The Boys Who Loved Autumn

All I ever wanted was to be loved, and understood.

Do you see how easily I can lie to myself? I put the words to the page, and they become their own truth, despite their lack of veracity. There are serial killers who only wanted to be loved. They eat raw flesh to absorb the essence of another human being. Like me, their mothers probably didn’t love them. It doesn’t preclude you from the possibility of being a monster.

We can call anything love, but that doesn’t mean it will conform to the correct shape. My mother used to scream at me on the regular, for any number of pecadillos. Maybe she was right, that I was a shy and difficult child. She’d call me lazy, selfish, spoiled, dirty, horrible, clumsy, a bitch. She’d tell me I couldn’t love because I hated myself. That I had no friends because of my terrible personality. Only after I’d been reduced to tears for hours would she tell me, “I love you, I’m only trying to help.”

I’d cook up a steak out of the soft, plump flesh of a little woman and call it love as I poured on the A1 steak sauce. How many men have beaten their wives and called the purpled bruises and the swollen cheeks love?

I cannot continue to lie to myself and tell me that terrible actions can be dismissed because they come from wanting love. You can think of love as a warm room with a crackling fire or it can be a hole in which you could bury the entire earth inside of and still never quite fill.

Let me tell you about my love.

I have had heartbreak but it never compares to the first heartbreak - having a mother who betrays you.

I have spent too much time trying to fill a hole, which is really a vacuum, endless space, with the love of finite beings who cannot pour their whole essence into me even though I wanted to.

I met my first boyfriend at 16, when we both played Lineage 2. We never met in real life and I only asked him to be my boyfriend because we fell into an easy, quiet kind of companionship as we’d hunt in the Enchanted Forest. I didn’t understand love and I had built a thick shield around me to keep everyone out and hold the shattered pieces of my self inside. I did this in an automatic way, because I knew of no other way. I broke up with him when he continued to cancel plans for us to meet up.

I met a girl when I was 17. Another long-distance relationship. She was rough-hewn and eschewed everything feminine and hated her own sex and was foul-mouthed to try to portray the image of a tough girl. She like me, was terrified of her own feelings. It was the first time I realized the gaping need inside of me to be loved and how the compulsion of that desperation made me want to destroy everything. We used to roleplay vampires on a RPG forum. But I was a vampire, shy and hiding behind my hair, bloodless lips but insides like coal.

The boy at college had a terrible smell. My very cells rejected him, but I didn’t know how to tell him to go away.

The date with the Buddhist woman had sweat dripping down my back and we went to my dorm-room to play cards but I didn’t know how to curl out of the back of my head. She was quiet and hard and had shoulders that seemed impossible to get inside of. We ended our date with relief.

I called the next boy ‘the devil’ because in the shadow his hair looked like horns and he had malicious facial hair. We talked constantly about god and the devil and even though we were both atheists we constructed an elaborate mythology for us to live inside. He’d be a small-town preacher. I truly thought that I had fallen in love with him, but it was a carefully constructed fantasy that we built for each other. We moved to Austin together. Living in a commune for 2 weeks together for the first time, and the god-hood I’d placed around his head like a crown fell away. I knew in that moment the forever I imagined was merely a story.

The next one was much older than me, and I knew he was a womanizer. His name was Shadow and I lost my virginity to him while my boyfriend sat in the next room, watching television. He told me my thighs tasted like almonds and the skin of my neck was like sugar. He cooked me breakfast and made me coffee and read me Clive Barker’s “The HellBound Heart” as we lay in his bed and I lapped up the attention that I’d never received from devil boy. Except the moment that I fell in love with him, he decided to return to his paintings, stop touching me, turn his back on me, tell me that I was “too much.”

There was the Asian sociopath I dated on and off again in the next 7 years. I craved the dominating sex because I felt so small and submissive inside, and he made a lot of money, and smelled nice, and always seemed to be composed of intricate, well-oiled moving parts.

This space is reserved for those people that I touched in fleeting moments before disappearing.

This space is reserved for the ghost outside my bedroom door, who I opened my legs for in the middle of the night.

This space is reserved for the various one-night stands that ended with me running out in fear and anger after my insides had gone to numbness. I was trying to find myself but I only found pools of brokenness because I could only stare at the broken reflection I had created of reality to shield myself from pain.

This space is reserved for three of my eskimo sisters, who I slept with as well. We’d have threesomes in a haze of cigarette smoke. It was all so wonderfully hedonistic despite my self-hatred and despite everything, I don’t regret any of it.

She was the demon, a woman in a man’s body, and we spent nearly three years together. We were both videogame testers and exchanged love underneath a sunset and moved to Seattle together and tried to create a home out of fur and horns and magic and promises, but we were both broken in too many different ways. I said once that we wouldn’t be together more than 7 months. I wrote We are Wormwood and dedicated it to her, and after I gave her the proof copy I remember her running out of the cab toward our home with tears in her eyes, and hugging me in the lobby. I thought maybe I’d built a love that last, but I didn’t even know the first thing about love. Later she’d say she stayed with me out of revenge for those words.

The succubus stole my energy out of my mouth and we touched naked in dim light, little stolen moments. She’d dated my girlfriend, who broke up with her, and then me. So it felt forbidden, clandestine. We swam in the freezing Seattle weather in my apartment’s courtyard fountain and when I slashed my knee open by falling she poured iodine and bandages over it in our drunken stupor.

Let’s not forget the Korean boy who had never even properly kissed anyone. He showed me all the best restaurants in Seattle and learned how to be a good lover and was one of the few people I met who had a genuine depth of caring. I knew we weren’t going to last, but I have no bad feelings left for him.

I let the next one fuck me without a condom because I didn’t care about myself anymore. I knew he was a player, charming and a little narcissistic, and I fell into his arms because his distance was familiar and the pain was comfortable.

Space here reserved for the sweet, blonde girl with the shriveled arm who called herself the female Johnny Cash.

There was the horror writer who called me his student and made me feel reduced in his arms. We spent months writing each other sweetened letters from a distance, and I took his online writing course. But he kissed too eagerly, too desperately. He treated me like something that could break, instead of a woman.

This space reserved for Christopher 1, who was sweet but entirely too worried about what I thought of him.

This space reserved for Christopher 2, the funeral director, who’d recently divorced his wife and was exploding in various ways.

There was Gina, who I was terrified of because of her desire to be close to me. She drunkenly told me she loved me the last time we met and danced for me to Portishead’s Glory Box because she said she wanted to seduce me. I always felt comfortable with her up until the moment our lips meshed together and I want to tell her that I’m sorry that I wasn’t someone who could love her better.

There are others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Does it matter?

Then there is Robert, but he doesn’t belong in this space. I could write an entire novel about Robert and never even touch the vastness that he’s inspired in me. In the first volume of Fuck What You Heard I redacted a love letter because I was a literary coward. In this volume, four years later, there will be no redacting. There will be no reducing.

I am terrified, but I refuse to be a coward any longer.

All I ever wanted was to be loved and understood, but none of them could give me the understanding that I desired.

I never found love in any of them, because it wasn’t to be found in them. It was to be found in me, but I was unaware of this, because I had created a vast wasteland where my heart should’ve been.

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