Status: under construction
Heavy
ONE
Before Ru I was fiercely alone. I was never lonely, I told myself, because I chose to be this way – I actively rejected love and romance, I was a freedom fighter, unshackled. I told myself that love, romantic love, was the ultimate distraction to a balanced life. Friends tried to psychoanalyse me, to work out my fierce rejection of relationships – was I afraid of commitment? Did I have a bad childhood and a fear of abandonment? All bullshit, of course.
Except that deep down I knew that I had forced myself to view this life as an assertion of my own autonomy. The truth? I was fat, ugly. Unloveable. No one would want me, I knew – and so instead of letting that hurt me, I thought fuck them and convinced myself I wouldn’t want them anyway. I was fat, I was confident, and I truly – truly – loved myself without the validation of another.
He changed everything, of course. I was wanted. He told me he liked my mind and my smile and my stupid jokes and that the rest didn’t matter. The first time we slept together I wanted to keep my t-shirt on but he wouldn’t let me. He forced it over my head in one quick motion, he looked me in the eyes – and smiled. This is it, I thought, this is love. After, I wondered why I still didn’t feel good. Why I was lying next to a person who had just seen me, nude and vulnerable, and I still wanted to wrap myself in sheets and not move until he was gone.
It was good, the beginning. I grew to love the feeling of his hands on my thighs and back. I forgot to worry about my rolls and stretch marks and the pale skin on my stomach that had never seen the daylight, because I was too wrapped up in him – in his smile and his laugh and the veins on his hands. We sat in the front room of my flat and read together in sunshine, in silence. I was consumed by all these intersecting realities in which I was more than I had been. Where did he end and I begin? We were wrapped around one another, a tomato vine on a trellis, and I was coming in to bloom.
Somewhere in this strange dimension, the waves of my tsunami are dragged further out to sea. All the small organisms that grew in the shallows are exposed to raw air, and they gasp – gills drying in the sun – waiting for an encompassing wave that will wake them up again. The water has abandoned the constant moon for a seismic shift, equally unpredictable and destructive.
Except that deep down I knew that I had forced myself to view this life as an assertion of my own autonomy. The truth? I was fat, ugly. Unloveable. No one would want me, I knew – and so instead of letting that hurt me, I thought fuck them and convinced myself I wouldn’t want them anyway. I was fat, I was confident, and I truly – truly – loved myself without the validation of another.
He changed everything, of course. I was wanted. He told me he liked my mind and my smile and my stupid jokes and that the rest didn’t matter. The first time we slept together I wanted to keep my t-shirt on but he wouldn’t let me. He forced it over my head in one quick motion, he looked me in the eyes – and smiled. This is it, I thought, this is love. After, I wondered why I still didn’t feel good. Why I was lying next to a person who had just seen me, nude and vulnerable, and I still wanted to wrap myself in sheets and not move until he was gone.
+
It was good, the beginning. I grew to love the feeling of his hands on my thighs and back. I forgot to worry about my rolls and stretch marks and the pale skin on my stomach that had never seen the daylight, because I was too wrapped up in him – in his smile and his laugh and the veins on his hands. We sat in the front room of my flat and read together in sunshine, in silence. I was consumed by all these intersecting realities in which I was more than I had been. Where did he end and I begin? We were wrapped around one another, a tomato vine on a trellis, and I was coming in to bloom.
Somewhere in this strange dimension, the waves of my tsunami are dragged further out to sea. All the small organisms that grew in the shallows are exposed to raw air, and they gasp – gills drying in the sun – waiting for an encompassing wave that will wake them up again. The water has abandoned the constant moon for a seismic shift, equally unpredictable and destructive.