Life

I feel kind of weird having started up this whole new thing and then not posting and not posting and not posting. And then I feel extra weird that the internet is causing me guilt.

I’ve been sick on and off for about a month or two now. First a cold, then a flu, now some cold/flu hybrid that makes me incapable of swallowing most moments of the day. During one sweet day between the flu and the cold/flu hybrid, I was completely unsick, and drove down to see Badger in her little middle-of-nowhere. I felt like somehow it would be weird to see her with kids, as a mom, and I’d be struck by an existential crisis of all my friends growing up and getting adult while I watch bad anime and make concerted efforts to stop thinking about college or careers. But it wasn’t even the littlest bit existential. Motherhood really fits on her, and though I’m sure she’s worked really hard, it also seems to come naturally.

Along those same lines, our friendship seemed to just re-emerge as good as ever, not even too terribly dusty. She’s not someone that I need to use a lot of details with, a lot of explanations, just tell her the stories. Me and Badger have rarely had to ask each other, “But why did you do it that way? Why did you say that?” In the past I’ve thought it’s because we knew each other so well, in and out, but I don’t think that’s really true. We’ve been apart for a good many years now, and there’s a lot of room for new lives to grow there. But even when we were bound at the hip in high school, there were always secrets, not because we were keeping them from each other specifically, but because we were just keeping them. Because sometimes there are things that are just yours and nobody else’s. I think it’s less that Badger and I know each other so well, and more that she and I accept each other so well. She’ll do what she does, and I’ll do how I do, and we’ll love each other regardless.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was with Mr. Flint, oh, how he hated Badger. He told me, and her, and probably himself, that it was because she was so fucked-up, and because she was so fucked-up she was unhealthy for me to be around, and I had to let go of that part of my past. I assured Badger this weekend, of course it wasn’t really that. What it was, when you’re abusing and controlling somebody, your worst enemy is the person in their life who loves them like crazy, makes them feel good, and isn’t under your control. So of course Mr. Flint hated her, of course he tried to chase her away by telling her she was fucked-up and crazy, telling me if I hung out with her I’d be fucked-up and crazy, too. I remember when she was pregnant the first time, I started crocheting a blanket for her and the baby. I was nearly done before Mr. Flint finally asked me what it was for, and I told him. His face turned red, he grabbed his keys, said, “Jesus,” and left the house. Later I got a call from a friend of ours, who said Mr. Flint had called him from the bar saying, “I need to get a new girlfriend.”

It happened slowly, and Mr. Flint only needed to prod me so much to go this way, but I began packaging up “my past” as if it was some discreet collection of objects and memories and things, instead of parts of me, experiences, people I loved. There was this dividing line, and everything on the one side belonged to somebody else, somebody who used to be weak and stupid and ugly, and everything on the other had to be vetted for approval, to burn all the weak and stupid out. Badger ended up on that other side, and I wasn’t very nice to her. All self-righteous and “Why don’t you start being healthy like I am?” When Mr. Flint asked me why I was friends with her, it wasn’t right, somehow, for me to just say, “Because I like her.” No, Mr. Flint said, I only liked her because I liked being fucked-up. I tried telling him, well, maybe she is fucked-up, maybe I want to help her not be fucked-up. But no, he told me that was just co-dependency, and that I had to just let her fade away and die, and I had to understand that she deserved it and it was the right thing for me to do.

I learned a lot of ways to convince myself that something was right. The pain I felt at losing Badger, I told myself, was good for me, because growing takes pain. The bad fucked-up person I used to be, she hated pain, she would refuse to grow, but not this version of the new good me. She welcomes pain because it’s good and healthy and right. If I missed Badger, it was because I was still fucked-up, and had to work harder, longer, faster, until I didn’t miss anything anymore. The things Mr. Flint said to me only felt bad because I was bad. Mr. Flint was right to not like Badger; he knew what was best for me. The fact that I couldn’t accept that just showed how childish and immature I still was, how broken. Only broken people think something good is something bad. Only crazy people have trouble accepting truth. I hadn’t yet heard that phrase, that being crazy is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. During the times in my life that I have mostly labeled as crazy, I didn’t expect anything different. I think I saw very clearly what my life was like, and what actions led to what consequences. With Mr. Flint, somehow it always seemed if I worked hard enough, I would be enough. And somehow, that wasn’t crazy.

To contrast all that, coming back from Badger’s house this week, I remembered this time her nutty mother was driving us around in high school. She took a small break from screaming at passerby, accusing them of “wearing hats,” to tell us why we were best friends. “You get three soulmates in life,” she said. “Three people who are just your perfect match, your perfect everything. Most people are lucky to even meet one, and almost nobody meets all three. You girls are lucky you found each other.” After the obligatory teenage rolling our eyes because oh god your mom’s talking, Badger and I looked at each other and just beamed. That was a truth I never had to work at, or force. It was, like Hannah Green says, bone-truth.

Thinking of that, I remember my wedding to Mr. Flint. The beautician who got me did up absolutely forbade me to wear my glasses, horrified that I would even consider it. So, nearly blind, I stumbled down the aisle, holding onto Mr. Flint’s father’s arm, squinting and tiptoeing in ridiculous high-heeled shoes. Mr. Flint was just this blur in the distance, and I thought, this is okay, because when I get close enough to him I’ll see his face for the first time and I’ll see all the love in it, and that’ll shake this feeling that something isn’t getting through, something isn’t hitting my bones. And when I got to Mr. Flint, and looked up, he had the bug-eye. Big bulging eyes of doom, gawking, aping. I tried to smile nervously, and he just bugged harder. If you were making a movie about a creepy lonely man who walked around neighborhoods at night, peering in windows to watch married couples have sex while thinking of his dead mother, he would be making that face. Unblinking. Unchanging. Just bugs. I couldn’t look at him throughout the whole service. I looked out at the church, the guests I couldn’t see, big blurry people who I didn’t really know anyway. I smiled the way I thought a bride should smile, and when my eyes were too strained to look out, I looked over Mr. Flint’s shoulder, at one of the groomsmen, who was prettier than my husband.

I have this wedding phobia now, from having been through one blurry bug-eyed mess, and the utter disaster and continuing trauma of the wedding night, fodder for another post for another time. And yet sometimes I find myself really wanting to get married again, really hoping for that. Marriage and a wedding are these two entirely separate concepts to me, with the former being a happy state of comfortable affairs, and the latter being an anxiety-provoking PTSD mess, a horror I wouldn’t wish on anybody. Thinking about it now, it seems like most of my horror has to do with sight. Being unable to see what’s coming, who surrounds me. Being unable to look my husband in the face.

I spent most of my wedding in this state of paralyzing good manners. Laugh appropriately, talk about the weather, walk daintily, thank profusely, smile politely. I couldn’t look at Mr. Flint because of the unrequited bug-eye was so horrible, but even beyond that, I was somehow embarrassed to show feelings in front of all these people. Should I look utterly in love? Isn’t that a private affair? Won’t everybody be uncomfortable if we kiss or cuddle? One isn’t supposed to show these things in front of others. It’s poor taste. Even beyond Mr. Flint, at the reception, when people kept stalling me to chatter about nothing, give me good wishes, I couldn’t look them straight in the face. I kept blushing and looking at my shoes, the perfect picture of a shy and happy bride. But really, I felt it was poor form somehow to be happy. To look somebody in the face and say, “This is the best day of my life!” Maybe that’s because it would have been a lie. I think, though, more than that, it was a vulnerability. I was too guarded a person to share anything with anybody, happiness or sadness. Every face, every person, every feeling, every word was a wall for me to maintain.

The thing that struck me most about seeing Badger was the lack of walls. It was warmth and happiness and affection without reserve or boundary, even when we were talking about sad things, hard things, painful things. We were able to speak in matter-of-fact terms about abuse, about rape, about fear and hatred and wanting to break into a million pieces because it seems like we never can. And none of it was hard to talk about, or hard to hear, there was no withdrawing or holding back. It all just was. I told my bear that it was like falling in love with him had been, the surprise of reaching out to find the wall and there is none. The feelings don’t stop or change but radiate outwards forever.

I remember how easy it was to look and smile at Badger when her mom called us soul mates, the exact kind of looking and smiling I couldn’t have forced myself to do for all the Nutty Bars in the world at my wedding. I never thought about it before, but a wedding is such an incredibly vulnerable moment. The ceremony provides enough structure to get through it when you don’t feel it, don’t want it. Step here now, say this now, look here now, light this candle and speak these words, wear he make-up, put on your costume, make a joke about Bridezilla, the mothers cry, and there, you have now performed the script so you are now in love and happy forever. The ceremony is awful to me, because of the slow evil of ritual to replace feeling. I remember at my reception, Mr Flint’s father came up to me once and asked how I was doing. I said, “Everybody’s looking at me,” and he smiled, but I wasn’t being cute. It was horrible to be looked at and not be able to look back unless the ceremony told me to.

This is all sort of blabbing into nothingness. I didn’t have a point, except that I had a nice day with Badger, I hate my ex-husband a lot, and I’m sick and need to get back to work.