Endings Are Just Beginnings in Disguise

After not seeing my then-boyfriend for 6 months because of the worldwide pandemic, we sat in the trunk of his car with blankets and a deck of red decoupaged cards. We were playing strip poker against the backdrop of gently swaying grass, uncut and unruly. They must have been as tall as I, at 5’9’’, if I measured myself standing against them. I was always bad at card games, and I was losing miserably. Down to my last hand and half-naked and exposed to no-one but him in the parking lot of a deserted beach; but it seemed I had won after all when he gave my braless nipple a sucking kiss.

Dusk turned the sky pink and purple as we strolled along the beach. Stumbled, really, against the whipping wind, despite the gentle summer days coming to an end. The cotton candy skies reflected the warmth and sweetness the moment still stirs in me now, even after my recent separation from the man.

I used to cuddle against my comforter when I was a child, dreaming up scenarios of all the things a faceless man would do for me that would make me fall in love with him.

Dubious, lasting, and hopeless love.

Care about me in ways that no one else would. It’s hopeless to try and remember the things the man of my dreams did to make me love him so much, I’ve since grown up and separated the romantics from reality.

Both were needed and in equal measure.

When I was in college, my faith in others was shaken, to say the least. But it was mainly a projection of myself onto others. When my best friend’s mother passed away at the end of high school, I failed to be there for my childhood friend.

In the distrust I didn’t produce in my friend, I slowly fostered over the next several years with everyone close to me.

I avoided any lasting connections with my friends and family, and instead, relied on artificial connections based on a mutual exchange with people I never dared to make a connection with. Because maybe if I never get close to anyone, then I can never hurt them the way I hurt my friend.

After years of swinging from guy to guy, and often back to the same person, only ever sharing a bed and maybe even some deeply personal stories that held no variance to the depth of our relationship, some moments allow me to hold a reverie for who I used to be. Someone who relied fundamentally on the strength of the bonds that she forged with others.

I am not that girl anymore.

It feels like eons ago when I was a sorority girl, my voice quaking as I read out an email I sent to my organization’s president in front of every girl in, what used to be, my sorority.

The email detailed every single abuse and sleight she used against me and my fellow sorority sisters. As I sounded out each syllable in the email that took, what felt like, an eternity to read, I stood afraid for, what felt like, a necessary cause.

The same girl who was the organization president would call me many months later, as I sat on a rough, modern loveseat that the boy I was fucking on-and-off and I was walked in on by my roommate, whom I only ever spoke to once about a mess I had unknowingly left in the kitchen and who unceremoniously announced that she was moving out after the fact when I bumped into her by chance on our college campus.

The sorority president’s voice rang more clear and succinct through the receiver than I had ever heard it.

The surprise didn’t color her tone, but I remember her telling me that

“I was surprised to see the organization’s email.”

The one where I told the national organization’s president that I was leaving the sorority. No one at my school’s organization knew I was making the move, except the women I entered the sorority with. But it seemed none of my sorority sisters was surprised. The national organization gave women the chance to leave the organization without alerting anyone from within their school. Such was a blessing for anyone seeking to escape their abusers.

I was only the second girl to ever leave the sorority. The intimidation and fear that they instilled in you during the rush process made most women unable to, for fear of losing a sisterhood that never supported them. But the sorority sisters held something like awake as if I had died. I support them, I was.

At the time it made me wonder why they didn’t just pick up the phone to call me and ask how I was or how I felt. Looking back, I know. Because they didn’t care. And that’s why I left.

Because, no, they didn’t care about me. But I do.

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Previously Published on medium

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