To Be Understood

Years later, I consider myself understood. Raw, unpurged; mapped in earnest fingertips. You went off to Chicago because you were always made for it. I stayed in New York, reaching for what you already had in the palm of your hand like a precocious stalk stretching from the dirt. Radio silence between us where harmony once swept. Still I beg for how rare it was. 

When we were young we had nothing but philosophers and parents telling us who to be and where to look. Even so, we looked at each other and then, in sour defeat, looked away. Scolded children, guilt scrawled on faces which, not moments ago, knew the saccharine taste of secrecy. 

Perhaps you don’t dwell on it anymore. But, for my sake, I do.

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I wanted you first, but I had a shy and persistent way of convincing you I didn’t. In a time when the world seemed turned against you– every haven tainted– I clung to you because I rejected order and hoped to prove it wrong. The school hierarchy, the shadow rules, the bullies with their subsexual advances. And your parents, who gave you hell at home. You were used chewing gum stuck under the desk for later. It was a cruel adolescence dealt to you as one of God’s rootless injustices. How could you ever belong?

I never knew you didn't. I moved to Oyster Bay when I was fourteen and started high school an empty pool of social knowledge. I had few goals but to read and survive with minimal ego damage. Attending high school was one of those Icarian nightmares where I constantly minded the sun. Aim low, I thought. This place is not for you. 

It became mine in the choir room. That was where I first met you. Music was a sigh. It was bloodletting. Words and sounds came unaltered. And you knew this, probably before I did, confidence spilling off you as you entered the room in your outdated flannel and took your place. You had ART written on your forehead and I admit, I wanted to be you– be better than you. Of course you would sit smack in front of me. I inched into your hair, searching for a blueprint on the back of your head. I couldn't speak to you. 

It wasn’t until a month later you took my hand. There were four of us in a tight practice room, singing a hymn, palm to sweaty palm. You taught us how to do it; said you learned it at your Jewish choir camp. You layered the deep notes on top of my much less rich, high ones. Operatic, I thought. How strange. I was uncomfortable with the intimacy of it, but jittering all the same. Your pulse was melting into my hand. 

I joined the things you joined. The spring opera, which you dropped for a debate tournament. You left me alone to fill the role you abandoned: a nun, of all things. Then, I joined debate. Not because of you, but because a boy I liked asked me to. He never liked me back.  And, I sucked at debate too. But at my first tournament, in between the rounds, you and I stalked the hallways and you told me you’d marry a Jewish boy– Ashkenazi, not Sephardic. I told you I thought all people were bisexual and that I couldn't pee in public toilets. You left the bathroom so I could go. How come we haven’t hung out before, you said through the door. I didn’t know how to tell you I’d wanted to, just never had the guts to ask. 

By sophomore year I learned that the school saw a different version of you, one molded by irreversible years in middle school I had luckily escaped by biding my time in a different state. When I said your name, the reverence off my tongue clashed with our classmates’ scoffs. Haven’t you heard, they’d say, haven’t you heard? I hadn’t, but I wouldn’t believe it if I had. I grew protective. Your initials meant all that was good to me before I registered what that meant. 

Plus, I had monikers too. Try-hard, stuck-up, awkward. I wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity. But, I heard boys talk about your breasts and girls discuss your mother. They stripped off your skin and picked at the bones underneath. It was never a fair game. I began to love you, not out of pity, but out of opposition and a matter of knowing the truth.

In our time together we talked about boys- well -mostly our lack of them. Both of us overcome by a desire for self-transformation. Wanting to be craved thoroughly; not yet craving each other. After school we’d walk the grounds, order takeout against our empty pockets. I played you a song I’d written. I started writing shortly after I met you, but it took three years to reveal itself. I think I saw you cry when I sang it; the lyrics said something you recognized.

Take all your strength and make me fall

But I’ll be stronger than the walls

That keep me safe from you, I know

Your fists will bleed till you regret it all,

I’ll put you in the cell I made, 

From the pieces of my heart you stole from me. 

It was all teenage angst and melodrama, but it moved you somehow. That was when you told me about your parents. And I understood because, at that time, I hated my parents too. Like the rest of Oyster Bay, they were too opaque and absorbed in the way things should be, what kids should want, what laws they should obey. Using force and fist to erase all the good, patch the uneven. Unaware of what they had, what was festering underneath. And of the spite under their roofs. 

We took it up with our pens, writing away the injustices. And, I confess, I haven’t read a better writer since those school days. I write too, but never as well. Once again you outdid me, and I was brutally jealous and completely in awe. I let you write in my journal and I kept it on my nightstand four years later. 

The air conditioner shuts off,

Silence punches at your eardrums,

You look up and mean to do something, anything, nothing–

But it dies in the silence, a broken fan, a cracked wing.

Hello? Is there anybody in there?

Just nod if you can hear me. 

There could be a whole world inside your head. 

In my room it is quiet. 

More than a world. More than a quiet room, the one you shut in, alienated in your own home. More than bullies. More than parents. More than sixteen years of life. More than prejudice. More than fear. More than perfect scores. More than rumors. More than Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley. More than time. More than body. More than me. 

By then I think you loved me back. I think we loved each other, although you denied it a year later as I cried on the floor of my bedroom with you assuring me I’d be happy one day, but that you just couldn’t feel that way. See, you said, you’re even pretty when you cry. You brushed the tears from my face with your thumbs, palms cupping my jaw like a warm bowl. 

You did feel that way. I knew it in the way you asked me to hold you, in the way we talked for hours, light draining from the sky, in the way we clung onto each other in the backstage of the school theater and casted hopes into invisible wells. I guess you were afraid like I was.

After winter exams, you came to my old, disintegrating house to celebrate. I apologized for how it looked. It was what we could afford back then. I had posters of women on my walls, but we talked of marriage, of my clownish boyfriend. Music was playing and a solution of various alcohols was brewing in a shitty water bottle on the floor. One taste and the gag reflex took on an entirely new meaning. Your eyes were dark, your hair slick with curl product. You reminded me of a cello, of velvet on an expensive couch. We whispered.

“Sometimes, I think it’s all too easy,” you said. We expressed this frequently. Exams were easy, even though we pretended they were hard as a courtesy to others. But, we barely studied, we read our own books, and directed our own interests. 

“You’re just smart,” I said. Another self-evident truth. While I said it with nonchalance, I had an intimidating sense of brushing up to prodigy. 

“Not like you.” You turned to look at me. Suddenly, I felt my ribs on the floor as they sunk deeper, down into the ceiling below us. You hadn’t praised me like this before. In truth, there were moments of rivalry between us. I chose silence as you kept steady. 

“You’re brilliant.” And maybe it was hard for you to pronounce the words, but you gave them so willingly once they materialized. Now you were looking at me and an awareness curdled in some core of my body. I blushed and let out a cloud of oppressed air through my nostrils. 

You said it more softly, the ashes settling. “You’re brilliant.”

And I felt it. I felt brilliant. Because if you thought it, I could believe it. If you said we lived in a cardboard box floating on the Hudson, I’d have agreed. 

We were staring at each other, grins distending our cheeks. I reached a finger at your face to tap your nose. I don’t know why–I hadn’t done that before. The second I made contact, I couldn’t pull away. A course was set from that touch you triggered with your flattery. We stopped smiling, my finger now tracing the bridge. Your skin carried my attention more than it had before and you didn’t swat me away, just held your breath. I grabbed your jaw with one hand, the other linking in your hair. 

We kissed without thinking. 

Thoughtlessness. It is so rare to me now, but when I kissed you, it was womblike. Nothing intellectual or physical. All innate and universal, like dying and decomposing into dirt, belonging to the essentials. I had never felt anything like it before. It was long and convincing, indoctrinating. Kind of like you. Persuasive. The rhetoric of your tongue enlisting me to a life I hadn’t conceived of and feared. You defined my boundaries any way you wanted and I loved the person you drew with your hands. A better person, a true one. 

I want to stay here.

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I won’t talk about what happened after. To either of us. I won’t talk about my new clothes and haircut. I won’t talk about the immediate danger we were in when we couldn’t face up to our kiss and speak to ourselves the way an omnipotent God would. I won’t talk about the parents. Not just yours, but mine too, prying at the secret we hid so poorly from ourselves and the people around us. Working their way into territory they couldn't understand and still don’t want to. 

I won’t talk about how I fell in love and you said you didn’t. I won’t talk about lost friends and empty lunch tables. I won’t talk about the silence or the summer we spent without a word to each other. I won’t talk about how when you left for college, I disappeared. The whole school did. Like it never happened. 

I will talk about this though:

I was understood. For the first time and maybe for the last. I had your primordial understanding. Do you know yet how rare that is?