months I will be eighteen, will be going to college, will be leaving the only town I've ever known, but that I can't wait to escape. 

I am twenty-two, and have had my heart truly broken for the first time. Even in the months leading up to it, in the fear of having that first big loss, a fear bigger than my doubts about the relationship in general, when it comes, it still takes me by surprise. I make my way through it in gasping breaths, incessant talking, a complete loss of appetite. It lasts a week, until we see each other again, and get back together. Even in a week that felt the closest I've ever felt to total loss, I can observe myself getting stronger each day, feeling freer and more powerful. 

This is the story I've told so many times it feels stale in my mouth: I'm on the porch of my house, seventeen in the summertime and cradling the phone to my ear. My father, a person I have loved despite the times he has promised to pick me up and never showed, despite the cruel things he has said to isolate me from my family, despite the times he has transformed into anger, yelled and stormed off, has sprung calculated insults that have torn through every last shred of my confidence, is on the other end of the phone. I talk and he doesn't hear me over his own voice, his laughter, his surprise that I have asked him for anything at all. I try to communicate my limited knowledge about financial aid, my surety that without it I will not be able to attend college at all. He tells me, as if it is factual and friendly, that it's nothing to worry my little mind about, that in a few months when I turn eighteen, when he is no longer legally bound by child support, he is done. 

I am twenty-three, and the person with whom I have prepared myself to live the rest of my life with has ended things with me for the second time. It doesn't come as such a shock this time; there are ways to tell a person has chosen to stop fighting for you long before they admit it to you, openly. I don't cry. Instead, I barely sleep, afraid to touch him and push boundaries, afraid to never get to touch him again, afraid to lose the smell of his blankets, the feeling of darkness that engulfs us when the curtains are closed, the sounds of a city outside seeping in through his window. I am afraid to sleep because I am afraid to wake up the next morning, to admit to loss, to give up the present. It is one of the worst nights of sleep I've ever had. 

At seventeen, I hang up the phone with my dad and feel numb for the first time in my life. I walk inside my house, the light and the air conditioning hit my eyes and my skin simultaneously, I set the phone down on a table, stare right through the walls and barely notice my mom, there with bated breath and tears of anger and apprehension forced to swallow themselves as she waits for me to say something, anything. I say nothing, then everything. I am angry, and the only way I know how to show it is to fold up into myself, to quiet everything until I'm barely breathing, barely existing. More than anything, I am confused. For the first time in my seventeen years of living, I understand what it feels like to feel completely out of control. I acknowledge that nothing I said could have been the right thing. I recognize that sometimes, someone's mind is made up and there is nothing to do other than to accept this fact and move on. My mom is calm. She is not surprised, and she is terrified, but she is determined never to give up an opportunity for my growth. 

On the other end of another phone conversation, six years later, the person who has called me the love of his life tells me he never wants to speak to me or hear from me ever again. He says it quickly, strongly, in a way that feels like he has no desire for the opportunity to take it back. It is another of those moments, when I understand, suddenly, how certain words can make the whole world stop for a moment, and can cause a consciousness shift so cosmic that there will not be anything that can be done to undo them. I recognize the fact that nothing on earth coming from my thoughts will ever be enough to chase away these destructive, harsh, pain-filled words. I feel numb, and then I cry, hard. And then I am angry, so angry, hurt for the way I am being blamed for the slowly destructive fire that has destroyed all fibers of the first real love of my life. It feels like getting pelted with stones and crying out when each one hurts in a different way than the last. And then my anger evaporates. Instead, I feel mourning, sadness, emptiness where the space I've always reserved for this person has suddenly been dusted out and its corridors are open and whistling to make their emptiness known. I send him a long text telling him how much I have and always will love him. I type multiple versions with apologies in them, and delete them. I will not apologize this time, since it does not matter whether I am sorry or not. I wish and hope with everything in me that he will respond, but am unsurprised when he doesn't. 

How can I learn to stop giving myself away to people who do not appreciate what they are getting? How can I learn to stop loving people who have given me every reason to hate them? How can I start healing in a way that allows me to forget about the past, forget about the hopefulness of the future, allows me to stop labeling the end of a relationship as giving up, not trying hard enough, not being willing to change enough to fit comfortably into someone else? 

After all the things my father and my ex have said to me, done to me, not said, not done, said about me, not said, I love them with everything that I have. I hope with every piece not dedicated to loving that one day they will recognize how much I love them, how much I desperately want to be good enough for them.

I am still twenty-three. In moments of confidence, I feel that I do not need the approval of people who have done nothing but ask me to change. In moments of weakness, I cry with hurt, with longing, for these two people who I have loved and who have chosen to leave me. I ache for the cruelty of memories: I remember exactly what it feels like to run my fingers through my ex's hair, to hold his hand, to lie with him in his bed. I recall too deeply, too personally, the magic of having sex with someone whom you truly love, someone who you hunger for, someone you give permission to rip your life apart because to be with them feels like growing your heart with each beat it takes.

I wanted to sleep next to him for the rest of my life. I knew that to accept our relationship for exactly how it was would prevent us from growing individually, that the time we spent together was hard to rip ourselves away from, that the reason we broke up the first time was because we spent all of our time together and it made us caustic and angry and glutted. But I didn't care; that is what it felt like to be so immersed in a person I loved them despite all the warning signs.

I have had sex with other people since then. As a creature of freedom and habit, I like to have sex, and I don't see the end of a relationship as a reason to deny myself of it. And though I've opened my mind and my body enough to allow myself pleasure for the sake of it, it feels nothing like what I had with him.