How it feels to fall

Content warning: Mention of emotional abuse and partnership violence. 

For additional resources if you, or someone you know, is experiencing domestic violence, please visit: https://ncadv.org/RESOURCES

In June 2011, I attended my first Pride. 

I remember how nervous I was. I wore a ponytail and a paisley sundress, the closest thing to rainbow that I owned. As I stood sweating in the midday sun next to my girlfriend, Asha, I still didn’t understand the appeal of parades where beads weren’t thrown (the Louisianian in me runs deep), but I clapped and cheered and teared up watching all those people who felt comfortable in their own skin. I was so jealous of them. Asha and I had been together for almost five months, but she consistently reminded me that I wasn’t “really gay.” I thought I was pretty gay, but I had had relationships with men, and good sex with them, too, and I didn’t know what that meant. “Born This Way” played on repeat as the floats passed by. What made someone gay enough?

After the parade, we walked through the West Village to meet her friends for drinks. Two days prior, the New York State Senate had voted to legalize gay marriage, and on Bleecker, the Michael Kors storefront was practically aflame. Identical eye-height plastic cakes stood next to each other, one topped with two grooms, the other with two brides. We took photos through the glass. We kissed. Later that afternoon, I drunkenly slipped my hand up her skirt and fucked her in the back of a bar. I couldn’t help myself; I never wanted to stop touching her. When the bartender asked us to leave, I reddened, thinking of how I’d played Barbies as a girl: how I’d had them slip each other’s strappy dresses from shoulders, slowly lean in to kiss; and the unending desire I had to know how that felt in real life. 

Now that I knew, I didn’t want to stop. I’d never felt that way about a guy. I thought that must count for something. 

*

Asha and I had a stereotypically fast-progressing lesbian relationship. We met in the last week of January and became immediately inseparable. We emailed constantly, because I didn’t have unlimited texting yet. We fucked at my apartment at lunchtime and had dinner together every night. We saw movies at an old theater in Chelsea and walked miles around Manhattan, talking about everything and nothing. She was desperately charming, strikingly pretty. She left notes on my bed when she went to work in the morning. She took me to her favorite spots in the city (she’d been there almost a decade), surprised me with flower deliveries, told me she’d never met anybody like me. I admittedly was smitten. Even when we started fighting, even badly and in public, I didn’t break up with her. She told me I wouldn’t find anybody like her, and I was terrified she was right. I was terrified of being gay and thought that, maybe if the relationship lasted long enough, when I finally came out to my mother, she wouldn’t be able to call it a phase.

Even after the Saturday night in early May when Asha’s friend attacked my friend at a party, and security forcibly removed Asha and her friend from the apartment complex, I went after her because I knew she would blame me for it all if I didn’t. Even when she spun me around, called me a whore, and shoved me face-down on the sidewalk in front of Duplex, and I lay there in a stupor, feeling the cut on my chin and staring up at the lights from Stonewall next door, thinking, stupidly, of gay rights—I didn’t break up with her. She followed me to my apartment and cried and apologized and said I just made her feel so insecure. I let her in. In the morning it was sunny, and I had too much to lose. We went to brunch and drank champagne.

*

It always went like this:

Here is the wine we will drink. Asha has picked it (and also this restaurant) because I have poor taste and do not know about wine. I do not know about endive salads, or the French restaurant where Asha says she saw Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Swift (your girl, she calls her, her voice dripping with disapproval) dining together last year. I do not know about asking for black cloth napkins to keep the lint off black pants. I do not know that industrial rock is the genre to which Nine Inch Nails formally belongs. I do not know the bands Rilo Kiley or Veruca Salt, or about the intricacies of Fleetwood Mac’s band members’ affairs. I do not know the lesbian bars in New York City; I have never been to one, and now that Asha and I are together, Why would you even want to go? Those girls are predators. I also do not know anything about being gay. I do not, it seems, know anything. 

Talking with her felt like talking with my father: every argument was moot because she inherently knew better—knew me better than I knew myself because she was older and that’s how it works. She told me my friends weren’t my real friends: They’ll abandon you after grad school. They only care about you because they either want to fuck you or don’t know what they want out of life. She told me I didn’t care about her, that I was selfish. When I made a plan that didn’t involve her, she’d say, My time is very precious due to lack of it, so how I spend it is very important to me. If someone doesn’t have the time for me than [sic] I certainly won’t make the time for them when it’s convenient for them, but then if I tried to change my plans to see her, I’d be met with snark: I must say, your 24-hour turn around for booking is better than a continental flight—thoroughly impressed; or she’d deny that she’d wanted to see me, saying, I’m playing catch up on my life as I have been doing for the past 5 weeks because I’ve been in Jan-land. Her disdain was vinegar, pickling the parts of me I thought I knew. 

So I started yelling. I didn’t know any other way to be heard. 

*

The night that I broke her rib, we had just arrived home from eating at a new pizza restaurant in the West Village. Asha had gladly eaten the food, but it was somehow my fault that she had done so. From the bathroom I listened to her yell and brushed my teeth too hard, trying to hold my tongue on what I wanted to say: that for someone so much older and wiser than me, shouldn’t she know by now how lactose intolerance works? Then, she was in my face, shouting that my friends specifically picked that place because they knew I’d get sick!, and I snapped. I slammed down my toothbrush and pushed her away from me. She stumbled backward, and then she was wailing and calling me a bitch (which wasn’t unusual), and I told her to just get up. 

As it turned out, Asha’s rib had fractured where she’d fallen into the toilet paper holder that jutted out from the wall: such a small, stupid thing. This, as with everything, was my fault, because her words never left a mark. I set up the air mattress in the “living room” (if you can call it that, in her studio apartment) in front of the couch. I piled it with pillows and covered her in kisses and wept like a sore with apology. It hurt to breathe, she said, but she felt fine enough to have sex—which we did, a lot, because that was all we ever did. Fuck and fight and fight and fuck. I was air; she was fire; I fed her open wounds. She suffocated everything that was living; the sky was red, the trees had burned, and my skin turned grey with ash.

A few days later, she left for a work trip, and I lay still on the deflating mattress. I thought of her hands: the first and third nails bitten, a scrape on the middle knuckle, each slender bone that never learned to play the piano but should have (they are piano hands). I examined my hands: they were mine, but they were also hers. All of me was. Because for every awful thing she said, there was something charming, something sweet:

Of all the things I love about you (and I’ll never be able to make all these things concrete—as in make a list—because they’re so infinite), I love your magic the most. Your electric eyes are a close second.

I know who you are… I know your purpose in my life and I know mine in yours and it’s not typical and it’s not short and it’s something full of depth and it’s something I will always need, have always needed, like water. 

My fondest memory of us is resting between your legs...your words echoing through me as you read that poem to me. Sexiest moment I think I’ve ever had.

I want you with me—where you belong—and with no one else because it makes sense.

You're unforgettable because you're an exceptionally lovable person. I'll unforget you always and forever :)

There was so much conflicting information, so many sentiments I couldn’t keep straight. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. How could she see me so clearly, and then so quickly forget who I was? 

It has nice legs, she always said about wine. That means it’s expensive, you know. Things, things, always things. She swirled it pretentiously and watched the tears drop back down the sides of the glass. I read about it; the only thing legs on wine really indicates is that it has a higher alcohol or sugar content. In fact, only beginner wine connoisseurs tend to refer to them, under the misconception that they indicate the quality of the wine. I never told her that. I only cried and hated myself and wondered what kind of person I was becoming. I had no idea what I was doing, and no idea who I was.

Even still, as I sit here and read this back, I am overwhelmed with guilt. Even now, I still feel that I am the one who failed.