From a Furnace, Saying I Love You
I had an anxiety attack the first time a boyfriend told me he loved me. I lay on my side, my face hot and wet, my body surging with the adrenaline that comes from fighting off death, thinking surely I was defective. Being loved shouldn’t feel like dying.
Less than a year later I straddled a shiny, new boyfriend in the dark of a sterile dining room. The apartment was filled with the din that comes from absent parents and restless kids, and the counters were sticky with vodka. I blushed with shame at the alcohol coursing through my veins as I whispered I have something to tell you, but I shouldn’t right now. What I meant was I’m too drunk for this; what he heard was distance. But I love you.
For so long I fought every inch of the way with every man who wanted to love me. All the while, I wore the clothes of a girl who was chill and laid-back and didn’t care much for love, or at least didn’t need it. Every piece of skin a man fell in love with caused a tremor in another part of my body. Something about Newton and physics — an equal, opposite reaction.
“Would you want to go out with me?”
“On a date?”
“On a date, as my girlfriend.”
“But things are so nice like this, with me lying next to you not knowing what comes next.”
It always sounded like that. I always hated men for not fighting harder for what came next.
When I was young I thought the phrase one step forward, two steps back had something to do with marching bands. Wouldn’t it be so lovely to watch the tuba player slowly making his way backwards, even as his low bellowing brass projects forward? A dance where the steps were dictated — what could be so bad about that?
When I found someone else to love four years later, he told me he didn’t much believe in love and relationships. It’s always that way with boys who survive until 22 without getting their hearts broken. There was more alcohol and more din and more whispering in the dark. He poured a big glass of whiskey while I danced with his mom in the living room to Slippery When Wet. He pulled me into a hammock on the warm Florida lawn — nowhere should be that warm in November — and told me he loved me. He was sure.
And so to one boy: I love you tonight, and I always will, I or he or we whispered in bed as we prepared to say goodbye for some indeterminate amount of time that we both knew would be forever. Whispered later to the man who was slowly breaking my heart, taking the love that I constantly shifted around his apartment and hid in different cabinets and chipping off bits of it to keep for himself. The worst fight we ever got in was when I finally realized he had been blacked out when he first told me he loved me on that warm Florida lawn. Nothing good ever happens in Florida.
And that was the way that we loved, me and all those boys: me fighting against it until I looked each one in the face and, like a rustling of leaves on a summer day, breathed Are you sure? I don’t get any easier. And then piling all our love into a bag until one night — it always felt like night — the boy and the bag were both gone. The love wasn’t, but being left felt like dying.
After the first panic attack, I always said that I was easy to fall in love with and hard to love, a line no doubt stolen from a 90’s romcom with Meg Ryan and some everyman trying to love her. The first time I said my mantra out loud you smirked, ignoring the shield of armor I was frantically trying to construct. You thought I couldn’t see your smile, feel your laugh, as we lay in the bed in the basement telling each other all the ways we had broken ourselves. You, who love so consistently and bluntly, finding comfort in a cool bed, and I, fighting so hard to fight so hard, finding mazes where there are none, igniting everything I touch like a furnace.
When you told me you loved me it was with a smile, the afternoon sun enveloping the sheets in a glowing yellow light. There was no whispering or fumbling, no alcohol or din. The truth of it is I knew months before, in the bed in the basement. I love you today, and I always will.
