ON THE GRAND staircase at my grandparents’ high school, my grandfather found himself looking up at my grandmother. It was then that he knew he’d marry her, or so I am told; he was 5 years older than my grandmother who was a freshman when they first met. Stanley was supposed to have graduated the previous year but was flunked and held back because he refused to speak English. Any time he was asked a direct question by any of the nuns at their Catholic high school, he would respond confusedly in Polish even though he spoke perfect English outside of school. She was 14 and he was 19 and she had wanted to pursue higher education after high school, but they married when she graduated and then she had my father. When my grandfather died forty-odd years later, my grandmother was finally able to enter the workforce in the 90s.
Who could she have been had she not met my grandfather? These are the questions we ask ourselves now, in the modern world. There’s an unspoken urgency where we pick at the bone for the remaining marrow: was she free; was she happy; did she have a choice? There are no answers, however—not really anyway—there’s only ever information. Fragments to a mosaic.
2. LEAVE [YOUR PURSE] on the table, protected by your napkin, or 3. Drop it on your chair, depending on which makes you happier.
You are a little object on a mantel or I am a large room filled with shadows. I yearn to be understood intimately and not just sexually—the two are sometimes conflated—but for someone to know me and the way I move, how I’m shaped, and the ways in which I exist.
I have to remind myself that I am a little home within myself or I collect little houses because I long to cultivate a home or real estate. I don’t really care about the diagnosis, I just think they’re cute. Bone china. Porcelain. Some uncap to hold little treasures inside like tea I never really drink or spices that whittle away slowly. Am I allowed to keep anything so precious? To want anything is to walk through life with a thick milky sickness tied to one's strings. Desire is, I mean, desire is that, quite frankly, desire is gross. But I like little houses.
And what if someone gave me one someday, like a single house or seven, maybe two mid-sized houses that my grandmother built piece by piece in the early 90s? Once, I went to my grandmother’s house and played with her little girl neighbor. We pretended the houses were ours and played with little Strawberry Shortcake dolls until the hour had passed and we had to go home. My grandmother said goodbye and reminded me that her two mid-sized houses would someday be mine but this scares me, and that’s not surprising because I’m so often afraid of things like ice and coffee klatch, choking on pretzels, drawn blood, cars and pigs, never seeing my exes again or seeing my exes again, syllables and semicolons, and my grandmother dying. Although, I’m not so sure. The uncertainty is frightening. I cannot accept my grandmother’s house on the principle that I do not know if I’ve loved enough.
I’m cracking my jaw and gnashing my teeth: I’m trying to transform my feelings into words but it’s not a perfect translation. I’m not being honest with myself. I do not put on my dating app profile that I’m searching for a home but this is essentially what I’m after in the end. I’m afraid to be so openly looking for something long-term—what does that say about me? Instead, I say nothing. Instead, I say “My goal is to publish a book,” and a man comments: “Your goal should be to write a book first.”
1. UNLESS IT'S VERY late or you and Johnny just don’t seem to hit it off, ask him in for a little while. It’s the nice thing to do and cements those future dates.
I write in a journal that I want to love someone who will teach me something new because I already know so much. Sometimes, I think that I have accidentally read too many books or watched too many movies and now I’ll never be satisfied. Last night, I talked to a man for a few hours through a dating app and then invited him over. This is something I never do, I’m too nervous, and I even say: “This is crazy, what if you’re a murderer, or what if I’m a murderer?” He assures me that he’s not a murderer but he does not seem concerned about me being a murderer so maybe that, in itself, is a red flag. In any case, we have sex and I feel a little cold afterward as he gets up to leave. My ex, Didi, felt that making love in the morning was so meaningful and I used to cringe internally at the phrase “make love” but now I understand, or I don’t understand anything at all. I text the man I had sex with “Good morning’” and he does not respond. I ask “How are you?” and still nothing. I say “Would you like to come over again tonight?” and he responds that he’d love to, but he has to play ultimate frisbee with his friends later. I turn the phone off and go to bed.
I think my yearning makes people uncomfortable: They cannot let me feel sad or “big emotions,” a phrase I am now prone to using (somewhat ironically but mostly earnestly) ever since I first heard it spoken in a kindergarten classroom to refer to a cozy corner where kids are sent when they’re upset. My youthful vulnerability leads us all to shame, but I would rather drip with abundance than pretend to be above it all. We were all so youthfully naive once, and maybe we would all be kinder if we could remember that feeling.
My feelings are singular and yet so universal because even though I’m personal I’m still just a person. I’m writing to find community because right now, there’s only this wide scrape of singularity for me, like when I used to walk home from work at 1 a.m. and chant my silly mantras like “I don’t fear the dark, the dark fears me” while I gripped pepper spray between my forefinger and thumb. I’d get home and lock the door and I’d hear my heart drumming in my ears. Sometimes, people just disappear and I could have, too, in the space between home and away, I could’ve been taken or lost without anyone ever knowing.
3. BUILD UP HIS ego. Don’t act as though you were merely subscribing to a social convention… let him know you’re pleased and a little flattered.
I see Didi again after 6 months. Our break doesn’t feel protracted—it feels like just yesterday that he left me in the hallway of my apartment building after kissing me twice and squeezing my ass. We broke up because we had finally built something that could break.
I had been the one to contact him. I asked him to pick up the book I had bought but hadn’t given him. Young Man of Caracas. I didn’t tell him it was a book, however. I just said it was a memento of my affection—a surprise. This made him nervous because he doesn’t like surprises.
“What are you, pregnant?” he jokes, now, as we stand with our backs against his car.
Sometimes when I’m bored, I think that I could have a baby at any time like Miranda on Sex and the City. Sure, it’d be a little inconvenient, but I need a hobby. I tell him this and he laughs between cigarette puffs. I tell him that he really should stop smoking and he answers stupidly, something about how he’ll either achieve his dreams or die from lung cancer before the failure sets in. I want to chastise him for such a masturbatory answer but then I realize that we both came here to feel sorry for ourselves. A chill sets in; it’s a cold night as we stand side by side, trying not to look at each other.
I pinch his arm and say, “You’re real.”
He says, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You haunt me like a ghost.”
“What is this, The Sixth Sense?”
“Exactly! You're Bruce Willis and I’m Haley Joel Osment.”
He inadvertently winces when I say Bruce Willis because he’s insecure about his receding hairline. He’s insecure about a lot of things.
I laugh because I don’t know what to say, or because I can’t say what I want: I miss you. I thought this moment would feel like the longest five minutes of my life, but in a minute it’s been an hour and we’re still talking. He says he’s been working out; I say I can’t tell because of his sweatshirt and that he should take off his shirt and show me.
“I don’t have an undershirt on today,” he says, modestly, and I instantly remember how he wears undershirts like a young grandfather. When we first had sex, I disrobed immediately, but it took him a minute to reveal himself, ceremonious in the way he peeled off his layers: a flannel, then a t-shirt, then an undershirt.
He says, “Look at you, look at the way you’re dressed,” and points to my autumnal sweater with a teddy bear on the front.
“The orgy upstairs thinks this is hot,” I joke and he laughs at my outrageous statement.
We start talking about porn but in a purely intellectual way, like, hey, you ever notice how the writing always starts smooth but then it just degenerates? The conversation flicks from threesomes to orgies and I say, “What’s the difference at that point?” and he says plenty.
A threesome still has the appearance of intimacy while an orgy is as simplistic a need as putting a round-shaped block into a round-shaped hole. “An orgy is all about filling holes in the end,” he says and I’m doubled over, laughing more than I ever have.
2. SAD BUT TRUE, your makeup and your hair won’t look as pretty at 11 as they did at 8.
Not to slip, but I truly think everything does come back to the mother. She’s been the third in all my relationships, although it seems too simple to say that she is the reason why I gravitate towards these men who are emotionally inept; yet I have grown so used to yearning for a love that’s been withheld from me that it seems to have seeped into my very being. She is impenetrable, but not entirely cold—maybe she’s just unreachable. I know her best by the ghost of the smell of her corned beef and cabbage. I still smell it in my nose at times of great distress.
Maybe it goes back to my grandmother; she never remarried after my grandfather died of alcoholism, but their tumultuous marriage must have affected my father who married and divorced thrice. What is love, anyway, but a living, pulsating memory?
3.a Why let Johnny in on all your beauty secrets?
My friend M. gave me her sex crystal. She believes in crystals and while I don’t think rocks hold any power over me, I believe in belief. In the spring, she had given me a small, shell pink love stone that was supposed to make Didi mine. He broke things off a few weeks later. The sex crystal was her apology. “I think we came on too strong with that one,” she said, referring to the love crystal. It was also, she said, encouragement to pursue pelvic floor therapy.
I repurpose trauma as funny stories, although it might be strange to put something like that on a dating app profile. I am prone to telling the story of my first pap smear humorously. The doctor, in a bit of a hurry, did not say when and I yelled so loudly at the intrusion that she had her nurse practitioner finish the procedure. I read Emily Ratajkowski’s book and she writes about her own pap smear where she’s tense and there’s incredible pain. The doctor expresses concern: victims of sexual abuse often have trouble at the gynecologist. My doctor never approached me about this, and I rack my brain to find a time when I ever felt physically unsafe (I come up empty-handed).
I’m told to seek physical therapy and the practitioner says they don’t see a lot of young women—mostly postpartum mothers who need their vagina tightened like this is an auto repair shop. Being “tight” is supposed to be a good thing, or so I am told: not loose but a noose. But it doesn’t feel comfortable and I can’t relax. I watch parents in movies pat the space on the bed next to them, encouraging their child to sit down for “the talk.” My father just told me that he was divorcing my mother because she was a slut who fucked her way around the neighborhood and that I shouldn’t be like her. That’s like giving someone half a puzzle with the other pieces strewn throughout Central Park.
Is my shame really so strong as to shut down my body? I forgot that shame was even a word, a tool in my box of excavation. Sometimes when I’m on dating apps I feel such shame for having needs or desires. I wish there was a way to go through life without the need for love.
My father never dated after he and my mother divorced. He says it was for my benefit, that he stifled his desires so that I could grow up in a stable environment without a new “Cheryl or Dawn” coming around every month. I think he was just scared.
3. NEVER KEEP HIM waiting on that first date. There’s nothing more uncomfortable for a boy than to have to carry on conversation about generalities with a strange set of parents.
There’s a person in a puffer vest walking the length of the train platform. Each time they pass a help button they push it but keep moving. A moment later, a voice comes over the intercom: Do you need assistance? But they’ve already moved on. Do you need assistance? Do you need assistance? They keep doing this to the point where the voice in the intercom says, Stop pushin’ those damn buttons if you don’t need any help. But they keep pushing the buttons and when the train finally comes they board and move from train car to train car pushing those help buttons so that at each stop, the conductor has to get out and assess the situation. It takes me an hour to get downtown. I look around the train car each time for a nod or wink of solidarity but no one is paying any attention to each other so I think I finally know how William Shatner felt in that Twilight Zone episode where he sees the gremlin on the wing of the plane. I want to tell Didi; I want to share every moment of my life with him but I don’t, or I can’t anymore. I’ll save this anecdote for a first date.
2. IT SIMPLIFIES MATTERS and satisfies his protective instinct.
I talk to Didi for three hours despite the chill from the October air. I find him infuriating, and yet still I desire to lay his head down in my lap and let us rest together until we fossilize. In the end, he says he’s moving and it throws me. I want to say, move where? What have you seen of my city? But he’s moving for his career and my career is here, so I say nothing.
I’m trying hard to bottle the entirety of that conversation or mold it into something tangible, something I can carry with me forever—a space and time that runs like a film I can return to whenever needed—but some things have become lost. I cannot capture the joy of our back and forth because now the memory is tainted with longing. Do you know how it feels to spend your life waiting for someone to pick up your call? He tells me so much about his childhood, his parents, his friends—things he couldn’t even tell me while we were dating, but now it seems we’re not at risk for any faux pas—that I ask, What do I do with all this information now? And he just looks at me.
I have lost all words. Our conversation has come to its natural conclusion, but I break our silence and say, “I can’t text you anymore.” I say this more for my benefit than his, although he responds solemnly that I don’t have to text him.
“No,” I want to say. “I want to text you,” I try to say. Instead, I just say: “It’s you.”
I cannot know what I meant by this. An accusation, maybe, or a moment of recognition of the self in the other. I just said you as if that could ever be enough, as if you are enough and you and you and you as if through naming my desires out loud I can beat them. The loneliness of modernity echoes around me. I cannot let the precarity of my existence come to rest upon you, and yet, I’m constantly calling out to you, saying what do you want? What do you want with me?
Gina Twardosz (she/her) is a nonfiction writer from Chicago, IL. Her work is exceedingly personal, often humorous, and occasionally political. She has had essays, prose poetry, and flash nonfiction published in various literary journals and zines and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.