“It ought to make us all feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we talk about, when we talk about love.” –Raymond Carter
The crazier I got—or perhaps, the longer I was crazy—the less boundaries I had. Goodbye kisses on the forehead migrated down until a boy, not my fiancé, said goodbye on my lips. Boys—other ones—snaked arms around my waist, across my chest. On the same outside swing, I alternately cuddled, shotgunned marijuana, was felt up.
This used to be my fucked-up notion of intimacy. When my synapses crossed and misfired and exploded, I thought that these things [they all felt like electricity] were what intimacy was all about.
I was being used. I was using them.
I ought to have felt ashamed. I do feel ashamed, now—a deep intense shame that spreads through my skin.
Flash-forward three years, now or almost. I’ve traded in boys who push hair out of my face for boys who push me up staircases. I’ve never hugged my friend Joe. Despite two years of him being my best friend in medical school, we’ve never hugged.
All those things I thought I knew about intimacy, all those secrets I thought the world was whispering to me about love: I had no idea what I was talking about when I talked about love. But when I stopped equating physicality with intimacy, my ideas about love expanded.
I discovered that: sometimes “I love you” sounds a lot more like “If I had ping-pong paddle hands, I would beat the shit out of you.” Sometimes, someone wraps their arms around you to pick you up, and you flail against them and kick their shins, but they don’t let go—a metaphor, one I pick up because I’ve had too many people let go when I flailed. Given the choice between singing the words, “Me and you, and you and me—no matter how they tossed the dice, it had to be” in four-part synchrony and a goodbye kiss on the forehead, I will chose the former every single time.
A few months ago, I called Joe on the phone after arguing with Joey, my boyfriend. I was upset, so upset I reverted back to my “crazy” way of dealing with things: I had been driving over bridges, crying and screaming the words to Everclear’s “You Make Me Feel Like A Whore” until I was hoarse and no less hysterical. I felt raw and vulnerable. I texted to ask if I could come over for a minute—it was test week and I knew he was still up.
After I had calmed down, I apologized profusely for interrupting his late evening. “It doesn’t matter, don’t apologize,” he said over and over, but I kept saying I was sorry. He switched on me:
“There were times when I could have left,” he reminded me, “but I didn’t.” The implication was that he had known what he was getting into, with this friendship. That he had signed up for hysterical phone calls, for the sound of my sobs resonating out of his staircase, for me showing up at midnight with tears soaked into my face.
“There will be more times,” I said. More times he could leave, more times he has to deal with me leaking out of my head.
“Probably.”
“And will you leave then?”
“I don’t think so.”
He talked me down, told me that Joey was handling his feelings in a good way, that he’d been smart. He put a mug of water in the microwave. He pulled it out and I watched him [like I always do] slip a few pieces of ice into it so I could drink it immediately. He searched his boxes of tea, pulled out one and prepared it for me to drink. “Go home, and go to bed,” he said, “this will help you sleep.”
I watch the two of us, sometimes, and I am reminded how little I knew about the love of friendship before. Knowing him has made me a better person, a better friend to others and a better girlfriend to Joey. When Joe turns his hand slightly to receive my car keys, when he reads my mind, when we remember the same obscure SNL reference or fight to see who can get out one of “our” quotes first, when we sing duets in his car—I can think of nothing more intimate. I know now that I know what I talk about when I talk about love.
