Monsters

I don’t want to tell what he did. To anyone. Ever. I feel so weak and ashamed and barely able to write this much here. I do want to talk about how he held me in his arms while I cried and stroked my hair. How he told me I was too beautiful to be so sad. I want to describe the look in his eyes and how he maintained a level of sincerity for 24 hours that I have never seen in him before. I want to remember how careful he was with me, like I was a delicate, rare thing he dare not damage. I want to feel again how it felt when he almost said he loved me, how it was such a tangible understood presence in the room and how it swelled and pushed until it became a part of the air we breathed. I would like to just be proud of the clarity the whole thing brought me. A chance to shake some of the demons out of my head and almost have someone else hold them for a while. I went into such a dark and familiar place right after. I became nonverbal and I floated outside of my body and outside of Queens. This has happened in every relationship I have ever been in at one point or another for one reason or another. And every other man got tired of it. Comforted me at first but eventually threw up his hands and blamed me for my weakness. Some called it attention seeking. Some felt too helpless to care anymore. But he stayed next to me. Wrapping me in a sheet when I couldn’t move and the heat stopped working. Touching my face and not forcing me to look at him like the others always did. He held me and let me be where I was. He asked what I wanted, respected my lack of an answer. Didn’t give up. For the first time he held me for the entire night. Every time I woke up he was watching me or had his arms around me. I love his arms. There is such a safe, safe feeling that comes over me when he holds me from behind and I rest my cheek on his arm. He was patient. I started talking to him again in the morning but retreated to a lonely place after breakfast. It came upon me like a comet crashing through the ceiling. Unprepared, stunned, and I started to cry again. It took me a very long time to understand why I was still crying, why it hurt so incredibly bad. My therapy kicked in and I asked myself when I had felt this thing before. I remember my dad, screaming at me when I was trying to help him. I had spent the afternoon helping him plant rose bushes outside. He wanted to surprise my mother when she got home from work. So we smiled at our secret plan for her and worked eagerly to finish. When she got home I ran upstairs squealing "Come see! Come see!" She came down and was delighted, she went outside to examine the flowers, to breathe them in, she was so, so happy. Then he came up to me. Quiet but fierce, "Why did you bring her down? Huh? Why?" He pushed me or slapped me I can’t actually remember which but I remember feeling stunned, holding my face and crying for the next couple of days.Other memories came to me too. Of Anthony. That piece of shit. Of every fight we ever had that ended with him sneering at me and telling me to stop my crocodile tears. Memories of how he secluded me from the world, kept me from my friends, made me think I could never do any better. Distinct memory of how he would get so incredibly mad at me when I got numb like this and couldn’t articulate what was happening, and one time he hit my bed so hard it left a dent in the metal frame and he drove away somewhere for hours. Oh how many times did he pack his things and walk down those stairs? And then there is Jay sitting next to me now, saying how much he cares about me and wants to talk to me. He is gentle and beautiful and I desperately want to be present in the room with him again so that I can breathe it all in. I miss him already and I’m sitting next to him. The thing that happened with Jay, happened. And it can’t unhappen. And I am also aware that a lot of the feelings I had today were about my past, not my present. I don’t know what to do about them so I’m just going to let them be for now and see how I feel the next day and the day after that. I can’t continue to be with him and hold his sins and the sins of those before him against him. But I also can’t not feel what I feel. So it’ll just be. And I will learn to stop taking everything life with such finality and I will realize that all things are in our paths so that we can learn from them. I will do all of those things, tomorrow. Tonight is still murky and when I close my eyes I still see monsters.