What Touches the Heart
You don’t get to be this old, unless you’re a complete ignorant, without being aware you have weak areas and you’re bent (in my case like a circle.) I have had an entertaining life, I’m crotchety as hell, and I’m not used to being liked. I lead with my crustiness of the soul, just to get it over with.
I just spent a spectacularly soggy episode crying on my best friend’s shoulders about the wedding. Sometimes, our spirits are very like us—Danto and I have a fair bit in common, which touches on sometimes in my battered and occasionally sensitive vanity.
The thing about my life is that no one ever asked me if I wanted to be handed intractable problems in awful situations, or even cared if I could deal with the problem. This pretty quickly begs the question of what’s important to deal with, since you can’t do everything, and just keeping it 100, I was almost never most important.
I’m not a nice person. I decided early that if I was going to make making decisions like whether or not getting beaten was worth it to spare my brother, or desperately trying to figure out how to keep the closet door closed against a raging adult while my brother cried behind me, someone else was going to suffer.
Unfortunately, that was often me. I violently rejected romance, trying to be attractive, and all things associated with self-care outside the minimum. I was enraged that I kept having to throw myself in the path of something, because no one seemed to be able to do it. I didn’t want any more responsibility than I already had, taking care of the situations and people I had to take care of, and while I am a regular showers kind of gal, you’d best believe I was dressed to repel, foul mouthed, and in the habit of rejecting anything resembling intimacy.
I might put myself between you and something nasty, but I resented you for it, and I resented me more that I couldn’t seem to help myself. Until recently, I had a compulsive response to the sound of women and children crying. I couldn’t shut it out and I’ve done my fair share of dangerous things in response.
Everybody gangsta until a teenage girl with hacked off hair jumps you wielding a knife (and willing to die for it) because you were raping your girl friend in front of an open window, or hits you with a fucking car. Or rams a table into your crotch. Or slams your head in a wrought iron screen door, screaming.
People keep offering to protect me. I guess I’ve gotten frail in my old age, or I just look delicate. And maybe I am, any more.
All of this has lead, along with a judicious helping of other childhood traumas to the tune of something I was often told, that no one could ever love me, to a bit of a complex around love.
Part of what’s really getting me about the wedding is that Danto is all the things I’ve been told are why no one could love me. Yet people love her. Passionately. Deeply. Affectionately.
And she loves me. She rolls her eyes at me in possession, chides me for making myself small to fit other people’s expectations, and says “you gonna keep fighting” when she comes on my head, tremors spilling down my arms and legs.
Ai, my love, I fight like a cornered alley cat. I’m afraid of being loved. I’m afraid of loving.
But I’m going to marry you, anyway. No one has to love me and real love is precious.
Facing you is facing a part of myself, with everything that radiates up this little vignette. I’m just apparently going to go the fuck through it in the lead-up to the ceremony.
