Hit Me

“You know, Anna, I feel like I love women back to security.”

We sat in his car with the seats leaned back. His intuition must have felt me viscerally brace as he extended his arm. I thought it was about to reach for the side of my face to pull towards his. He reassured me he was reaching for something in the back and not trying to make a move. A wave of relief washed over me. We spent the entire day together and bonded almost instantaneously. We’d only phone called once - the evening before - but in that four hour conversation, we mutually noticed a kindredness. He was going for a drive while we phone called. I told him I loved driving with the windows down, music loud, and driving just to drive. He suggested that instead of a traditional date, he could pick me up and we could just drive. It could be that simple. I was thrilled.

Most people like the car or the backseat because it’s the golden opportunity for a make out session and thirty second thrill of connectedness. I’m an old soul. I enjoy the car because I love the drive. You can sit so close to someone, yet simultaneously have space, silence, or conversation. You can connect or disconnect. Something about the swoosh of the tires on the highways and backroads and hum of the engine is like white noise. It creates such a natural ebb and flow and feels therapeutic to my restless mind. It’s like Xanax for a first date. Or at least, it is to those of us who chronically overthink everything and pre-scope menus to see which food will be easiest to cut, chew, and digest on an anxious stomach. A drive requires no eating utensils, menu, activity, critical thinking, or having to stare across a table at someone’s face, as you mentally wonder if your skin and wardrobe and face makeup look okay and if they find you attractive or not.

I stared out the windshield from the passenger side; the car in a vacant parking lot downtown. We’d just finished gutting our souls in a conversation. He told me about his love life roster and struggle with emotionally dysfunctional women and feeling used. I told him about my unhealthy pattern of dating pagans and returning to abusers and addiction and expectation of pain, because it all felt normal. We didn’t shy away from our darker parts. He turned towards me; his voice soft and sincere.

“What can I do to help you?”

“You got a bat in your trunk?” I laughed.

“…Want to take a swing?”

He didn’t find it funny.

A week later, he called me up. I will never forget this moment. I was about to head out for the evening. I’d just fixed my makeup and slid on a striped dress in preparation for a photography project. I picked up the phone. His softened voice had hardened.

“You just want an F-boy.”

“What are you talking about?”

He laughed, clearly pissed off. He meant a “F*ckboy”. How dare he.

“You don’t want a committed relationship. You just want someone to hurt you and torture you.”

It felt like something inside of me shattered. A punch of shock hit my stomach. I combatted his graceless sentiments. I told him it was untrue. I fought for myself. He interjected over me. I could barely mutter a full sentence. I asked him not to raise his voice. It kept raising. We hung up the phone.

I sank to my bedroom floor in my dress. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think straight. It all was so wrong. He misinterpreted me in the worst of lights. His speculatively cold words and accusations felt like bullets to my soul. It felt like my insides were suctioned out of my body. I felt like hollow nothingness. Amidst his brutal honesty and generalized speculations, he still desired to continue dating.

I sat with my feelings. Actually, I sat with them in the dark all night. My roommate gently knocked on the door. There I sat, coiled by my bedside in the dark, words replaying like a record.

“AG…are you okay?”

It was all so wrong.

…Except that he was so right.

Maybe the electric shock pulsating throughout my body was the hyperawareness of things true about myself I couldn’t readily admit. Maybe he was wrong about a lot. But maybe he was right about a lot. Maybe I was a walking red flag. Maybe I was the very thing I tried to avoid. Maybe it really did feel abnormal to talk to a human being who had morally upright character and values to protect and preserve someone else. Maybe I was still in the addictive cycle and traits of mistaking pain for love. Maybe bracing for anxiety, for discard, for emotional pain was my new normal. Maybe I was the problem. Maybe I didn’t know how to convey that in a healthy way to him. Maybe I didn’t know how to properly stitch together the pivotal situations of the past in a sensible fashion.

Maybe I unzipped my soul to him partially…but maybe I kept the other half zipped up; my deepest agonies stuffed down. If I could have created a powerpoint or filmstrip of the looming burdens I wanted to acknowledge and overcome - the real reason I felt indebted to “bad boys” and felt unworthy of goodness - maybe it would have taken my scattered pieces and created a clearer picture. Maybe it would have done a lot of things.

And maybe - just maybe - he was the better wounds of a friend.

Maybe today, two years later, I thank his wounds from afar.

They hit me. But their soul ripping truth helped heal me.