awakenings

As a self-confessed control freak, I find nothing more distressing than uncertainty. This stems, perhaps, from my relationship with my father: he never hit me, but his frequent threats to do so left me guarded and skittish. I lived in near-constant dread of provoking an outburst, and the anticipatory tension that wound itself around my spine completely exhausted me. As bizarre as it sounds, I just wanted him to get it over with. Cuts and bruises would heal quickly enough, but the fear never really left me.

Though there is no threat of violence, this situation feels much the same. The walking-on-eggshells anxiety, the crippling indecision, the curling body and constant tension. Am I doing the right thing? Am I being cruel? Am I seeing things how I want to see them, not how they really are? What if I leave and it is a mistake?

I am aware that I sometimes have a ‘grass is greener’ mentality, and that I can occasionally be a bit lazy. I hear so much about people needlessly ending marriages through their own unwillingness to work harder, and I ask myself: is that me? Am I throwing in the towel without even really trying? Is my sexuality just an excuse? I have a good thing here: a caring boyfriend, a beautiful home, a supportive family. Am I tossing it all aside for selfish reasons? Will I ruin my own life, and my son’s, on a whim? Could I learn to fall in love with him again? Should I? The questions flicker across my brain faster than I can process, until I am dizzy and sick with the effort of it.

When I set aside the thorny issue of my sexuality, I know what our relationship problems stem from: D. and I have always struggled to communicate. In the beginning, our vision was tunnelled by passion and our mouths were easily distracted by lustier pursuits. But on dates where this was not an option, the silence broke over us like waves – and while he seemed content with this, I squirmed with discomfort, babbled inanely, and longed for conversation that never came. I remember telling my mother about one of our first dates: I was sitting in a restaurant with D. and staring over at a couple to our left. They were two forty-somethings eating wordlessly with diverted gazes, occupying separate spaces at the same table. In the half an hour since we had arrived, I had not seen them speak once. I asked my mother, with dismay clogging in my throat, ‘Will that be us in ten years?’ And, with the knife-edge of alarm: ‘Is that us now?’

I suppose it matters less how we got here than what we plan to do about it. But that’s the problem: we don’t agree. D. is from determined stock: his family are the type to fix things through sheer force of will, and word ‘surrender’ simply is not in their vocabulary. We often laugh at D.’s dogged attempts to complete impossible tasks. I, on the other hand, have always been rather pragmatic about such things, and my attitude is usually along the lines of ‘Why flog a dead horse?’ Naturally, at this point in our relationship – or lack thereof – we have completely different opinions as to where we should go from here. He wants to try, and try harder, and try harder still…and I am longing to let go.

I suppose, when you think about it, neither option is wrong. But I am more likely to be judged for walking away than for staying. His parents have been together since they were nineteen; his mother surrendered her career after the birth of her first child and never went back since. Despite the fact that I can sometimes see undercurrents of bitterness between them, they have just celebrated their ruby wedding anniversary. Even my mother, who was married to a lying, abusive philanderer, found excuses to stay with her husband for twenty-plus years.

So I am not being pessimistic when I say that they will not understand. Where I grew up, ending a relationship for some wishy-washy reason like ‘unhappiness’ or ‘sexuality’ was considered utter bollocks. If you divorced, it was because he gave you a black eye, or because he shagged all your friends and his idea of a thoughtful gift was a couple of STIs. If you divorced, it was because he’d gambled your life savings or gotten arrested (again) for fighting. A good husband was defined by his ability to put food on the table and avoid beating you senseless. By those standards, D. is an Adonis.

So I am back at square one. Do my feelings justify my exit, or am I just making excuses? Do I stay? Do I try? If I go, will I regret it? Is this my fault? Am I lazy? These aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way. Feel free to pitch in.

Lately, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on the internet. Though I am aware that it has spiralled from a hobby to a near-addiction, I simply cannot seem to stop. I am known to waste 7 or 8 hours video-hopping on YouTube; I spend entire days doing Google searches for articles, forums, and websites that will help me make sense of how I’m feeling. My grades are slipping, the house is a mess, I’ve put on weight, and I have a constant low-level throbbing in my temples from too much exposure to LED backlight.

When the truth comes tumbling out, it is more by accident than design. D. and I put the little one to bed and begin our usual nightly routine of sitting at opposite ends of the couch. I curl with my back to the armrest and open my laptop, using the screen to shield me from view. He flicks through the channels, coming to rest on a cooking programme, and absent-mindedly rubs my socked feet. The silence yawns uneasily between us.

I am watching Ellen and Portia’s wedding video, on mute, for what must be the hundredth time this week. Seeing their happiness, so pure and free and unsullied by doubt or fear or shame, fills me with a hunger that is bone-deep. I have never dared to watch it with D. in the house before, and it is a mistake. The grief in my face is naked and raw, impossible to miss, and it gives him pause. He asks, not really expecting or wanting an honest answer –

‘Are you okay?’

– and without warning, I snap. Sobs roll up my spine and burst out of my
chest, animal sounds that echo against the silent wall of his surprise. He gently disentangles my fingers from the computer and sets it aside; tugging me into his lap, he rocks me as though I am a child.

We talk for hours. The hope in his eyes is sweet and brittle as glass; it fractures with every word I utter, and I watch him fold at the waist with the agony of it. I tell him that I am unhappy, but I do not tell him why. I tell him I know that I am not in love with him, but I do not tell him how. I tell him I am sorry, over and over and over, until the syllables taste strange and foreign and my lips are numb with regret.

He begs. Oh, god, he begs, and it is all I can do not to just give him what he wants. To let him have me, no matter what the cost. He tells me he still loves me, and though I knew this, hearing it and not being able to say it back is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I tell him he deserves better, and he tells me he does not want better – he wants me.

We can make it work. Please, I’ll do anything, anything you want. There has to be something left.

I say it, not just once but over and over, because he does not believe me. No. No. It’s not going to work. I can’t do this. There is nothing left in me to give. Self-hatred rises like bile in my throat, and I want him to slap me, to kick me or bite me, so that I bruise in places he can see.

The silence, afterwards, is almost worse than the tears. The air is open and raw as a wound. I rest my forehead against his arm and quietly fiddle with the seam of his t-shirt.

‘There’s a hole,’ I say. ‘You have a hole here.’

He looks down. A baby-blue cellular blanket is crumpled on the floor by his feet. It is the same blanket, I realise, that we brought our son home in from the hospital, and I wonder what it is doing down here. He picks it up and gently folds it into a square, and then he presses it to his chest.

‘Sounds about right,’ he replies, and I know I have broken him.

I went to university at eighteen and discovered an entirely new concept: fuck buddies. Here was a way to experience the fantasy without ever having to commit to it. Despite the fact that casual intimacy had never appealed to me, I tried it out.

The first girl I slept with had soft curves, full lips, and limpid green eyes. We met at a pub, and she extended her forearm across the sticky surface of the beer-splattered table to show me her tattoo. Tracing the dark shapes with my index finger, I drank glass after glass of Malibu and Coke, until the coconut-and-sugar taste drowned out the acrid tang of my own fear.

We walked back to her flat in the pouring rain and peeled off each other’s clothes, curling our clammy thighs around one another under the duvet. A pinkish glow rose like a blush from the fairy lights she had strung around her bedroom, and minutes rolled into hours as we kissed, touched, and talked. When she lay flush against me and rested her cheek against my collarbone, I felt – for the first time in my life – complete and utter peace.

I came back for more, of course, only this time I was sober. I overcame my fear by lunging at her without pausing to think, and luckily she was pleased – rather than terrified – by my apparent eagerness.

She was the first person to give me an orgasm. Her fingers danced and gripped and stroked, and I rose for her like a tide. She tipped me abruptly into a sensation that sent shock waves down my spine, and then she peered up at me in the half-light and said, with a mouthful of accented attitude, ‘I bet a man’s never touched you like that, eh?’

Indeed.

I had an insatiable thirst for the taste of her mouth, and I drank her greedily and without apology. I had no idea what I was doing, but my hands moved over her independently of thought or design, as if they already knew her. When her body vibrated under my touch, I felt something close to invincible.

That was the second and last time I ever saw her. She revealed shortly afterwards, over the phone, that her feelings were going beyond the unspoken boundaries of our circumstances. I nodded and murmured in all the right places, and then I ran like fuck.

Before I met D., there were several more like her, but none that I enjoyed quite so viscerally. By then the fear had taken me in a stranglehold. Physical intimacy has always been bound up with my emotions, and I was terrified that surrender in the bedroom meant surrender in everything else. I told myself I had made my peace with my sexuality: I dated some guys, but mostly girls, and I never shied away from showing affection to the latter in public. When I snaked my arm around a girl’s hip at the bus stop, and a bunch of pre-pubescent boys on bikes yelled ‘DYKE!’, I did not move away. I did not apologise. In fact, I gave them the finger. But every time someone got too close, I took to the hills as though my feet were on fire.

I ran from what was to be my last relationship with a woman straight into the arms of D. He was a kind and generous lover – and, to my utter surprise, I was deeply attracted to him. He was endlessly patient and he taught me how to relax again, how to give myself over to sensation. I told myself that I could not be gay, that the pleasure I felt with him during sex was far more important than the emptiness I felt after it. I told myself that it was time to break away from everything that had gone before. I told myself that it was time to move on, to create something new, to forget everything old.

And for a little while, with his help, I truly did.

Dear Moonchild,

It seemed inadequate simply to leave you a passing ‘thanks’ after that beautiful letter. And so I sit in my study, drinking green tea with agave nectar, and offer up my own words in return for yours.

I won’t lie: your truth damn near broke me. I read it this morning while I was cleaning the kitchen, my forearms immersed in a sink full of bubbles. I read it once through, and again once more, and then I bent double over the counter and wept until I could not see.

You are right: truth has its own gravitational pull. In the carrying of it, you can scramble for a foothold or shift your position – and sometimes that works. Sometimes it does. But inevitably, your bones begin to shake with the weight of it, until letting go becomes less of a choice and more of a necessity. I am at that point, I think, or near it. As your body fought against your husband’s, so mine does with D. Each time he tries to kiss me, I slip through his fingers like air and I am gone before he has chance to voice a protest. I feel the full force of his sorrow at my retreating back and it brings me to my knees. But still my body will not – cannot – let him in.

The inevitability of this is what left me sobbing this morning in the butterscotch light of the kitchen. It is happening, it is coming, and I don’t know when, but I know it is soon. I can only sit and wait and watch for that moment of heartbreaking clarity – that moment you talked about, the one where you just know – and let it knock the air from my lungs. I can only hope that once it does, I will have the strength to get back on my feet and learn how to breathe again.

You are right, also, in that our communication has been ‘buried’. The sad thing is, it has always been this way. I am a talker: I talk to heal, to resolve, to reach out and comfort; I talk for honesty, for fun, for a challenge. D., on the other hand, has been taught that problems go away when you pretend they don’t exist. I often wonder if things would have turned out this way if I had succeeded in my attempts to open him up. But I am beginning to realise, just as you did, that it is not my job to fix him.

Sometimes I wish that I, like you, had a ‘catalyst’ – a woman whose eyes and mouth and voice gave me reason to doubt the life I was living. Then, at least, I could seek solace and affirmation in her arms, and know that my sacrifice was for her and not just myself. But then that’s not really the point, is it? The whole reason this began was because I wanted to find out who I was. I need to learn the rhythms of my own body before I can explore someone else’s.

And so – to my other questions. ‘I feared for our kids.’ How did they cope? Did they understand? Were they angry? My sweet boy is sleeping off a fever in the room directly above my head. He already knows that something is amiss, and he has been following me endlessly around the house like a wounded puppy. I am not the best mother in the world – I am honest enough with myself to know that – but I adore him. I could not live with myself if I made him hate me.

‘Choosing your own presence and wholeness will only bring more love into the world.’ Oh, Moonchild, I hope more than anything that this is true.

With much love and gratitude,
Bee
xox

Though I like to be thought of as opinionated and strong-willed, at heart I am what I have been since I was five: an insecure little girl who just wants to be liked. And, as everybody knows, the best way to do that is to be perfect. Make no mistakes, do what is expected of you, and for god’s sake don’t ever let them see what you really are.

I am what Americans call a ‘straight-A student’. I am also maddeningly obsequious with teachers; as a result, they have always treated me just that little bit better than the rest of the class. In life, my decisions are rarely the wrong ones – and if they are, I am eloquent enough to make them appear otherwise. I work exceptionally hard at appearing infallible. Occasionally I am told that this makes me seem conceited. Upsetting as this is, it does not motivated me to change: I would rather they judged me for something that is not true than for something that is.

So what I’m thinking of doing flies in the face of everything I have ever known. It is the equivalent of stepping naked into the spotlight on a stage facing an audience of thousands. My bones shriek with the desire to flee, to go back, to bend myself into the familiar shape of the shadows. The last thing I want is for them to see me stripped bare.

And yet, absurdly, it is the only thing I truly do want. A small part of me recognises that there is a certain freedom in living without clothes. I yearn to feel the air on my skin, without the restrictive abrasion of seams and sizes and labels. Look at me, I want to say.

Don’t you see how beautiful I am now?

Back when I was tiptoe to the doorway of adolescence, there were several more ‘gay moments’ like the one in the changing cubicle. With the perfect vision that comes with hindsight, I remember them all. I remember the sweet, lazy heat that rolled up my thighs when my first-year English teacher leaned across me to collect my homework. She was petite and blonde, with delicate hands and a tiny bow mouth. When she moved, a ribbon of vanilla-scented perfume trailed behind her; it made my young body thrum like a harp string. Even now, twelve years later, I never fail to be moved by the smell of that perfume.

But then, of course, there are memories which are not quite so pleasant. Like the time I found out what happened to people who came out in high school.

Victoria – Vicky – was her name, though I doubt anyone remembers but me. Teenage girls have that ability to effortlessly crush someone’s spirit under the heel of their designer boot and forget it almost instantly. The only reason I remembered was because some small part of me knew, even then, that it could so easily have been me.

From what I heard at the time, a popular and aggressively beautiful girl named Sam approached Vicky and asked her a question. Try as I might, I can’t imagine how that particular question came up – and, more importantly, why on earth Vicky answered it. The fact that Sam casually flung such a crude offering at someone she barely knew should surely have alerted the poor girl, but it didn’t. Perhaps Vicky’s vision was misted with hunger for someone – anyone – to understand, and she mistook the glitter in Sam’s eyes for a reflection of the same. In fact, it was simply malice.

Either way, she said yes and agreed to meet Sam later in the school yard. Vicky came, and she waited, and suddenly there was Sam – Sam and a baying mob of thirty other students. Elevated in my position at the top of the school steps, I saw understanding bleed into Vicky’s face by degrees, and then her shoulders went rigid with panic.

Pushing her way to Vicky’s side, Sam raised the bewildered girl’s hand in the air like a prizefighter and crowed, ‘She said she’d fuck me! She’s a friggin’ dyke!’

An appreciative audience, the kids erupted in whistles and catcalls. A boy at the back threw his empty water bottle; it sailed over their heads, bounced off the wall behind Vicky and snickered across the floor.

‘I didn’t say I would!’ she squealed, tugging her hand away. ‘I said I might!’

God help me, I threw back my head and laughed at that, along with the bullies and the bastards. Did she honestly think that would work? Did she think that admitting she’d considered it would help her case?

Before anyone had time to stop her, she vaulted the small wall at her back and ran for the building. Like a swarm of angry bees, they followed, funnelling in through the door of the science block. I did not chase her, but neither did I try to stop them. I only felt an overwhelming sense of relief that it was her instead of me. She was locked in a classroom by a member of staff, I heard, for her own safety.

Vicky never did come back.

I am drifting further away with every breath. He senses it, I think – my movements, however small, vibrate along the ghost of a chord that once held him fast to my insides. When I take a few steps away, even just to pick something up or go to the bathroom, he is instantly vigilant.

Where are you going?

Mummy, come back and play with me.

NO, Mummy. Stay here.

It is simultaneously heartbreaking and suffocating. I cannot go anywhere without being followed by the patter of his footsteps, the impatient tap of his hand. Self-reflection requires solitude – at least for me – but he allows me none. The anxious rope of his voice repeatedly tugs me backwards; I am not sure whether I resent this or am grateful for it. Often, it is a mixture of both.

He is not quite three years old, yet he is more attuned to me than D. is. Sweet and exquisitely sensitive, he mimics my moods so accurately it hurts me to watch him: for weeks now, he has been weepy and bad-tempered without ever seeming to know why. As he lacks the all-too-adult capacity for denial, his face crumples in the most innocuous of moments and he gravitates instantly towards me, crawling up my torso like a kitten. It is all I can do not to weep along with him, but instead I do what I know I must: I rock and stroke, whisper and soothe. I rub slow circles on the small of his back. I kiss him.

I lie.

I have learnt that skill all too well from his father. The man worships denial as though it’s his life source. Never in my life have I met someone so capable of ignoring the elephant in the room; it could be trampling over the furniture, crushing everything in sight, and still he would deftly step around it and paste on a smile. I used to find it astonishing, and would try poking him into an argument just for the fun of it – after all, nobody’s that perfect. I used to joke that his loudest expression of anger was a sigh. After growing up with a volatile father whose temper was fierce and unpredictable, it didn’t exactly seem like a problem.

Now, however, I just find it exhausting. I cannot fix anything if he will not admit that it’s broken. My once unwavering sense of honesty has all but been strangled into silence; it takes me months if not years to work up the courage to talk about our problems, and within minutes he has changed the subject.

I’m so tired. I’m so unbearably tired. I need to be strong for my son’s sake; I need to somehow find the courage to confront this before it gets too big. But years of crushing who I am for the sake of everybody else has taken its toll: there is nothing left in me to give. I am finding it difficult to care about anything but getting the hell out of here. My job, my degree, my house, my future – what does it matter, really? What does it matter when I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning?

I’m sorry. I’ll try to be a better mother, a better girlfriend, a better daughter. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt anybody. I’m sorry. I tried my best to make you all happy. I’m sorry. I’m gay.

I’m sorry I’m gay.

Shortly after I turned eleven, I climbed onto the bench of a changing cubicle at the swimming baths. My discarded bathing suit clung wetly to the wood; I nudged it out of the way with my knee and pressed my cheek flat against the cold tiled wall. I was half-dressed and shivering, but if I squinted and tilted my head just so, I could see a narrow slice of the cubicle next to mine.

She was changing with her friend, and their bare limbs flickered in and out of my vision like scenes from a garbled videotape. Underwear and t-shirts and words passed easily between them; their laughter was girlish and relaxed. For an instant, I simply marvelled at their indifference – to them, their shared nakedness meant nothing. And then she turned to face the wall behind which I was furtively crouched and dropped her towel.

Oh. Her breasts were full and heavy, the kind I’d only ever seen behind flimsy strips of lingerie in the clothing catalogue. So far, she was the only girl in my class who needed a bra. The skin-pink circles around her nipples were puckered with cold; at the sight of them, something nameless shifted inside me and began to ache. Later, shame would creep up my throat like bile and burn through the sharp edges of this moment – but for then, at least, I knew exactly why I was there. I knew why I stayed frozen until my limbs felt thick and drunk. I knew why my heartbeat had dropped to the base of my spine, and why my fingers stuttered a restless tattoo against my chlorine-soaked thigh: because I wanted nothing more than the chance to reach out and touch her.

I’m not sure exactly what started it. I have been creeping towards this conclusion with my eyes squeezed shut – sightlessly groping the dark for some answers, even as I refuse to admit asking the questions.

The books, I think, were a large part of it. It’s hard to read with your eyes closed, but I managed it. Sugar Rush. The Price of Salt. Pages for You. All of them were beautiful, but none contained whatever it was I was searching for. Until then, at last – Dear John, I Love Jane.

Ah, so that’s it. It is possible to – ? Oh, okay. But it doesn’t apply to me, not really. No, no. I’m sure their husbands were lovely, but they’re not D. He can, even now, pull me back from this. He will see the book and its title and he will ask me what’s wrong. We will talk until our voices are sandpaper-dry and then go to a relationship counsellor, who’ll show us spider diagrams about communication and give us ‘intimacy homework’. In six months we’ll be back to normal, and I’ll fall for him even harder than I did when we first met. In six months I will have forgotten.

But. But –

I finished reading a book about ‘ex-gay’ Christians last week. It was rather formal in description, with most of the emotion buried beneath academic lingo – but still, it tugged something loose inside my head. The self-loathing, the fear, the seemingly endless struggle to redirect desire – ah, yes. I know this. And now, whether I want to or not, I am unravelling at a vertiginous speed.

Our son slept over at my mother’s yesterday, and I spent the evening soundlessly begging D. not to touch me. Put simply, I am running out of excuses. Perhaps he sensed my stiffening reluctance, or perhaps he was too tired – either way, he did not try. The only contact we had was when he laid his palm on my right knee, gently rubbing away the residual ache of past injury. I let him, needing the platonic relief of his warmly circling hand.

I read parts of Dear John again, only this time the stories had an echo – the eerie resonance of my own truth, bounced back at me in the words of another. I tried to sleep but could not shift the disquiet that pulsed in me like a second heartbeat; dread formed a cold, hard ball in the base of my throat. Eventually I switched off the bedside lamp, letting the darkness cocoon me from the question of his eyes.

This morning I pressed the imprint of my palms into the steam of the shower screen. I allowed myself to cry, my hot tears indistinguishable from the water that sluiced over my face. I said the words – only in my head, but god help me, I said them – and found myself shaking fiercely, unable to stop. I felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with bare skin, and everything to do with exposing myself to the purest truth.

I am coming undone.

There once was a time when I could forget the small details. The colour of his eyes mattered less, somehow, than the look in them when our skin connected. The shape of his mouth was never as important as the texture of his kiss; it was the direction, not the form, of his hands that I followed. For a little while, I felt far more than I saw.

Now that I see him with clear eyes, I remember everything: his palms are square and callused, and my fingers are longer than his. His lips are a plump blush of surprise in the angular planes of his face. His eyes are the softest kind of green, like spring lime. I remember what he looks like when he wakes up (sulky-eyed and bushy, with hot red cheeks), and how he likes his coffee (one sugar, a generous splash of milk). I remember how long his hair has to grow before it starts to curl, and what his favourite dish is when we order Indian food. So how is it, with all these details, I have never known him less?

I collect the memories like valuable coins, displaying them in frames and on shelves; they are the glittering punctuation in my family stories. Look, I say, holding them aloft in my outstretched palms. Look at how well we fit.

I am trying to convince myself more than them, I think. Besides, they already believe it’s true – and there is a small part of me that grieves over that. Because even as I fight to prove the perfection of our union, I am thrashing for release. I am praying that someone will know me well enough to look past the colourful blanket of my words and see the dropped stitches, the threadbare wool, the gaping holes that I seem to be carrying everywhere with me now. I have pretended so hard for so long that I cannot remember what is real any more. And I wish more than anything that someone would show me. That I would not have to make this decision alone; that in finding answers from a third party, I would be absolved of guilt. That I alone would not be responsible for tearing my family apart at the seams.

That wish will never come true. I am honest enough with myself to know this, even as I hope otherwise. I allowed myself to get to this point and only I can choose where I go from here. Whether or not I will ever have the courage to say the words out loud is still a question mark at this point; even thinking them threatens to snap me in two. I have to wrestle with my conscience in silence, until I figure out whether I can handle the weight of one essential truth: I cannot heal myself without breaking somebody else.