ANOMALY

9:47 P.M.—throwing a fit inside my car after gambling 70 bucks at the casino and only winning 20 cents

I never had a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend.

(And I currently don’t have any friends, but it’s neither here nor there.)

Though I’m at a loss in the relationship department, I do have some knowledge.

I had a first kiss. A few of them.

A brushing of lips when I was six. A big, loud smack when I was ten and playing the bride for an afternoon. A non-consented French kiss, humid and conquering, when I was 16. A quick, underwhelming peck when I was 22.

I had my first dance. My first hug. My first kiss on the cheek. My first holding of hands. My first Never Talking To You Ever Again. My first sharing a very uncomfortable air bed. My first fight. My first break-up. My first planning a trip. My first I Love You. My first Lie. My first play-pretend.

I had my fair share of declarations and displays of affection, too.

Most—if not every—were very badly received by me, yours truly.

My heart dropped whenever a hand lingered on the skin of my shoulder. My thigh. My hands started to shake when I glimpsed a heart emoji in the middle of a conversation about snacks.

I nearly vomited every time I would receive the well-known “Can I tell you something?” text.

Those confessions came mostly from boys I considered best friends, and with whom I thought I could emulate the unconditional love and support that my family’s sphere had often failed to provide. Each of those confessions felt like poisoned apples. Every girl my age longed to be offered one; I did, too, but not if it meant losing a perfect friendship exempt from the tantrums of attraction and lust.

Alas, with every confession of interest, those friendships I so cherished changed a little. Broke a little. Disintegrated a little.

From then on, I had to be careful. Not too cheery. Not too touchy.

I had to micromanage the way I spoke to those male friends. My tone, the topics, the hours of the day, of the night; how I responded, how often I did, how my answer might be interpreted.

Eventually, fatally, the flame of camaraderie died slowly, my rebuttal already a foot in the grave of our friendships.

And every time, my heart broke a little.

I was young back then. In middle school and high school, mostly.

And those moments that others would consider milestones happened in such quick, involuntary moments that they never really stuck with me as dating. They felt like checking a box.

Those moments of teenagehood were the golden star stickers I was expected to desire. But every time I obtained a new one, I found no place to put them. No desire to stick them in my diaries. To show them off. To wear them with pride on my chest. Those milestones felt like a need rather than a want.

The need to fit in. To have something to share with the people around me. With the girls of my class. With my female best friends. A need to belong somewhere, even if it meant leaving pieces of me on my way there.

Those milestones felt like consequences—the repercussions of my actions.

Things changed when adulthood knocked on my door. Suddenly, the need to couple up became everything everyone talked about.

More than a need, it became an urge.

At University, where and when I made my first wobbly attempt at real life, dating was all I heard about. Dating became all I thought about.

I searched for potential love stories in the faces around me. In the auditorium. In the corridors. In the cafeteria. I carefully kept a list of them in my head. Picked out scenarios; recorded cutscenes.

The girl with the long blonde hair, always wearing a black cap, always sitting a row in front of me in my Religion class. The boy with the beanie in my Introduction to English Literature class, a skater I sometimes saw at the comics store a block away from my dorm. The older, cooler student with the snakebite piercings and earplugs, whose laughter echoed across the cafeteria and always made me turn around.

Those people I observed.

Those people I picked out amidst the crowd.

Those people I collected in my mind, never in my heart.

Those people I never talked to.

Those people served as a currency. I exchanged those potential love stories with my friends like Pokémon cards. It felt right. It felt wrong. It felt indispensable to build a connection. To get that golden ticket. To get on that train towards Normality.

To not be the only one left behind, hands empty and heart heavy, on the station platform.

But nothing went according to plan. I left university in the second semester and never came back. And yet, the love stories of my peers continued to haunt me through Instagram stories and texted monologues of First Times.

And though I felt a burning shame at having nothing new to share, I also felt a certain sort of peace.

I didn’t have to play pretend anymore. I didn’t have to put myself out there. By leaving behind the world and its people, by reentering the Void, I didn’t have to try and understand and fix the reasons for my inability at intimacy—at trust.

In this social stagnation, this immobility of life, this isolation of the soul…

I was free.

TRIBULATIONS OF THE HEART

or

Intimacy, The Great Enemy of Self-Sufficiency

Eventually, I had to reemerge from the Void.

I did.

And it was 2020. And I was 22.

When I came back into the light after four years lost to the Void, I found myself invited to a wedding.

There, amidst summer reverie, COVID-19 sanitary precautions and a ceremony in the South of France, I met an old classmate.

We had evolved through high school in different social groups, sometimes merging for a few class projects. We were part of the same constellation, a collection of small satellites in orbit around the planet that was our classroom, passing by each other, going through the cosmic motions, acknowledging each other’s presence, never really needing to make acquaintance.

Until a spark happened.

Kinda.

See, back then, I didn’t realise that a pattern had developed within my relationships. Romantic and platonic. Today, I can tell you with certainty that what I felt was not attraction per se, but a sort of weird, mirroring emotion.

I felt like I owed him to be attracted to him as he was to me.

Problematic, right?

It was not the first time it had happened.

When I was 16 and the rumour had it that the older boy in our class found me pretty, I let him court me (what a joke) for a week, then forcefully kiss me in a dark corner of our school. A day later, he confessed his love to me. Two days later, he asked me if I was a virgin. Three days later, he made plans to come back home with me for the weekend. Two days later, I broke up with him.

Well, the same thing happened to me when I was 22, with the same but not-quite-same intensity or debauchery.

It took my former classmate four months of long-distance courtship (that word really is fun to use in our current century and its myriad of situationships) to confess. Then an evening spent together with our friends (where he couldn’t look me in the eyes but had already introduced me to the rest of his family as his girlfriend—unbeknownst to me), to tell me he loved me. A week later (approximately two weeks since I had agreed to see where our blooming affection might lead us), he talked of me moving across France to live with him and his mum.

You can easily conclude, dearest reader, why this relation ended.

And by now, you must have guessed it.

I have avoidant tendencies.

Alright. I am avoidant.

There are many reasons for this curse, many found in my childhood and rooted in the instability of growing up around undiagnosed mental disorders, intergenerational trauma, and drug addictions.

And yet, it didn’t stop me from falling in love at 14.

No. What really cemented those behaviours happened between my 15 and 24 years of life—and had nothing to do with those two sort-of-dating moments that happened in between.

It happened because of him.

I’ll refer to this individual as Ken. (I would have gone with Dick, but let's be subtle.)

I previously told you of those unwarranted confessions from male friends. Now, let me tell you about the ones that stained.

Love Turned Into War Turned Into Love

My best friend Ken turned intimacy into a minefield.

The first time he confessed his love for me, it was not to me.

He told one of our common friends, who then told me when I asked why Ken had suddenly ghosted me for the past six months. We were 15.

He did it again when we were 19. I received a text in the middle of the night telling me that he was in love with me, that he had been since we were fifteen, and that it was killing him. I woke up, read it, and agreed that it might be more beneficial for both of us to stop talking for a while.

He told me he had no memories of sending that text. That he was drunk. That he had erased it. That I should send it back to him so he could have a laugh.

Two months later, he came to my parents’ house and left a single rose on our doorstep.

Then he ghosted me. Again.

And we didn’t talk for three years.

Then he came back into my life in 2020. Just as I reemerged from the void. And I told him it was the last time we tried being friends; that we wouldn’t go through one more cycle of Love-War-Love ever again. He agreed.

And it was good for a while.

I really thought we were grown-ups capable of communicating.

Of learning and changing.

Of loving.

But we were not.

And that was no love. Not really.

The more I pushed him back, the more I became desirable.

The more I showed my teeth, the more I became something to conquer.

The more I drifted away, the more he believed in forever.

Because loyalty, no matter how bloody and thorny it might be, has to be rewarded eventually, right? Because love has to be epic, right? Because sharing such a deep scar with another scarred soul has to mean something in the great scheme of things… Right?

All that pain has to lead somewhere. If not, how are we supposed to believe?

To go on?

Those confessions of love from Ken became a recurrence. Sneaky. Tainted.

Little bombs dropped in conversation that make you take a step back, eyebrows singed and chest bruised.

“I love you so much.”

“Shut Up, Leave Me Alone. I’m talking to a new girl.”

The kind of headwinds that make your mind whirl.

“You were the first and only girl I ever loved.”

“Of course, that’s why I abandoned you every few days/months/years. Because I loved you that much.”

The kind of arrows wrapped in velvet that makes you question your sanity. The kind of words, of actions, that have you doubt if there ever was any true friendship hidden under the surface, or simply a wanton beast biding its time.

“You’re so smart.” An adoring murmur shared over the dashboard of his car; then, hours later, he turned to a new friend sitting between us at the dinner table. “Careful. Don’t use too big words.” He said, not meeting my eyes. I wasn’t part of the joke. I was the joke. “She didn’t go to university. She only has a high school diploma.”

Every act of casual affection—even the motion before, when you can feel your heart bursting with the love you can only ever feel for someone who shared a broken piece of your childhood, even a house away—became an avowal of weakness. Within our relationship, platonic as I wished it to be, Ken had turned every casual act of intimacy into a minefield.

And I let him.

Because for a while, it felt right.

Because that devil inside of me roared with his, danced with his; because he fed my hunger, and I fed his.

So desperate for understanding, for that special bond only shared with a soul that seemed to have been made with a piece of your own, I continued allowing Ken in. I continued our game of rope-pulling. I continued dancing on the edge of the fire I nourished, caring not for the way it singed my fingertips, my lungs, my feet, as long as it kept me warm.

Compulsive behaviour (or compulsion) is defined as performing an action persistently and repetitively. Compulsive behaviours are a need to reduce apprehension caused by internal feelings a person wants to abstain from or control.

By continuing this cycle of chasing and running away, I stayed in the Known.

I knew the course of actions and reactions that would follow my interactions with Ken; I knew the emotions that would arise in me. Disappointment. Love. Shame. Grief. Hatred. Longing. I knew how his eventual letdown would feel just as he knew how mine would, our trauma around Intimacy siamese twins. I knew why and where we would break; I knew when and how we would make up. I knew he would always come back, and he knew I would always let him back in.

We were glorious, he and I.

A hermaphrodite god of eight limbs, two heads, two hearts, one mind.

I let him see the worst of me, and he challenged head-on the darkness within. He thrived to change, to shine, and I held up a magnifying mirror to every ray of light that slipped through the cracks of his insouciant facade. I really thought we would have run to the edge of the world together. We nearly did. But he wanted more. And I became weary of pulling his heavy hand away from my shoulder, my thigh, my stomach.

Of waiting for him to leave me, then come back, proclaiming having found another flame to warm his heart before letting it die and trying, once more, to ravish mine.

I still think of him. Almost daily.

I carry Ken around like a lead locket; sometimes it hangs heavy between my breasts, sometimes it nicks the skin of my neck from where the chain has become a choker, strangling the anger out of me—demanding air by rekindling this strange love affair.

I never deleted our text conversations. It’s been three years since we last talked.

I didn’t block him. He still stalks the digital places where he might find me. Following my TikTok. Sending me a meme on Instagram. Liking an old post. Trying to get a rise out of me, then celebrating with a Gotcha!.

But I stand my ground. I ghost him as he ghosted me.

It’s pitiful, I know. Childish, even. The slightest bit noxious, still. But hey, it's my corpse of a friendship and I’ll bury it how I want.

The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference

I wish I could be indifferent. Sometimes I am.

I wish I could be more resilient. More forgiving. Less spiteful. Sometimes I am.

Sometimes, some nights, I entertain the idea of letting Ken back in.

But if I do so, then I’ll remain stuck in that state of pseudo-self-sufficiency. My heart will be safe in the muddy ravine I threw it in, yes, but it will rot away; my trust will remain safely scattered across the landscape of my self-imposed independence.

I will never vanquish my enemy, Avoidance.

I will never conquer Intimacy.

I will never get to find out what I want, how or where I want to belong.

I will never get to experience love and attraction on my terms.

I will continue to entertain and then desert each and every person who shows me their interest, dooming the relationship before it has a chance to bloom, the roots already rotten.

I will persist in this limbo between conformism of the body and anarchy of the mind.

I’ll remain the anomaly in an equation of my own making. The glitch in the system I coded. The colourless stitch in the colourful tapestry I wove.

And not only is it annoying. It’s also fucking boring.

And I’m done being bored.