A break from the sweetness of sorrow

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

I admit, I put it away. I let it fade. I had to. I had to let it soften at the edges and dull. I had to let it begin to age and dim.

There are times, upon waking, that the pain is still sharp and new. I dreamt weeks ago that I was with him again, with Mark, sitting in the audience of a little playhouse, watching Susy run around the stage in tights and a bright, scratchy tutu. He was holding my hand on his thigh and his face was familiar and I was unsettled because I was so happy. That happiness with him, upon seeing him, is now so alien a feeling that it woke me. I sat up and I said, “Oh, oh,” and I pressed my hand against my chest and I breathed in the warm still air of my bedroom and I laid out across my bed, the width way, and I felt the cold side of the sheets where no male body had been lying. Where none would lie for weeks yet.

I had to put Mark away for the end of the summer so that I could let his absence wash over me, so I could be alone. I suppose I could have kept writing through it, kept reliving his kisses, his heat, his scent. I could have kept that always alive and fed on the sweetness of it…but I had to put it away for a while, for just a while.

And now, I am seeing someone. I ask myself, I asked myself last night, while crying fresh tears for Mark, “You idiot! It was never about that!” and “I only wanted us to be happy but you just couldn’t stand it, you couldn’t help yourself and you fucked it up!”
A breath after that tirade I asked myself, When is it enough? When have I suffered enough? remembered enough? cried enough?
I have cried enough, by God, I know that for damn sure.
When is it enough to move on? To test yourself against the warmth of someone new, against their affections, against a new desire? When is too soon or long enough, when is it time to start dating again?

Sometimes I feel like a loaded gun painted to look like a harmless toy, ready to go off and blow holes through the next part of my life…I don’t know if I am doing this right. I don’t know if I am doing anything right, who does? I do know I like this guy. I know that all I have to do is think of his smile, his laughter, and my day brightens. I know that I light up when I see him and for that alone I am more grateful than I can ever tell him.

Do we love again? Do we ever love the way we did before?
Do we love again after great loss?

Some would say no. Some would say, oddly most of them self-defined “true romantics,” they would say that you only have one great, true love in life.
One shot.
This is a beautiful and terrifying ideal.

For my part, I don’t know. I am afraid that I will never have again what I felt with Mark. I am afraid that I will have it again and lose it again. But love doesn’t thrive in fear and I have decided to choose love…so I am afraid but I am doing it anyway. Sometimes I feel like the greatest fool. Sometimes I feel so brave I can’t stand it. I wonder what other people live on, if they never feel this pride in themselves, the ability to say, This killed me, but I am doing it again anyway. I am not afraid to truly live.

I look at the man who holds me now—his eyes light and clear, not just blue, warm slate grey—I look at him and I let myself feel that swooping rush of first affection. That feeling like falling. I kiss him and I let myself feel something again. He kisses my temple, he breathes in the scent of my hair, pressing his thumb at the side of my neck, holding me tight with a feeling more like we have been wrapped up together, compelled by some outside force. I sink into him and I measure myself against him with yet more gratitude. He says he can tell there is so much mystery in me, so much more he doesn’t know. I could almost love him for that alone, for not thinking he knows everything there is to guess about me.

I can’t call it love yet.
I don’t punish myself for that.

Small steps away from the sepulturero’s grief-fed balms, the yellowing sweetness of decaying love that still clings to my memories of Mark, of us. Our romance and its long imprint in my heart.

I don’t know what comes next. I am still living this way, step to step, heartbeat to heartbeat in this tiny town. I go on dates with a handsome, intelligent man who tells me I am pretty. I laugh a lot and I feel pretty, but not only because he says so. I am still asking questions, always conducting interviews, and still amazed that despite having answers we are all of us still turning circles around the same confusion.

You really do, you do: you have to live through it to know what the hell is going on and even then, good luck.

Last night

I held him in my arms. I felt the solid press of his wide chest against me, the swell and settling of his ribs as he breathed.

He was holding the back of my head, his chin tucked into the sensitive hollow of my neck and shoulder, whispering, “I’m sorry,” the slight movement of his mouth brushed his roughened cheek against my skin. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said over and over. I turned my head into his, rubbing my cheek against his hair, the side of his face. I pressed my lips against his temple. He said, “I love you.”

I was on my toes, my feet were bare and I could feel the chill of the floor beneath me. The shelf behind him took our weight as he pulled me closer and leaned back, shoulders collapsing, shaking. He was crying silently, I realized, the way some men do when they let themselves cry. “I’m sorry,”he said, still whispering. I felt the words more than heard them, “Sorry it took me so long.”

I was saying it too, “I’m sorry…Sorry I didn’t know you.” I held him and folded my arms across the back of his head. I told him, “I love you, I love you,” and he buried his face in my neck again, faint words rumbled through his chest, through me. I felt him smile against my skin and I felt lighter, safer, happier—more completely happy than I have in months.

I woke smiling with only a faint feeling of loss that comes after a good dream. The way you feel watching someone as they leave you, going on a long trip: you miss them and you know they will be back.

It wasn’t Mark. The man in my dream was not Mark.
It wasn’t him, I think.
“It wasn’t you.” I take a few deep breaths, still smiling, still remembering the man I held. He felt so right, I think, my smile deepening, He felt so real.
“It wasn’t him,” I tell myself and the relief breaks over me like a fever.

This isn’t over, not by a long mile, but I can see the beginning of daylight.

All roads end, in Christmas City

A few days ago I stood on a street corner shrieking wordlessly into the sky.
I had had a rough morning. Not the worst in my recent life, to be sure, but not so great either.

The day began with the bus I needed to be on driving right past the stop I was waiting at only to stop about a half block away instead.
Turns out only that one bus, an 8:55am, can take me from my apartment to the movie theater.

Hmm. It is 2011 and I live about an hour away from a city that has 24-hour, hot’n’cold-running-everything but here in Christmastown, Pa., there is only one bus that can get me to the Saucon Valley Rave and back in the same day. When it blew past me I came back up here and checked the site only find that, yeah, that was the one and only. They had altered the route but not updated the stop locations; “I was just supposed to know, I guess,” I said, rolling my eyes at the computer screen.

“So, no Captain America. Fine, fine,” and I slumped in the chair for a second, thinking about my big plans for the day. Redemption and good ol’ fashioned, Marvel-brand butt-kicking.

I had intended to see this as a gesture as much as anything else. I know it is silly, and only a movie, but I had been looking forward to so many this summer and I have missed all but one because I could not face any of them knowing that I had always intended to watch them with Mark. Sitting in the semi-dark, watching trailers with his hand on my thigh, my arm twined through his, we had huddled our heads close and geeked right out about this movie season. “This summer is going to be inTENSE,” I would whisper. And he would remind me about other flicks coming out and talk about going to the comic shop’s preview showings, wearing our Comic book T-shirts—nerd heaven. And then we broke up…and then I still had to go see that movie with him and feel him sitting next to me, treating me like the plague. It kind of put me off the cinema for a while.
Captain America had been his boy, his favorite of the Marvel men, so it was with some small nod to my emotional backbone that I chose that one to break back into the pictures. Actual threats of violence couldn’t get me to go back to the theater where we had our last showdown, so that left The Rave, less than fifteen minutes away at a big, well-known mall, and completely unreachable to me.

“FINE! I’m going to buy comic books,” and I stomped off to go do just that.

It was hot. I was sweaty. People seemed to think I was begging to be hit by cars despite my waiting at crosswalks for the signal. A woman wearing craft fair jewelry was rude to me. By the time I got to Broad Street I was already in a foul mood. Then I recognized a stretch of houses, a restaurant, and my memory pulled me back into a cold day almost a year ago: The Halloween parade. Mark’s niece, Chelsea was marching with her school band and his sister Pamela would be walking with her. Mark was assigned picture-taking duties. I had dressed in layers and I was still freezing as we stood with his friends in front of their house, a large apartment above a dentist’s office with a small porch and late-flowering baskets.
I look up at the baskets now filled with bright summer flowers. The porch is clean and the door is closed but I can see the stairs behind it in my memory, leading up to their rooms. “I remember this…” I whisper to myself, and still I was back in that moment.

I was so cold I was shivering, I couldn’t control it anymore. I watched a little boy stoop to pick up candy thrown from a float, his face haloed in a soft, grey shark mask that matched his footed and finned pajamas. Aw! I wish I had a shark suit, I thought. He looked so warm. Chelsea’s school was still two groups away, at least another half hour.

“How are you this cold?” Mark asked, his arms wrapped around me, my head tucked into his puffy vest. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back inside?”
I shook my head no, “I’ll be fine,” and I began to sternly tell myself that I was not that cold, It’s all in your head. I covered my nose and mouth again with my scarf and I breathed the warmed air in without opening my eyes. My eyelids were frozen, even my eyelashes were cold.
I felt my hair being pushed back and Mark’s warm fleecy hat was pulled over my ears. Then his scarf, also ultra-soft polar fleece, dropped around my neck. His scent all around me, his heat seeping into my body, I began to relax a tiny bit. I was already wearing his gloves, my fingers floating around in them though I do not have small hands.
“I swear there has to be something wrong with you,” I tell him after chattering my thank-yous. “How can you stand there in just a T-shirt and that vest and be fine? I’m still freezing.”
“I’m quite warm, actually. I might lose the vest.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” I shivered again, huddling deeper.
“Here,” he said as he began to unzip. The sight of all his skin exposed made me even colder; I could feel my nose going numb. When he wrapped the vest around me it was like falling into our giant warmed bed: fluffy, smelling of his cologne and almost hot from his body. He zipped me into it and started taking back his scarf.
“You can’t wear just a scarf,” I said, reluctant to let go of that even, offering the hat instead.
He was standing there in just a T-shirt and jeans and still when I put my hand against his arm he was warm. My personal heater. I cuddled against him, both hands on his chest feeling the hair bunched beneath the fabric, my head tucked under his chin.
“You can’t still be cold!” he said, wrapping his arms around me anyway.
I pressed closer. “No, not anymore. You fixed it.”
“It’s what I do.”
And finally warm, I leaned against his chest, his arms tight around me. We watched the kids scramble for candy and cheered the pipers. We saw Pamela and Chelsea march by and when we walked back to the car, he tucked our hands into the pocket of the vest, laughing at my still icy fingers.

Walking away from that scene, feeling the chill in my head and the sweat rolling down the back of my shirt, the disorientation lasted about a block. When it wore off I was almost angry at myself for remembering that contentment. For letting it blindside me, for sinking into it.

This was a day to LET GO! This was a day to MOVE ON! and now this shit!

When I got to the intersection and pressed the button to call the crossing signal, I was angry. Angry at this stupid small town for being the scene of so much of my history with him. Angry at it for being the place I moved to to be with him. Angry that that wasn’t enough of a gesture for him, to show him that we could take anything, adapt to anything. I was angry that I STILL LIVE HERE though I never intended to do so alone. So alone…
The light changed and I stepped forward before realizing that the cars weren’t stopping. They were turning into the intersection, clearly not intending to let me cross. Some lights let the cars turn before the pedestrian signal so I waited. I looked at the clouds above the empty and neglected buildings. Frowning, I looked at the jumbled storefront of the headshop behind me; the bleak, sunbleached faces of the stores across the street. The light turned red. No crossing signal. I pressed the little button again, waited, and again the cars turned into the street without giving me even a second to walk.

I know that it is an expression, “seeing red,” but I actually saw red, just for a second before I doubled over, my hands clenched together, pressed against my stomach, and I shrieked. There’s no other way to say it. Eyes squeezed shut, body tense, everything in me just shrieked. (I have heard the phrase “primal scream” and even that is too polite a word for it.)

I gasped a breath and yelled, “I FUCKING HATE IT HERE! I HATE IT HERE! I HATE IT HERE! I HATE THIS GODDAMNED, CLAUSTROPHOBIC, HICK TOWN! WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF PLACE IS THIS? WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE? HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME HERE!?”

That last one, I don’t think I was talking to Mark.

While I shrieked and shouted, the light cycled through again and when the cars began to turn, I stepped into the street snarling at their hoods like a crazy person, “I FUCKING DARE YOU!” They stopped. No one honked. I crossed the street and I stood facing the building at the corner, my back to the cars, breathing, just breathing.

I leaned against a big, moss-covered tree there. I said, “I’m sorry I am so angry,” and pressed my back into its round trunk. The tree just stood there and a part of me felt humbled by its ability to never feel anger, to never experience this rage. I turned and leaned my forehead against the bark. I watched an ant climbing the rough little cracks and I thought that ants probably don’t get angry either. Except for fire ants probably…I sighed, smiled weakly and felt suddenly exhausted.

“I hate this. I really do,” I tell the tree. It just stands there and I can’t bring myself to hate it too. “I don’t hate you,” I pat its trunk and step away, toward the comic book store. I tell myself that each of these steps is one further from this place in my life. I tell myself that geography doesn’t mean anything, that journeying and experience and moving forward is all in the mind. It can happen anywhere.

I call myself a fucking hippie and I walk into the store. Time to take back the comic books.

The memory affect

Today is another idyllic day. Clear, piercing light so radiant it makes everything it touches more beautiful. Bright clouds hang in the sky like fluffy confetti just thrown overhead and swathes of unripe corn and just-mowed grassland ripple out around us—ribbons of green-striped, shimmering silk.

I am suddenly struck again by the incredible and impossible beauty of this life, this place. That I am alive in it seems always miraculous. The air seems electric and I savor the feeling as it fills my mouth, my chest and runs out all over my body. My skin is a thin coating of exposed nerves. Goosebumps rise on my back and neck: I love this life! I watch a tiny white butterfly tossed in the air near the bus. Light glints off a silo in the distance and I smile.

Watching Upper Bucks rush along beside us (I am riding a bus back from a visit to the Philadelphia), there are dense stands of trees with rich brush tangled at their feet. Clusters of Queen Anne’s Lace and golden wild senna mix with purple thistle tops and shiny reed grasses. Passing through Quakertown I see black-eyed susans and hibiscus mallow planted in front of stores, bright shouts of color to keep the blacktop at bay. I see a stone house with a red wooden porch tucked behind thick, ivy-wrapped trees. I remember how Mark and I used to window shop for houses as he drove us through the valley. One had an elevated porch just like this one. I flash on laughing with him as we devised a plan to flood the lawn.

“A moat!” I said. “Come on! It’s perfect. You like floods—I like intimidating, shark-filled moats. Perfect Fit.”
“Sharks?”
“Freshwater sharks, little ones. With big appetites.”
“Fair enough.”

It had a low wooden fence overgrown by cattails and scrubby weeds that I informed Mark he would never have to mow. I imagined laying on my belly in the grass by that fence, listening to the Lehigh river and the world rush by.

For a second I think again, Why would you talk about getting a house together? Why would you talk about living that life with me and then throw it all—
I shake my head and watch my reflection sharpen as I focus on my face in the window overlaying the velvety green landscape rushing by. This is not helpful, I tell myself. You will never know those answers and guessing is making you crazy and less and less sure of yourself.

Riding the bus back to Bethlehem is often riding surprise-memory lane. I used to take this bus, same drivers, same route, back and forth to see him anytime he had several days free when I still lived in the city, and if it weren’t for Mark I would never have left Philadelphia, would never even have thought of it. I moved for a man. I moved for love and I do not regret it, not even now that I no longer have that love to keep me company as I learn how to live here in the suburbs. I am not a suburbs person. I suppose anyone who knew me could have told me so, but I did not know before coming here so I wanted to try. With Mark and his world, with Susy and his family and our friends, I was happy here. I knew how to be happy here.

The space made me think I could like it. The free, green spaces around the roads and houses and the freedom I felt whenever I woke up to the sounds of birds and the cool, quiet morning air.

I used to walk down to Fairmount Park near my old ‘hood in the city and I would lay on my back on the branch of a great old tree and try to block out the buildings and see only the sky. Traffic blaring, people running by with their eyes glued to phones and watches, the smell of exhaust and cigarette smoke all became tests of my ability to feel nature, choked and struggling underneath and around me. The first time Mark drove me out to Lehigh Valley I was all wide eyes and smiles. He was staring at me, grinning and I said, “What?” and he just said, “Look at you, like a little kid,” and he kissed me and ruffled my hair, “looking at everything.” Everything seemed more alive and more real. I said, “There’s just so much to see! Is that a crow?” and I sat watching the fat bird while Mark watched me, enthralled by things he had grown so accustomed to.

It seemed I was ready for a change. So when it became obvious that I needed to move out of my apartment in Philly, I began looking in Bethlehem, just a few minutes from his house as opposed to the usual hour apart we had tried to work around up to that point. We had been together for a few months by then but it still seemed to make perfect sense.

“Are you sure you are okay with me moving out there? I don’t want to scare you by moving things too fast or something…I just want to make sure,” I asked on the phone once after having talked with him about some places I had found in the area.
“Am I okay with not having to drive an hour to see my girlfriend? Yeah, I think I’ll manage to get used to that.”

Let the record show: I asked.

He showed me this one house in his town, down near the bridge, that had a stand of bamboo trees and a semi-detached garage. It had a pond—I swear I saw geese one time floating across the glossy black surface. I could see us there. I could see Susy playing in the yard, Don’t get too close to the water! and Mark walking down the drive to get something he had forgotten in the car as I stood in the kitchen, sliding a pie into the oven. Me and Donna-Freaking-Reed.

“What do you think?” he asked, slowing as he drove past the front of the house.
“I like it. I really like it. It has a pond!”
“And it is doable. If I can turn the house now for what the market is asking, we could get this place.”
“This place looks bigger. More land anyway, and they’re worth the same?”
“No but I looked this one up and it’s been reduced to sell.” Later he showed me the listing with the layout and a description. We laughed about fighting over the garage. I thought Studio! he thought it was a perfect workroom for his cars and bikes. A proper garage, I guess. We must have driven past that house four or five times, once a month, attending to an obligation we only wished we had to worry about.

My heart sinks at the memory of myself, so trusting. You thought that meant he meant it. You thought that meant it could really happen.
I can hear my naive, trusting, still-in-love-with-him self say, but he said so!

I shake my head, watching my face frown in the glass, and I think, Grow up.
The bus begins moving again, passing behind the church and old buildings of the university up on campus. We’ll be at my stop soon. I gather my things and put those old dreams and enthusiasms where they go, back in the past, where we left them.

Auditory hallucinations are to be expected

He says my name again with a sigh, drawing it out so that his accent caresses each syllable. “Meh-leen-dah,” he curls his heavy fingers around my wrist, into my palm, “this is why I have come in to your life, Meh-leen-dah…to save you.” He takes my hand in both of his and begins to move them into his lap, pulling me closer. I resist, just enough to keep our hands on the table, and when I do I hear, “He is trying to fuck you.”

What?

The voice I heard is impossible. It is Mark’s. I look at the scene we make, me and this man, the voodoo prince. I feel I am watching the movie of my life, I am the spectral version of myself projected from the back wall of the sunny café we are sitting in. “Look at him,” the voice seems so real, I chuckle, “that trick, with your hand? Come on.”

From my mental distance I see this guy literally forcing my hand, trying to make me want him. Spooling out a line of interest in me, positioning himself to save me (if he knew me he would know that implying I need to be rescued is the last way to win my affection) so that he could make this play. A memory now, I hear Mark’s advice from months ago while trying to get me to understand other men, “Guys don’t do that kind of thing unless they think it will end in sex. He was trying to have sex with you.”

I shake my head a little, coming back to the moment. I tell the voodoo man I have to go, “I have to get to work.” He asks me when I am going to call him; I am honest, “I don’t know if I will. You want something from me that I do not have to give. I made that clear.” I struggle to understand how I am having to tell this to the same man who, a few hours before had given me the advice: “First thing [about heartache], you cannot rebound…try to cover it up with another person.” Now I am sitting across from him and he is telling me, “Ten years ago, you would be having my babies.” I laugh to myself about how little I understand…well, anyone, anything.
Eventually he leaves and I am walking up the stairs to my apartment.

“You think you can talk to men about being heartbroken and they aren’t going to try to get you into bed?” Mark’s imaginary voice jumps into a terrible female falsetto—“Oh, I’m so vulnerable. My boyfriend hurt me. I’m a sure thing. Please use me.”

Once in my door I start to laugh, “Son of a bitch. He’s right.”

One of the big life lessons Mark taught me is to understand that most heterosexual men are trying to have sex with most women most of the time. He also had to teach me that this principle behavior does apply to me too. I often forget to be aware of it, and it is still habit to think, but not me! Nobody wants Me.
I have interviewed about ten men since this all began, half of them have either hit on me or made it clear they were interested.
“Em!” his name for me, the only nickname I have ever liked, “What did you expect?”

“So if someone offers to carry my groceries for me?” We are in his car, idling at a curb in my old ‘hood in Philly. I often tagged along to visit friends when he went into the city for work. On the drive down we were discussing my naiveté as regards men, though I tell him over and over, it’s a pervasive, systemic condition. It’s not just men who confuse the living hell out of me, it’s everyone. I recall another incident from recent past, “What if someone buys my drink when we were both in line at Wa-Wa?”
He rolls his eyes at me, “Are you joking?” He then tells me that I cannot let men do any of those things for me. Not if I don’t want to be a jerk, “If you let them buy you things and do you favors…”
“It’s like signing the blowjob contract.”
“Yep.”

I told him once about a date I was on with my then girlfriend June. She took me to the Hyatt Regency, a swank hotel with a revolving restaurant and decadent desserts. I remember I wore a skirt that just brushed the tops of the backs of my knees when I sat on the tall, velvety chairs. I was swinging my legs, ankles crossed ladylike, back and forth, over and over—just enough to rustle the hem against my skin. When she got up to go to the ladies’ room I heard the man at the table behind me say something. I turned and said, “Excuse me?”

He said, “That’s quite a martini you’ve got there. I feel a little inadequate.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, mine was filled with berries and cream, not vodka.”
“Vodka?” His tone was playful but disapproving. We debated for a few moments about the merits of the gin versus the vodka martini before I admitted I had never had the gold-standard gin and vermouth. The man was older and handsome. I remember thinking that, He sure is good-looking, and I remember that that was one of the reasons I was sure he was not hitting on me. Not his age but my attraction to him.

“So he called over to the bar and ordered me a martini.”
Mark laughed and looked at me, “Oh, come on!”
“I was on a date! How was I supposed to know that he was—”
“You were on a Girls’ Night Out. You were not on a date. And you didn’t say anything about her being your girlfriend,” he said, muttering, “not that that would have helped.”
“I didn’t know I had to! I thought it was obvious…” I shouted, “We were holding hands!”
“Never even crossed his mind. If it did, it was to think, ‘Threesome!’”

“When the martini came and June still hadn’t come back, I joined him at his table,” I said to Mark, “It was only polite.”
He snorted his disbelief, giving me a flat, sarcastic, “Really.”
“Shut up! What was I supposed to do—Ignore him? Keep talking at him over my shoulder?”
“Okay, so what then?”
“I sat with him, we talked, I asked him if he was staying at the hotel—”
“WHAT! What the f—You…There’s a list somewhere of cock-teases. You are on that list.”
“What! Why? We were in a hotel restaurant lounge. It was an obvious question. We were talking about what we do. I figured he was in town on business or something…”
“Do you want to know what he thought? He was seconds away from giving you his room number, thinking you’d meet him there. He thought he was going to fuck you. You might not want to think about it,” Mark was laughing, I was too. Years of mysteries, solved with this revelation, “but that guy went right to his room and he was thinking about you when he jerked off.”

Ah, Mark, such a sweet-talker.
“It’s true.”

Mark, and almost everyone who has ever known me, thinks I am absurdly naive. Strangers think so. This guy, who tried to pull our hands into his lap for whatever reason (I still think, Maybe he was just trying to comfort me, and even to my own ears it sounds a little ridiculous), he said to me, “You are naive.”

I thought, Yes, yes I am. I said, “You are not the first person to say that,” and taking a drink of the juice he had bought me, (remembering it, Mark’s voice laughs at me in my head) I said, “and you will not be the last to think so.”
“You are a good-hearted woman. You are. You are not Evil,” when he says evil he pronounces it as a proper noun, addressing it by its name.
“I have often wondered about that.”
“I know you have, but you are not a bad woman. You are good-hearted but you cannot be so naive in the big Evil world.”

But I am. I tend to think of myself as an innocent, like a kid walking through life. Of course, I don’t really feel innocent, not by a long mile, but I figure that’s how everyone is going to treat me. Then this guy says, “Give me a hug, Meh-leen-dah,” and he tries to kiss my neck and fill the vulnerable space I have exposed to him, as though it is his right. As though my honesty is an invitation.
I remember then, You are a grown woman, people see you that way. Men see you that way, and it is a shock. It always is.

“You don’t see it,” Mark says, back in that car months ago. He gives me an exasperated look and says, “You have breasts. For some men that’s all it takes but you are actually sexy and whether you see it or not, men do. You’re going to have to get used to that if this is ever going to stop being a surprise.” A thought occurs to him then, something I had asked earlier, “And saying that you’re taken doesn’t change things,” he says, rolling his eyes at the euphemism. “For most guys, it’s just a challenge. A chance to prove that they are bigger and better. So,” he was looking at his phone, ready to drive away, his arm still casually draped over the back of my seat, “if you want them to leave you alone, you can’t just tell them you have a boyfriend.”

“No,” I say to Imaginary Mark, “I guess I can’t,” but his voice is silent in my head now. I see his face in the past, looking back up at me, putting the car in gear and kissing me goodbye.