Sam Bell
I.
There was a path between the ice hockey rink and the bridge, and the bridge took me back home. I remember watching the leaves change color on the path and the sky was cobalt, the air cold. I remember being with a boy who was not my boyfriend. I remember his long, blonde hair. It could have snowed, it was so cold, and we were laughing. I ran ahead, and he caught up to me. He put his hands around my waist, and drew into my face. A bird cawed overhead. I turned my face away.
II.
In high school, I dated three Matts in a row. Matt, Matt, Matt. Matt One was intelligent, already interested in ideas. He was a long-distance runner. He was blonde and captivating. I knew we wouldn’t last, but once in college, he sent me a letter because he saw an interview with Ellen DeGeneres in a magazine and thought of me. He wanted to remind me that I had made him laugh by reading parts of Ellen’s book to him over the phone. He thought I should know that he remembered this.
Matt Two was creative and artistic. He once made me a diorama full of hearts, layers and layers of hearts in all sizes. He was tall, and he felt things deeply. When he went off to college, leaving me to finish high school, he wrote me letters and told me about the women he was dating. On winter break, he delivered two movie tickets in an envelope to my front door because he heard I was dating Matt Three, and wanted to give us a Christmas gift. I watched him through my bedroom window; his glasses caught the edge of the porch light. It was snowing. His station wagon left tracks in the snow as he left. In the morning, any trace of him was gone.
Matt Three was my first love. I studied him for years, his long, straight blonde hair always in his face or pushed into a ponytail. In ninth grade, I wrote in my journal that he was “kind of a dork” because another girl asked him to a dance, and he said yes. He sailed competitively and dated a beautiful girl who attended a prep school in the city. During our senior year of high school, he started calling me. He broke up with the girl. I dated his best friend for a few weeks; that didn’t work out. Matt Three finally asked me to come over to his house to see a movie. I arrived, shaking, on his doorstep in autumn. The sun was going down behind his house. In the basement, we held hands and my stomach turned over. At the end of the night, in the dark autumn evening, he stood with his angular face close to mine, and refused to kiss me, because he knew this was going somewhere.
III.
I went sailing with Matt Three the summer before college. We sailed on Lake Ontario, and one evening, we could see Canada on another shore, a reminder that other places were out there for us to find. We beached the boat often, climbing up hills and rocky ridges, sitting at the tops of them, wondering what our wedding would be like. We wrote our history before it could happen. The morning he left for college, he stopped to say goodbye. It was a cloudless day, the sky blue and open, the sun warm on our faces. He told me he’d see me later, that whatever happened, happened. This was our agreement. I remember watching his face, his car packed full of biking gear and letters from me. His long hair was pulled back, and I knew that the next time I saw him, everything would be different, and it was.
IV.
I almost didn’t meet my college boyfriend. I was coming back to the dorms to study. It was a Wednesday night. Friends asked if I wanted to go out. I said yes and went, arm in arm, with my lovely friends to a keg party in a garage. I pulled a red cup from the stack, and a tall, dark boy with his white socks pulled up like the soccer player he was stood looking at me in the corner. After a beer, I approached him. He had green eyes and a delightfully freckled face. I cupped my hand to his chin and told him to call me. He looked me up in the directory and called the next afternoon.
V.
I cannot catalogue the college boys, because there are too many. I remember nights of hand-holding, and porch-kissing, and visiting boys in their rental houses. I remember an odd feeling of power and shame in the looks I gave across a room. I remember asking boys to walk me home, and they did. Boys came up to me when I visited home and went grocery shopping with my mother. “Who’s that?” she would ask on our way out. Sometimes, I knew their names. Sometimes, I did not.
VI.
My mother married my father young. She was stunning, blonde, nearly ready. She believed that completion in life was tied to men. Or, rather, her mother believed this and my mother fought against it, but was somehow involved in it by marrying a man she didn’t quite want to. This trickled down to me. I worried about being alone. I worried I would not be liked by men. Mostly, I worried about being alone.
VII.
I dated a musician once who had long hair and wide open eyes. He reminded me, in hair only, of Matt Three. He played the banjo, and he was terrified of commitment. He had a girlfriend, or an ex-girlfriend, and she was always around. One afternoon, the musician arrived to the lake where I rented a house, and we stood on the dock and looked at the greenish-gray waves moving around us. We fed seagulls – it was such a simple gesture, a simple day. Usually, we went to his house and I watched him write lyrics and we drank beer. His eyes had a way of searching me. The last time I spoke to him, he called me on a Christmas Eve, late, driving home from a tour. I told him I had met someone else. He threw the phone to the back of the van; I heard it hit metal. The man I married was “someone else.”
VIII.
My best friend in the third grade was a red-head named Jeff. I adored him. We made comics of potato bug people, and they had all sorts of adventures. For one week in the sixth grade I’d visit Jeff at his locker after class, trying to ask him to the upcoming dance. I would say hi, hop from one foot to the other, and hug my books to me. He always waited, as if he knew, but I could never tell what the answer would be, and I never asked.
IX.
My first kiss was with one of my best friends. He had a mop of curly, bouncy hair. He was impatient and bossy, smart and energetic. He pressed me against a locker and there it was, a first kiss made public. Soon, he was dating someone else. Soon, we were dating again. Soon, we were in college and kissing during one humid summer night. He returned from a trip abroad that summer looking tan and thin. He pulled me close. I had missed him, but I knew we could never become lovers. He was too close. I needed him as a friend, which is what he became.
X.
I met my husband during a work function at the start of a school year. We were graduate assistants and tutors. We sat in a circle. My blonde hair hung down my back, and I put it up casually as I watched his face open. He wore dress shoes without socks, jeans and a polo. His face was tanned, his freckles almost red. He spoke with a laugh in his voice. During a break, I rose to get coffee; I was hung over and quiet. I spoke to a woman I knew, watching him over her shoulder. I thought to myself, I could live with him. I don’t know if it was his face, his blue eyes, or the way he almost looked at me, but I knew my life would fold into his.
XI.
At the same time that I met my husband, I was in the brutal process of leaving a violent man. He crashed my car and he destroyed my bank account. He threw a clock at me, high and dangerous. The musician was there and not there. The lake house was trashed. The violent man was ill, and addicted, and I let myself become sucked into him because I was afraid to be alone. Let this be clear: I knew I would not leave him when I should have. He punched my bedroom door one night when I was dancing with another man, and I knew right then that I would stay because I was afraid to be alone. This isn’t about the violence I endured. This is about the savage way I didn’t give myself a chance. This is about patterns.
XII.
In truth, I have no true in-between moments of being alone or single. I took breaks from boyfriends to casually date other people. I watched my mother fade into her backyard flowers and painfully, slowly, I came to see myself in my mother. I saw my aunts involved with men that hurt them. This isn’t a judgment; it’s simply fact. I watched the pattern sew me into it; my cousins got into and out of violent relationships, and we eventually watched our mothers get divorced.
XIII.
It’s a warm New York night; my college roommates and I are in our friends’ garage, people are playing music. We are dancing along to the beat, swaying happily. Sweat beads on our foreheads. People laugh, drinking beer and touching hands. My college boyfriend and I are happy to be here; we have not yet hurt each other, not yet realized the potential we have to cause such harm. The shadows from the dusk are growing in length. I smile at my friends and sway, singing along to a song I can no longer name. There is only one set of hands around my waist, forming a clear, easy circle.
XIV.
I have left out the horrors of serial dating. I have omitted pushes, brunches with parents, phone calls to hospitals, running to safety, falling from a porch, being in the dark too late. Instead, I see moments, hands, a mouth, a laugh, a hand on a hip, a look across a room, a man’s hand pushing his hair from his face. I see beaches and cars and dorm rooms and houses. I see the trail of my past pushing me forward.
XV.
Once, I rented an apartment on my own. I am an only child, and I have always been afraid to live alone. My first night in the apartment, I walked from the front room to the bedroom, wearing a trail between the bathroom and the front window. I stared at my reflection, deciding that I better get to know myself. I had just left the violent man, and I knew he could find me here. I wasn’t afraid, because I had finally found the strength to leave.
XVI.
Sometimes, I think about watching my friends play soccer on the high school field, the grass so green and our lives so new and undiscovered. I watched beautiful boys run down the field, and I clapped and laughed. I see the early autumn dusk hovering above our heads, a low warning, and I see the sweaty bodies move toward me. I see my life then – simple. I see our breaths in slivers of white at the end of a driveway in the night air, all of us watching one another, gauging attraction. I don’t know when the pull of my muscles changed, when I started strategizing over men and being wanted. Sometimes, I wish to return to that uncomplicated time, the time when boys swung me around in a circle after a big win, and I laughed and pleaded, “Put me down!” I want to return to that night sky, the silver breaths across an autumn fire, embers pulsing the way our bodies will later.
XVII.
When I left the violent man, I was really running back home, to that soccer field. I was, in essence, picking myself up in the air and celebrating. In the apartment, when I heard noises, I welcomed them. They reminded me that I belonged to something larger than myself. When the trees shook in a blustery wind, I watched the individual leaves tumble to the ground. In the morning, with the sun on them, I picked the leaves up in my hands, admiring them.
XVIII
Memories of men are shells of my former self. It has taken me a great deal of time to stare into my own mirror. Some nights, I dream about the men of my past. I see one looking at me with compassion, another stares icily. I see a boy pulling over his car at the end of a date; it is raining, and he turns up the stereo, leading me to dance under a street lamp in the town where we both grew up. I see our faces, illuminated by the light and the stars. I see possibility, I see need. I see a face without imprint; I see a map of my future, all the latitudinal lines scaling paths down my body, already tracing a path of apologies that I will need later. The lines lead me home, where I can say I am sorry.
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Sam Bell is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review