16 August 2017 "On Bob's Last Day"

 I have several memories specifically tied to a few houses and to my first boyfriend. Beds, always in beds, and always tired. 

What to do with the memory of having someone whose hand you can hold any time you want, and yet who sometimes made you feel so far away? We used to dogsit together, the kind where you stay in the person's house and you borrow their car, and it feels like you are an adult, living an adult life. We could lay together for hours, legs and arms intertwined and I could feel myself melting, could always feel myself melting, into a person or into a moment, it didn't necessarily matter which, it just mattered that I let myself be succumbed into the gravity of another body next to me. 

The first time my first boyfriend and I went on a date, we didn't kiss, just had an awkward little hug. I didn't necessarily mind, I hate first kisses, they make me so nervous for the way the other person might look. The unknown, you know? Anyway, he said it was because he never kisses on the first date, and I believed him, although it sounded odd, because I believe anyone anytime they say anything, at least the first time. I found out later that he didn't kiss me because he still had a girlfriend at the time; he just hadn't had the time to break up with her yet. The relationship was already over, he assured me, and of course, he broke up with her immediately and then we immediately started dating. Was I irresistible? Or the perfect storm of timing, because he was already looking for a safe way to jump ship? I don't know, but we talked on the phone for hours at a time, and it felt unbearably good to sit in the same spot for hours with a phone pressed to my face, to carry that phone in my pocket all day and to know that he was one call away, he was mine, and I belonged to someone too. Plus, we didn't do anything physical until he had already broken up with his girlfriend, so it didn't even really count as cheating

I think about what it felt like to walk around a park or a campus, with the knowledge that I had a boyfriend, I had someone, and I feel a little bit sick, with longing. Just taking the pressure off, a little. How do I describe it? Stability, safety, the knowledge that whatever I didn't want to do alone, I didn't have to. You wake up in the morning, and it's it's kind of like an absence of longing. When is the last time I felt that way? Maybe before my ex, two exes ago, and I broke up the first time. Since I've been able to hold someone's hand without feeling a little strange, without there being a ton of things unsaid. I can pinpoint several times when I missed the feeling of holding someone's hand just because I want to, but when is the last time I did that? 

How did he make me feel? My first boyfriend. I remember sitting in a Chipotle and him suggesting that I stop drinking soda if what I really wanted was to lose weight in my stomach--that's what he did and it worked for him. I remember how he didn't really like pda but how if I stared up at him in the right way he wouldn't be able to help but kiss me. I remember fitting into the crook of his arm, I remember watching the Walking Dead with him and my mom, I remember how things felt so much more interesting when someone I was actively having sex with was able to accompany me to do them. I wanted and missed and needed to be in my mom's house with him, rather than anywhere else. 

I remember when I finally went to therapy for my OCD, I remember crying softly when the therapist told me that one day I might say something or do something and the people around me might laugh and shake their heads and say oh that's just Emily and I wouldn't have to be embarrassed and no one would have to be upset. 

I look back recently, and I wonder what it felt like, to be the girl that was able to get people to stay. The girl who had someone maintain an interest in them for more than a few months, the kind of person people wanted to be around without falling apart. As the months go on, I am starting to understand that although it felt beautiful and perfect, my relationship with Eli might just have been another of my own bad habits, not just his. I find myself telling the stories and retelling the stories and claiming there is a lot of missing context and forgetting sometimes where and what the context is. Are we nothing but the context in between the things that happen to us? 

What is the difference between feeling stable, feeling safe, and feeling trapped? There are so many moments tied to my first boyfriend, moments when I cried in quiet, when I wanted more than anything was for him to never find out, when I knew no amount of words would ever convey to him what I was feeling, but that didn't stop the wanting. But there are so many others, too, of laughing and of safety and of softness, and of deep longing, of not being close enough. 

I think the hardest part of my relationships has been the feelings of not being heard. Changing into something else, a representation of me that's a little less honest, if only to be more palatable. 

What is it, to sit across from someone who looks directly into your eyes and says it sounds like you are committed to being unhappy--to those situations that make you feel unsafe and unsettled? We can't find people who deserve us until we let go of our own traumas, I know this & I've seen this. 

Am I stuck because I won't stop cradling trauma? I know that I find beauty in stark descriptions of pain, but am I addicted to the way it feels useful to give gentle care to the parts of people that seem the most hurt? I don't know. But I do know I felt love for one of my exes the most tangibly when he cried into my arms, when he showed vulnerability I just knew he was killing himself to keep inside. I know that I am the kind of person who encourages people to let emotions seep out of their pores, who shows no judgement and so who invites emotional labor like it's something that feeds me. 

What does it do to a person to be a person like that? What does it do to me? I carry the weight of the world in every conversation I have because in all my conversations I like to make the person in front of me as big as the world, as diverse and complex as the human condition. 

Do I stay in the patterns I do because I know how they will end and that comforts me? Or because I hope in the back of my mind that I will be surprised and things won't go the way I always know they will?