This is a story about coping.
She was blond. She rode a bike to your apartment every other day. She wore Ray-Bans. You held
me against your chest at night. You bought
me coffee. You screamed at
me when I begged you not to leave me to see her. I was the one who sat naked in my bed, term papers unwritten, shaking water out of my eyes.
My therapist blamed me, too. You weren't being malicious, I just had a complex. I couldn't understand that somebody could love me as much as I loved them. What, she would ask me, folded hands sturdy as mountains on her lap, made me think that I had a greater capacity for love than other people, particularly men?
I'd tell her: stories of unfaithful men. Everyone had one. Do you? I asked her, looking through her spectacles, narrowing my pupils into laser beams to pierce through the thick lenses. She pulled the blinds over her eyes and I smiled.
And, other things, in this particular situation. When we shared a bed you always faced away and I would cling to you but I felt like a barnacle on a rock. I could sense your indifference. Your heart never sped up. You looked and talked about other women. When mixed with my daddy issues, my cheating ex-boyfriend, and my decrepit sense of self-worth, it all made sense. It was a simple case of input and output.
This blondie though, she was audacious. She was a real punk. When she called, you RAN for the phone. You never talked to her in the same room as me. During your conversation I got dressed, goosebumps littering my skin. I knew that when you came back, you wouldn't touch me unless I slowly nudged my way under your palm. You would light your pipe and stretch out in bed like a man who had just fucked the sultriest whore. You were a real asshole.
My therapist, in her velvet throne, blamed it on my faulty wiring. My brain had been molded into a spastic, tangled array of nerves over the course of my ugly-duckling years, when my prepubescent and adolescent crushes made me too anxious to eat. As a consequence I was always too skinny, with perfectly circular glasses and braces that always peeked out from under my lips. I loved running my hands over my ribs and feeling soft waves of skin curling over bone. I was satisfied with my jagged silhouette punctuating by my ribs. I wanted my first man to be able to enclose my torso with one hand. It took me until I was twenty to find that a body always splayed out in fleshy directions when lying in a bed with another person who smells like all the beauty you want to engulf with your fingertips, lips, mouth, pupils, ears. I hated when you pinched my skin. I hated that my skin didn't adhere to my ribs like glue anymore.
Blondie was a skinny bitch, too. When you first met her, she was heavier, with a less fashionable haircut that was always tangled up. I don't know what you did with her, but the few times that I had been there, your laugh made me want to vomit into her perfect shiny French bob. Why didn't you just fuck her? Well, you said, its not like that. She's my friend. She's my friend. She's my friend, your arms gyrating around the fulcrum of your torso frantically like a windmill and your feet moving out the door.
My therapist listened all right, she listened while I launched a linguistic crusade against men with gorgeous female best friends. I called you every name in the book, and then I came home to you napping, took off my jeans, and slipped under your arms. She wrote prescriptions for pills that I filled, and sold. I used the money to buy us sushi once a week.
Still, it wasn't enough for you. One night you packed up your things and let loose on your way to the front door. Bitch. Trust me, bitch. I could not believe you were asking me to ignore twenty years of insecurities that were so deeply tangled around and trust you. You didn't want me around because I cried too much. I asked, why did there have to be a blond paragon of beauty? Why weren't my flat nose, gangly arms and chewed fingernails enough? I wanted to punch you. I wanted to rip and tear your image until you finally got it. I wanted to stuff your mouth with every single pill I hid in my purse and pawned to teenagers.
One time, when you were standing putting on your jacket and I sat Indian style on the bed, convulsing with rage, she walked in. I pulled the blankets to my nose and moaned. You scoffed. She took off her hat, daintily slipped the purse off her arm, and sat on the chair facing the door. You left. I had no clothes on my body, so I drowned in those blankets until the only thing she could watch was my hair spilling over the dusty pillows, heavings up and down with my sobs.
