I.

Dear Me,

                It was a dull summer evening when you first knew you were meant to hate men.  The humidity was 98 percent and the high was 85, and all you wanted to do was sink your body into the narrow cushions of the seats at General Cinemas and forget about the weather with the even temperatures of air conditioning.  The cooling system made your nose run, but everything did, and you had to go with your father, whose knees had a habit of drifting over and finding yours.  His hands were red and worn from his years at LTV Steel before he was laid off, and his eyes were still heavy from the day his wife went and got the job that took away his manhood.

            His fingers grew greasier as he complained about the price of popcorn, and you kept staring at the screen, knowing that if they could pretend, you could too.   You entered the theater curious about what went on in the darkness, the couple crouched low in the back with hands places you couldn’t see, carefully covered by well-stretched sweaters and poker faces lined in red.  And you left hating men.  You left with knots in your stomach.

II.

            Adolescence, where, in addition to accusations of laziness, you were sullen and you were moody, but at least then you had an excuse (teenage hormones, the curse of the middle-aged parent whose hair hasn’t whitened yet).  Your teachers gathered in smoke-filled lounges and placed bets on who would be pregnant first among your friends, who would end up in drug rehab, and who would be the first to die.  They reinforced their bets with notes carefully typed on school stationary, tri-folded and sent home in manila envelopes with report cards with grades that didn’t match your anger.  You signed them yourself with the blue fountain pens your father always carried but rarely used, to avoid a lecture dispensed with his face a little too close to yours. 

            Your stomach knotted again, and you held your pasty reflection in the mirror, not a word to explain it surfacing, only further distance between you and me.  And when you got sick at school, I came up behind you and held your head, assuming you were drunk, because I was.  You told me you were thinking.  We were told that no one under the age of thirty had the right to wish for death.  But I thought that once you reached the age of thirty, you didn’t wish to die, instead you forget what it means to be young and wish for it again and talk fondly about the “good old days.”  I suppose it’s easy to forget that those days actually consisted of your Biology book being kicked down the hall by someone taller and stronger than you that, contrary to popular belief, probably will never truly get what they deserve.

            Your breasts grew overnight and weighted the rest of your body, and you held them in your hands for safety and warmth in the quiet of the evening.  Your father noticed with impatience that “Each day, you are more like your mother” and you couldn’t tell if it was an insult, but he shook his newspaper harder.  He didn’t look at the want-ads anymore.  Your parents didn’t hush their voices when they heard you stir in your bed; not when they were having one-sided arguments, and not during the violent love making that followed.  One day you thought you heard him call your name instead, and then there was a long silence.  You fell out of bed, but no one made a move; it had been years since the violent nightmares shook you from your bed.  And when you complained of stomach knots to your mother, she didn’t say it was okay when you vomited in the hallway; she yelled at you and told you to clean it up, because you weren’t a baby anymore.  And when I whispered words to you, you didn’t see me anymore, but instead stared out the window devoured by gales of rain and cried.

III.

            We left, you and I, just like we always swore we would.  We swore off men together, and made vows with our pinkies locked together below the full moon we created with flashlights against the navy blue of our eighty-inch sheets.  We swore they would never touch us, not ever, not ever again.  We agreed there was something ugly about them, and we were lucky to have this knowledge so early, this knowledge that we buried deep in the darkest caverns of our mind that made the body say what the voice couldn’t: “No.” 

You met someone, you remember him now on summer evenings in your living room where the candles that replace the light of the halogen lamp remind you of romantic dinners you never had.   You laugh now when you think of it ending, because you cried not because you hurt but because he didn’t; and it wasn’t that you stopped caring, it’s just that both of you were bored.

            And we merged in and out, and you took turns loving and flat-lining, staring into eager faces who claimed they wanted to help, but were frustrated with what you didn’t feel.  You found that Thursday was a good day to be a Gypsy, and as long as no one was looking you could be, and you found the lifeline in your hand and saw that it was long.  You pointed to the beginning and called it purgatory.  I agreed.  I saw him standing there, looking, no, staring; I looked away, because I wasn’t ready to stop hating yet, and neither were you.  He was too eager, had too many flowers and too many hands.  You didn’t even notice.

IV.

            Years later, he was able to make you laugh, to take you away from the windowsill and introduce you to the wonders of evening.  You found yourself playing for the first time; playing in the rain during sunsets that you supposed you should be watching in awe, but that you found much more appropriate as background.  You were splashing in the puddles, and when he splashed you back the first time you winced, because you thought he was trying to hurt you.  You looked into his eyes and he was laughing, and you thought he was laughing at you.  You held his gaze and started to cry, and his face fell in confusion.  And you looked down, and waited for him to run away, waited for him to leave you standing in the pouring rain in muddy clothes that unbeknownst to you had turned transparent.  You waited for his discomfort; you waited for him to hate you for not being what he imagined you might be…  But then he lifted you chin and pleaded with you to let your eyes meet his and said, “You are so beautiful.”  Then for the first time, someone held you as you cried, in the rain, where I was watching over you, and all the knots in your stomach went soft.