I hide in plain sight and make life harder for her because I love her.
I want to protect her from the others. I make sure that she doesn’t say or do the wrong thing. It’s awful when I let her do things impulsively. Shame feels different for me. For her, its white-hot heat slowly rising from her stomach to her forehead. For me, I get burned alive. Scorched. I’m protecting her, yes, and myself. Call me selfish, but I need to survive inside of her. Otherwise, they’ll all know.
She’s a freak.
I cause her to do things, so others don’t know. I keep her quiet, enveloped in a frozen state of thinking and thinking and thinking, until everyone else around her has moved on. I make her doodle so she’s too preoccupied to even consider speaking. I just don’t want her to embarrass herself. If she’s quiet, she’s unseen. She’s safe. Unremarkable, so she cannot be remarked.
I keep her from looking at mirrors. Because I see myself too. I see how ugly I am. How I bring her down.
It’s necessary. It has to be.
I remind her of shameful moments to make her never forget. To remind her that she’ll never be like them, and they’ll never see her.
The time she tried to flirt with the middle school boy who looked like Kurt Cobain. He asked her, “Were you talking to me?”
When she went to her first party and only asked people about school. Grave realizations of assignments missed, and flunked tests were littered throughout every conversation she inserted herself in.
There was also the barn party where she drank too much and tried to kiss her best friend, who shoved her so hard she fell in urine-soaked grass. No one wanted to drive her home, and it was too cold for her to abandon her piss-jacket. Thus, she was forced to endure.
She’s also struggled to remain professional. One time at work she was the loudest laugher in a room full of her colleagues. Every time she giggled it felt like the whole room was looking at her.
I replay this one moment for her in times of quiet solitude, so she remembers.
It was a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago. She wore her homemade jumpsuit that showed off her 24-year-old body like the beacon of hope it was. Newly overconfident after breaking up with her then-Brony boyfriend, she proceeded to get roaring drunk.
When she drinks, I get a little quieter. I’m dulled by the alcohol rushing through her veins, but that only causes me to scream louder. She was talking to this girl with box-dyed auburn hair she didn’t really know about being an introvert. She over-enthusiastically explained to the fake redhead how much she loves watching Netflix in bed, as if no one had ever tried that before. Red replied, “You’re so goofy” and offered her a bump of coke in the bathroom. She agreed, thinking that she had won the extroversion Olympics.
She followed Red and her blurry friends to the cramped bathroom, suddenly sobered by the sight of actual and physical white powder lines on Red’s compact mirror. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know these women, every fiber of her being was screaming to flee, including me. But that carnal desire to be accepted, to be included, to do something and in exchange of being deemed ‘cool’ by the ‘cool kids’ was all she needed to shove a rolled-up dollar bill into her nose and snort. Her vision wavered and shifted, and I couldn’t see myself in the finger-printed and powdered mirror.
She then proceeded to tell her temporary best friends about me. A mistake that she’s only made once before under the influence of another drug. She wanted them to call her “cool” again, or even “goofy” but instead they looked at each other.
This look is one she has seen countless times in her life. It’s the look that her big brother or big sister do when they need to reassure each other that “ugh, god, she’s doing it again” or when the friends she made in her Jane Austen class need to re-ignite their telepathic acknowledgement that “this chick is SO weird.” That look is what she needs to see, time and time again. It’s up to me to remind her that she is nothing to them. She told them everything about me, about when I first came into her life, how I keep her quiet. She told them all about how she wishes she could get rid of me. That if there was a pill she could swallow to expel me from her body, she would take a whole bottle.
It used to hurt more than shame when she would even think those things about me. I’m here to protect her because I love her. I remind her of these moments to keep her in her place, her safe place. If she isn’t safe, or content, or happy, or quiet, then she is lost. I can’t lose her to them. They’ll never understand her like I do because she is me and I am her.
And I love her.
After her coke-fueled rant about how much she hates me, her besties left to go do coke in another bathroom at another New Year’s Eve party before the ball dropped. She was alone again, too energetic to understand what was going on, and too angry to fix her amped-up brain. I kept screaming for her to leave, to order an Uber home, to be alone. But feeling alone in a room full of people was the best thing that could happen to her.
This low was what she needed to ring in the New Year. The shame that bubbled up inside her was excruciating, for me and for her. But it’s necessary. My pain doesn’t matter, only her pain that wrenches her heart closed. I need her to be sealed off in a way where it is only me, and her. If that means being on fire, so be it.
I just wish she knew. She doesn’t really need them. Not when she has me looking out for her. The more she tries to be with them, the harder she will fall when they find out.