There is a movie called Merlin that was one of my favorite films growing up. It is anti feminist in appearance but not I think in message, like him. In the film, my favorite two characters are born ugly and they carry this burden their entire lives. It shapes their lives. They select subordinate roles in powerful and cruel people’s stories, in exchange for a hint of power of their own, and ultimately beauty — as wealth and power will bring beauty. At the end of the story, the woman has been shot and she is dying. She asks, am I still beautiful? What she means is, do you still love me.

In practical terms, she is not still beautiful. The spell has ended. Her beauty has gone. But he looks at her and says, yes, beyond words. And she says the same back to him. And then, she dies.

The tragedy, see, is they had wasted their entire lives fighting someone else’s battle they did not believe in. Hoping to be beautiful enough to be part of the story at all. Hoping to be worthy of the grand passion that was always theirs. If they could only see past the mask society saw, and learn to value themselves for their true forms.

Being Jewish is like that.

Never quite beautiful enough. Always trying unsuccessfully to ease what seems so wrong. Assuming the ones we love most will judge us by the same metrics as others seem to when we are out in the white-washed Western world. We sanitize both our histories and our responses. We make our bodies bigger or smaller. We mask our anger and our sadness. We hide ourselves in plain sight hoping someday someone will want the true thing.

I loved his grief, and always would have. I wonder if he could have loved my anger.

I wonder other things. The years I spent trying to lose weight. My certainty once I began to eat that I was choosing to remain unloved, forever. Giving up on my very early childhood dream of one clear starlit unquestionably happy marriage, in order to be a writer and leave home. That leaving home is the start to any Western adventure tale. I want to go backwards, now. My parents’ house was only a house, never home. I am my home but I forgot I existed. My heart is my home but before I met him, I could not have located my heart on a map.

I told a table full of I can’t remember who, because really I was only ever just telling him, my love is strange, I am not sure anyone cares. I meant, you may think you process everything through your head, but you’re wrong. You process everything through your heart, and then, your brain decides which parts you let others see or not. But me, I process everything by writing it down. Eventually, my heart catches up.

I told him, my parents fucked me up. In reality.. I meet foster kids, kids thrust into a system that does not bother to identify them by name. We have a lot in common. My parents never knew my favorite color or food or nickname or what to buy me on my birthday. I am not sure if they ever cared. When I was growing up, I had no one in my life who cared about these things. No one who knew the answers to these questions. I was scary damaged, I suppose. Beautiful in my own way, looking back at old photographs. But dismantled. Clinging to shreds of identity as the center spilled away. People knew me because I could write or because I was brainy, so I tried to do those things very well. And sap over the other parts that were bleeding. It has never truly worked. I suppose it never will.

Funny, the lengths we go trying to be beautiful. Even when we know better.

I grew into an adult terrified of love, the way only children can be, when the people who claim to love them in fact see them as an unwelcome intrusion. Me, trying forever not to intrude, not to be a burden. I am such a good just-a-friend that I will disappear my emotions and fuck someone else, will you love me then? I am such a good girl that I will be unobtrusive and quiet and no bother, really. Someone with so little personality you can stick me in your back pocket. I will let you have bookworm and graduate degree and scholar and photography, like ceded territory. I will give you whatever you want if you don’t hurt me.

Me, terrified of being rejected and maybe he decided I was terrified of sex, and. Me, voiceless, but sure What Was Happening between us, unable to tell.

The will and the words are not enough. You have to have the hope for a better future that is unlike the past. Before you speak anything important. Especially about love.

I think this mermaid who I am is drowning in love. Love she wants to give away. She shoves it at anyone who will take it, as she has always done. She planned to give it to him someday, really she did. When she was beautiful enough to be worthy.

Foster kids don’t really get love. We don’t understand it. I say “we” but I should not. 23andme says my parents are mine, biologically. Though I was smart and clever and heroic and so I never let myself belong to them.

All right, then. Kids so neglected we almost died. Kids who’ve had to get a little crazy, like stripping rosemary and sage from other people’s gardens to remind us who we are. Kids who had nobody to knit us together after a social risk so we never took any. Kids who learned to develop or feign wallpaper colored personalities. Kids like me. We learn.

Kids like me. We don’t really understand love. Love is a thing other people do. Love is an organ inside us twisted into the grotesque from lack of use. Love is like a message from another planet. One others seem to think we belong to, as we age, but we don’t believe them. Rejection I suppose has formed the core of who we. We don’t know how to be anything else.

Jeanette Winterson says rejection teaches you how to reject, but she is only half right. I never reject anybody, and that’s half the problem. I never say enough or you’re crazy or stop or don’t or fuck you or go away. I am always nice and knee jerk conciliatory when really I am seething. My way to preserve something of myself. To save the only thing in me I can save, even if it is not worth much to me, as dignity I suppose rarely is in the last accounting.

And. I never know when I am rejecting. Love is a yes I don’t understand and a no I don’t understand. A yes that is practiced, like social manners and pretending to care. And no is what I say when I’m not sure what I should say. When I am trying to pause long enough to figure it out.

I tried to tell him, I was saying yes but you were ignoring me. Patriarchy ignores women’s no but it also ignores our yes. It says good girls must never say yes unless we are married to someone who we do not love, or unless we are trying to save somebody. I was trying to save him from my loving him, I guess. Sounds so silly now. But the actions of the broken always do to the ones who are not broken, not anymore. At the time, it was the best way to love him I could think of. Let him go.

Suppose this is what whiteness does to us. Says our best chance is to something other than who we are. The people who love us always say, come as you are. That is why we must leave home to drive ourselves into the ground under capitalism. In the name of a god who does not care, and of parents who taught us too much about fear and not enough about acceptance.

I spent the past year learning many things. Mostly how to knit myself back together. And that my perspective before was tilted. I did not deposit him gracefully like Moses from the water into the arms of someone who would love him better than I could. I put him into the hands of people who like hurting people. If I wonder what happened to his sweetness, that is what happened. I was so crazy. I assumed everyone on this planet would love him like I did. And for the same reasons.

I was wrong. And I will punish myself enough for the two of us. I already have. Enough of punishment.

We think punishment makes us more lovable but it only makes us hard. It only makes us do crazy things. I spent a weekend last winter reading articles he wrote a couple of light years ago in school. I took a year to be able to look at his face without shoving mine into the couch cushions like a little girl. I still do that, from time to time.

Love is a language I am learning, slowly. Yes for my sake. Loving him is a thing I do for my sake. I still believe doing it is killing him, to save myself. Maybe that will fade in time.

Until then.