Monosyllables

And other signs

I should know by now when he starts answering me in monosyllabic grunts it’s time to leave the room. If I had any self-respect, I would. I know what’s coming when I fawn, he’s going to get nasty. I know this. I shouldn’t even respond, I should get up, go into the bedroom and get myself together. I should text a girlfriend and ask if she wants to meet for a drink, but I’ve never been the person to meet for drinks, maybe that’s the problem. He’d be shocked if I did that. If I came out of the bedroom looking cute and smelling good, and breezily told him I was going out, that would get his attention right quick. My mom was the professional drinker in the family, though, and even after years of practice she’d start slurring four drinks in. Stumbling after six. Taking stabs at me with pointed words and a twisted face after that. Drinking never appealed to me, but I should rethink that, because the fantasy in my head now - the one of me and a girlfriend at the bar talking about what a dick he is? That sounds good. 

Photo by Michael Discenza on Unsplash

I don’t leave the room though, and I don’t go get dressed or text a girlfriend for drinks, dinner, or anything else. Instead I sit there and try to draw him out, knowing I’m playing with fire. Maybe I like it? More likely it’s that it feels familiar, like home, and on some level I must think I deserve the punishment. In any case, I’m an expert on fire. The signs are small, I grew up this way so I know how to spot them. There’s a change in temperature, the tiniest shift. A breeze most people wouldn’t even feel, a quiet swoosh underneath the floorboards. It was the chardonnay bottle when I was growing up. The sound of the cork sliding out of the bottle, the wine glub-glub-glubbing into the glass. I could hear it from any room in the house. The look of her elegant hand, diamond ring sparkling, her fingers lightly holding the stem so the heat of her palm wouldn’t make the wine warm, and her perfect little pinky sticking up. I do that with my pinky, too, even though I’m just a kid. I do that because I think everything about her is amazing, and I want to be just like her, except when I don’t. But that’s why everyone calls her the queen, because of that extended pinky finger, curved in the air like a question mark. When she drinks, it all changes. She changes, her face changes, the feeling in the room changes and I know I have to pay attention. It’s not that being alert will stop anything from happening, it’s that at least it won’t catch me off guard. At least I’ll be expecting it. If I’m lucky, it’ll be a night where she goes to bed when the slurring starts, or not too long after she’s a little wobbly when she walks. 

I watch her carefully as the night goes on - just like I’m watching him now - and see if I can read her mood. Maybe I can say something funny, or smart or sweet. Something that makes her laugh, or makes her look good. I’ll clear the table without being asked (just like I do his laundry). Sometimes if I say just the right thing, I might be able to avoid a night where I’m pressed up against my bedroom wall with my arms over my head, looking up at her from under one of my pointy elbows, trying to understand what I did to make her so angry. What I keep doing. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like there’s a monster inside of her, and when it’s unleashed it takes up the whole room. She’s as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the walls. The thing is, there’s no pattern, nothing I can point to. Just the fact of me is enough. There’s not much you can do about the fact of yourself. I fought so hard to get out of that house. I skipped my senior year of high school by teaching myself everything I needed to know to ace the achievement tests and the SATs and I got the fuck out. You’d think I would have avoided a house where I had to tiptoe around and read the room, making myself as small as possible, but you’d be wrong.

(Look - let me show you, uncomfortable as it is - here I am sitting on the couch facing him, one knee pulled in. I’m barely breathing, really, I’m panting, but softly, and my heart is beating just a little too fast. And here he is on the couch next to me, slumped down like a petulant teenage boy, foot on the coffee table, staring ahead, of course, not at me. He just picked up the remote, that’s how done he is with this conversation, he just forgot that I was still speaking. That’s not it, he didn’t forget, he’s ignoring it because he doesn’t care, or because he’s playing a different game. It’s a game he likes, and he always fucking wins. The real question is why do I keep playing, and when will I wise up and cash out? The lighting is nice, we picked these side lamps at IKEA together, and there’s a beautiful shade of gold coming through the big bay window - that light that you get right before the sun goes down. I could point it out if he was someone else. I could say, wow, look at the light, babe, isn’t it beautiful? And maybe we’d make out a little, or a lot. But I don’t say anything, instead I look around wondering what I did wrong, looking for clues. There are the stupid curtains I picked out when I thought this would be easy, and here’s the shag rug I thought was so cool. I made it all look right, but it doesn’t matter because he likes to break all the pretty things, especially my belief that he can be better than this. I swear he gets off on watching tears slide down my face. He’s like a bully kid who takes the toys he knows are your most special - that doll you prize above all others - and he watches your face while he twists its head off. Why? Who knows why? Not enough love as a kid, probably. Or he was smothered, not mothered and now he’s scared of intimacy. That’s what the articles say, and you know I read them. It doesn’t change a thing.

He started the conversation, by the way, in case you were wondering. He introduced the topic and I enthusiastically joined in. I love when he wants to talk about something, anything really, but pretty soon into our exchange I could see him clouding over. He’d said the part he wanted to say, shared what he wanted to share and then he was done. Or maybe he was playing me. Maybe he does this shit on purpose knowing I’m just like a hungry dog begging for scraps, and if he gives me just a little taste I’ll get excited, and then he can go in for the kill. Because I do think he enjoys crushing me, I just don’t know why.)

Once at a party we were going up a big staircase to the second floor where it sounded like there was a DJ, one with good taste. I thought we were going to have a fun night, maybe dance until we got sweaty. I was wearing a black, backless dress he liked, tanned from a day on a speedboat with his friends, feeling good. Feeling light. A girl came around the bend of the staircase. She was beautiful, long, dark hair, dark eyes, wide smile. I knew she was his type, but so was any pretty girl. In the beginning, when we were dating he’d tell me I was beautiful, but he doesn't do that anymore. These days he criticizes me, picking apart every single thing. He wonders why my hair grows out of my head straight, and then starts to curl after an inch instead of curling right from the root. How the fuck do I know and who cares is what I should say when he asks, but I don’t. He asks about a tiny scar on my forehead, so light you really have to look to see it. He tells me that maybe I don’t need that bowl of cereal, and that the crunching noise I make when I eat an apple is intolerable to him. He says I’m breathing too loudly. He says a lot of things, but that’s not the problem. It’s not even him that’s the problem, it’s me. It’s that I stay after he says these things, and then I hate myself. And I stay longer because I hate myself, and he says more things, and I hate myself more … you get the idea. That night at the party, that night on the staircase, he stared at that girl as she came toward us, and she stared back at him, but he didn’t stop there. He turned and watched her walk all the way down the stairs and let me stand there watching him watch her. I died a little, just like I’m dying a little here on the couch. I must really hate myself when he grunts at me and I don’t leave the room, because I’m just setting myself up for the kill again. 

Photo by Shelley Pauls on Unsplash

It’s going to take me years to end this madness and keep the pretty lamps, but one day, one day I’m going to look at him and say I’m done and I’m going to mean it. He’ll say different things then, things like he can’t believe I’m really over him, that he never thought that would happen. I wonder which part he thought would be the hardest for me to get over, exactly. He’ll say that I’m beautiful and he watched me sleeping just this morning, noticed the shape of my lips, the curl of my eyelashes and the rise and fall of my chest as I breathed, thinking how lucky he was. That he doesn’t deserve me, and if I give him another chance, it will be different. But I’ve already given him chances, and chances on top of chances. I’m all out of chances, it turns out. Instead, I’m going to pull the knife out of my own heart and start breathing again, big breaths, all the way into my belly. I’m going to crunch on apples with gusto and eat cereal and take up space and love my unruly hair and figure out that I don’t like riding that ride anymore, the one where he acts like an asshole and I stand for it. That actually, I’m never going to ride that ride again, not for anyone. I’m going to go back in time, back to my childhood bedroom, back to one of the many nights when the question mark turned into a nightmare, and I’m going to gather up my pointy-elbowed child-self, wrap my arms around her and carry her out of that room. I’m going to bring her into this moment, into this room where I’m sitting with the lamps, and show her the golden light coming through the big bay window. We can both see how beautiful it is, together.

I’ll realize that I prefer people who speak to me in full and thoughtful sentences, and that I don’t like playing with fire, I never did.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about the effects of growing up with uncertainty and fear I’ll be here 5/10/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. And there are just a couple of spots left if you want to meet me in Portugal in June!