Honor

I am the most honorable person I know and he, he is the most honorable person I know.

I think he stayed away because he thought I did not want him. I stayed away because I thought he did not want me.

I stayed away because “I love you and I want to have your babies” is a weird thing to say on a first date, never mind before your first kiss and. Maybe he wanted me after all, maybe it was his wanting me that made him so uncomfortable, maybe maybe..

In the secret narrative below the narrative, in the space where whiteness cannot reach. I only talked to men whiter, more assimilated, less ethical, less Jewish than him and he, he only flirted with or kissed or fucked girls who are thinner and more assimilated than me and. I don’t want to be different than who I am. I just want him to want me the way I already am.

I want him to want me so badly that I turned my life inside out trying to be somebody I’m not in hopes it would make him come back to me.

I never stalked him but I’m scared he thinks I did. I only tried to talk, to say all the things I desperately wanted to tell him, because I am sick enough that it feels as though my life is ending every time I breathe in, and.

I pushed him away, every time he came near me. I was not playing hard to get. I was not playing at all. Whiteness was playing through me and I let it play. I thought he would like me better if I let it play, or. I thought I would be inherently more lovable if I gave myself to being someone else, if I let whiteness take more and more of me.

I hate him for screwing a white girl over me but I have let my misogynistic housemate sidle closer and closer to me and I told myself I was a more attractive person for it. I told myself this proximity to white people power would make me powerful myself. I told myself that powerful and lovable are the same thing.

Powerful and lovable are not at all the same thing.

I will never give a shit how powerful he is, not like that, not like loving him because of power. He introduced himself, “hi I got my degree at Harvard I’m a lawyer I have an interview at Stanford,” and I thought, got it, you’re better than me, so go talk to somebody else will you?

We misunderstand each other, when we act out of passion, out of desire, out of genuine human emotion. He thinks I am playing him like a violin and I think he is setting me up to betray me. This is what happens when you spend your whole life on the outskirts of whiteness-town. Being told that someday if you are very, very good you will find your way to the center and claim your castle-prize and there you will find your one true love.

The prize is for obedience. I don’t want to obey. I don’t want him to obey.

I liked him saying “Mazel Tov” and dancing. I wanted to grab his hand but I was shy. In front of so many people. I was always shy. I sent someone in after him because I did not want to stand loving him in front of a group of girls who would see what he so far did not. Who would see how silly we were together.

I was not his princess, I was his witch. The Medusa he had to Perseus-kill to win the hand of Andromeda. Andromeda is always blonde and thin and rich. That’s how the story goes.

I loved him, though. Ugly as I am. A head of snakes, of trauma-flashbacks and mind full of terror and “have you come to kill me?” I loved him.

Crazy though it was. I knew it was crazy. I have said so many crazy things since. It is easier to be crazy than to love somebody at first sight. If you are fat and poor and disabled and, and. I need to stop repeating my marginalized identities like a litany of my sins.

I did not earn my marginalization through evil deeds.

I don’t quite know that, not fully. I wonder if he knows that.

White people love each other by saving each other from love, by sparing each other from love so that we can put all that energy of loving one another into the project of colonialism. Men go to war instead of making love to the women they love. Women go to war against our own political and professional desires instead of taking care of the men we love.

I didn’t think I knew how to take care of him. I think I didn’t, then. I think I thought being mysterious and sexy and alluring would be enough. I never once opened my arms and said, are you alone on purpose?

I think I learned too late, but I learned.

Maybe. I think I love him, and he thinks I’m a stalker. Maybe. He thinks he wants me desperately but cares enough to spare me from his wanting, and I think he’s disgusting and despicable. Maybe. We form our thoughts into patterns built on our beliefs about ourselves, which become our beliefs about the world. We form other people’s behavior into these patterns, too.

I gave him a version of me who I did not much like, a pretty little white girl who thought antiracist work was for other people and thought he was one cutie amongst many others. Maybe.

Men use language like a weapon but women know language can heal.

I have been telling stories in the margins of my own story my entire life. My story was always, who will love me?

Isn’t that always the only story worth the telling?

I was looking for an answer in him. I should have been looking for an answer in me.

Loving him is part of me, and loving the part of me that loves him is part of loving myself..I cannot save him and love myself, both at the same time.

What might loving mean, if it stops meaning, to save from the truth of me?