souvenirs

This is inspired by this chapter from In the Dream House, and Los Angeles, which is probably one of my favourite short stories of all time.



You are good at getting close to people. You are also good at letting them go. Your life has been a collection of doors opening and closing, people coming in and out of the picture and lingering in your thoughts and dreams. In one such dream your mind takes the shape of a house haunted by all of them. You greet them, one by one.



There was the boy in first grade, but you don't remember much other than that he was really mean to you then really nice, holding your hand in the tent set up in your kindergarten classroom. There was another in fifth grade, who was your sworn enemy before offering their hand in friendship, which you spurned with childlike sabotage. There was the boy next year. You were drawn to his quiet attentiveness, even if he did not reciprocate your feelings. Down the road you would remain friends and be repulsed by your interest, at the way he boiled meat and vegetables in water and called it hotpot. There was something both distasteful and compelling about his asceticism, the way he did not even salt the water. Then there was the girl in seventh grade, your first real crush, and there was an urgency about it, the way you spilled out your hopes and wounds and tender wishes, the slow burn of emotional intimacy. It kickstarts your vulnerability kink. The boy from Chinese class, whom you messaged for years after you stopped going, exchanging secrets, an implied confession of sexual abuse you couldn't detangle, and movies, requiem for a dream when you were way too young for it, scaring you off drugs more than any school presentation ever had. For days you slept chicken armed, protecting the crook of your forearm from the devious intruder ready you inject you with barbituates and pull you into the throngs of addiction. It's still a fear of yours, and not just in the form of drugs.



At the cusp of high school came your first partner, where all the firsts began spilling out. First kiss, first sexual experience, first declarations of love. You engorged yourself on the newness with such voracity it came spilling back out of you, disgust bubbling up your throat, acrid burn of intimacy you weren't ready for. When it ended you wracked yourself for any emotion but could only muster guilt from the absolute indifference you felt from your separation. The next was equally disastrous. It was your first experience with an avoidant, and it was a thoroughly miserable one, the way he shut down when you cried. You remember looking down at the conair hairdryer he had gotten you for Christmas and wondering what had possessed you to date this man. By the end you were so burnt out you had no place for grief. There were only weeks between him and the partner that followed, and the pain hits you inconveniently in your new relationship. It upsets you, because the new one was stable, gentle. You were enveloped in a feeling of safety you hadn't experienced before, and you enjoyed it, drifting in the assurance of being loved. He is patient even as you grieve your former partner, soothing you with a security you do not understand. When the honeymoon faded you realized how little there was holding you together. It took you another few months to end it, throat closing up around the slow build of his hurt from your inability to reciprocate his emotion. With some difficulty you manage to detach from the situation and excise all these people from your lives. You are now ashamed of the crude mismatching of it all, how little you understood your desires.



So you had an anxious partner and an avoidant partner, and somehow your brain frankensteined those experiences into a gravitation towards fearful types. Anxious types threatened to overwhelm you and avoidants bored you with their lack of emotional range. The hybrids lay patently in the middle. You liked the shyness, the subtle obsession, the challenge of puzzling over their desires and motives, the gap between action and words. You liked being kept in the stasis of longing, always grazing closeness with your fingers. You suspect you are drawn to them because intimacy terrifies you as well, and this is the only sort of desire that feels comfortable. In the gap between relationships you entertain a few such soft people. The person who finessed you with nothing but shyness and obscure emojis and a confession of gender dysphoria, a pattern of yours, girls wrapped in boy-skin. The girl you fell for in a haze of relief, alleviating your shame around your queerness. How it triggered her own, always dropping your hand in public and shielding herself from her desire. When people radiate fear you become soft, hedgehog's dilemma all over again. In each experience you lingered because of the fantasy of being a corrective experience. Maybe you wanted to heal someone because you so desperately wanted it done back to you.



Your saviour complex. You spent a lifetime fantasizing about being the one to heal someone. You used to lie curled around your ipod touch, reading fanfic about the topic, boys with self harm scars and eating disorders, girls with absent fathers and a nicotine habit, filtering by angst and hurt/comfort. You realized these fantasies in your next relationship and tasted such disaster you didn't know what to do with yourself. Before you knew it you were sucked into the high of assuaging their lifelong loneliness, of cradling someone who’d spent their entire life braced for harm. You let it liquify your brain, all your thoughts going to them, and you wrote voraciously, love letters and apologies stretching back and forth across email threads, the obsession yielding to insanity. In many ways it felt like the first time you fell in love. You engaged in a year of this mutual destruction and had the nerve to be shocked when things end with a collection of bloody images and a police report. It is the first time you were devastated by a breakup. It takes nearly two years for the pain to dull and another for the anger to dissipate. You wrote so much about it you want to limit the space it occupies here, the shame of it all.



The concept of damage. You now have a parasite in your brain, because their damage will not leave. You are nervous now, to open the doors that come next, because every half-decent person feels like a place of safety in comparison. You have become so used to emotional violence that if someone is not posting graphic threats you are almost delirious with gratitude. That is dangerous. (The silver lining: now you trust yourself to get through anything, even if you don't always trust others.) You begin to notice a pattern in your experiences after, vague and half formed, one of you poised to run. You spend the majority of these situations in a state of hypervigilance, suspicious of their motives, analyzing what was unsaid, bracing for the fallout of an unmet need. When they feel safe the fear turns to yourself, terrified of infecting another with your damage. You engage in these vacuous exercises in intimacy, let them fall apart. Each time you redirect the failure to yourself, thinking, why can I not serve as a safe space for someone? Thinking, that is all I have ever wanted to be. You are scared you are no longer wired to do so.



Everything is deconstructed now. Before you had a plan: commitment, a place to call home, muses till death. Now you read up on queerplatonic partnerships, relationship anarchy, gender theory, each opening pandora's box. You study your friendships, a heady mix of deeply stable intimacy, how openly you seek closeness, and puzzle over how to replicate this in romance. You can't decide if you are lesbian or straight or ace or now only compelled by androgyny. You become so good at detachment that you don't remember what it was like to want a life partner. Things are quiet for the most part, your growing list of non-negotiables tightening around you, pragmatism where you were once swayed by feeling. You can't tell where independence ends and pathology begins. Alone you are the happiest you have ever been. You lean into the peace. Some days you feel so healed, attuned to your own needs, convinced of your completeness. Some days you still dream of creating home with someone. Some days the very thought of intimacy feels like electrocution.



Now you are left in this empty home with only crumbs that hint at prior inhabitation. A shoebox in the closet, an unprompted photo memory, a song coming up on shuffle. You don't want to wake up. You drift from room to room, stuck in remembering, picking up each object with reverence. You aren't so much regretful as you are fascinated. You wonder why this collecting satisfies you and realize you never quite got over the shock of being chosen, the way you felt infected with undesirability as a child. To this day it surprises the fuck out of you. At the same time you are thoroughly deluded of your ability to make anyone you desire fall for you. You don't know how you exist with such contradictions, just that you do, and the result is perpetual urge to will someone into perceiving you via a desperate pursuit of intimacy. Every time you do so you are rewriting the beliefs of your child self, defective, isolated, radiating damage, pleading for love. You are reminded of her when you take the leap, wide-eyed, peering into the void with curiosity. If it spits you back out you'll have another souvenir for the house. You'll do it for the content, always.



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Now for speculative futures?