Do Your Worst

I stared at a spot on the wood grain, which looked like a river split in two. If I looked closely enough, I could see the water ripple down the oak and spill onto the tabletop’s splintered shores. Then, I blinked, and it wasn’t a riverbed at all, but the stream of tears spilling out of my eyes. But I didn’t look away from the table, because if I had, I would’ve had to look them in the eyes while they told me I was a bad person. I would’ve had to confront the moment, and in that moment, I was being expelled from high school for a text I sent to a boy.

So I pulled at my sleeves, and imagined rivers in the woodtop, and let my mom protest my expulsion on my behalf. When we got back into the car, I was despondent for several minutes. Then I slammed my head against the dashboard until my mother put her hand on my forehead. Like she was checking my temperature.

It was springtime, and the trees look now as they did then, supple and waiting to wilt. I slept my afternoons away, and my mother drove me to a therapist’s office every Tuesday and Thursday, until I could drive myself. I prayed the summer away, passed the day in silence and changed my phone number.

I spoke to no one on my first day of senior year, but I wore a light blue sundress with white flowers that I’d bought using the money I’d earned from waitressing all summer. I cut my hair short and lied to my friends when they asked how I was doing.

I focused all of my attention on college applications and obsessed over my grades. I had a boyfriend, but I kept him at arm’s length away from the rest of my life. I lied about his age and what he did for work. He never met my friends or my brothers. I told him I loved him, though, mostly because I wanted to hear him say it back.

I don’t remember much of this time. There’s a year and a half, mostly unaccounted for. My therapist has a funny word for that lapse of memory, but I can’t remember it now.

There are photos in my camera roll and diary entries from that time. But I don’t recognize her face, or her handwriting.

There are sensations I can recall, though.

I remember the thread of carpet, I rolled between my thumb and forefinger while my father said the words “passed,” and “better place.” The woman who looked like me was no more, and so I had no one to share my face with.

I remember watching the pianist’s hands as they ran along the ivory keys. I remember how they felt, pressed into my abdomen, in the space below my belly button. I remember the prickly sweat under my arms and feeling my heart catch in my throat.

I remember the cool tile of our school’s bathroom, and pressing my forehead against the plastic door, while I was bent in half, keeled over from pain.

I remember his hand on my wrist, and the pin-pricks of blood that sprang around his knuckles.

The rest of it might as well have happened to someone else, in another life. Still, in that fugue state, I graduated from high school. I left for college, and let the student health center put me on Prozac after I skipped one too many of my classes.

I remember my canary yellow sheets and the sounds of my roommate’s snores.

I remember the blue leaves as I let the sounds of the party pull me back to reality.

I remember the manic high I felt on an unseasonably warm autumn day, and throwing the Prozac away in my dorm’s toilet.

Still, I didn’t wake up till mid-March 2019. In the winter, I’d transferred schools, got weirdly religious thanks to a bad breakup and let my hair grow past my shoulders. In March, I got a haircut and remembered who I was.

I remembered how to introduce myself, with my shoulders back and smile, proud. I remembered what it felt like to make people laugh.

I made new friends and reconnected with old ones. I lived off campus in a one-bedroom apartment, but I’d fall asleep on their carpeted floors and walk the long way home at dawn. Still, there was a protective cage around the softest parts of myself that I’d allow no one the key to.

I studied abroad in Greece, and every time I left my apartment, my classmates would shout down at me from their balconies, asking me up. I would wave and tell them I was busy, preferring the quiet of my own company.

I’d walk around the city for hours, with my headphones in, wearing holes into the bottoms of my shoes. I remember the old man as he boarded the bus, and the feel of his palm as it slid up my thigh and rested on my ass. But then, I could rip my headphones out and yell at him when I hadn’t been able to before.

I’d go out with my classmates at night, though, and then anyone could touch me. They’d hold my waist while we danced. They’d lift me onto the bar top and pull me into their laps. But by morning, we kept our hands to ourselves.

I let them meet me, but I didn’t let them know me. They could kiss me, but they couldn’t keep me. There were too many broken pieces of myself to keep, and I felt I had to go searching for the missing parts, alone.

Maybe I’d find my wit in the shelves

And my sanity at the bottom of a pool

My heart in Greece

My brain in New York

I had given myself away too easily, and now I had to patch myself back up. Refit the shattered segments, fix myself with stolen parts.

When I was younger, I wanted to be broken, complicated, messy. I wanted bad things to happen to me. I thought it’d make me a better person, a more interesting subject for people to pin their desires to. I wanted to be loved, and I thought I had to be hurt, for someone else to want to heal me.

But then bad things happened, and it attracted the worst kind of people. I was hurt, and the people who were meant to heal me only inflicted more pain.

So, I didn’t heal because of one miraculous person, and if I did, it certainly would’ve been myself. But the year and a half of silence, and isolation, and forgetting ended when I let someone else in. Then, it took years of work to let him in fully, and even longer to trust my heart in the hands of others. It’s something I’m still working on today; I have no problem with loving others, but I struggle with letting them love me.

Learning how to let in and let go hasn’t come without friction. It comes with arguably more pain than keeping to myself. At least in my loneliness, I could always wrap my arms around myself. There was no fear of rejection, there was no possibility of being wrong, because I was just being with myself.

But in letting everyone in again, I realized

Maybe Raquel will find my voice in the Hudson

I’ll laugh with Ashlon on the banks of the East

And Emily can keep my memories in the James

While Lennon promises me my future

In waves and wood grain

More will come

As sure as the tide meets the shore

Comes love and pain

Because love inherently promises pain. Your skin is in the game, and there will be times when you leave bruised and bleeding. But your heart still beats, and every wound will scab over, and the skin under will heal.

To shut ourselves out from love, is to deny ourselves life.

So when someone new learns to love me

And I tell them everything that’s happened to me

They put a hand over the hurt part, and whisper

“You have a really big heart.”

They’ll be scared to break it

And I’ll say, “Do your worst.”

I’ll see rivers in the woodgrain, and feel everything again, all to be loved.