Tapferkeit

(a story from the ‘Rebirth’ pantheon)

“We could have been so good-natured/if you'd relented when I'd insisted” –The Shins, ‘Girl on the Wing’

September 18th, 2005

I’m thinking about nothing in particular. My skin feels rather dry, but I don’t have the energy to get up and get a bottle of lotion out of my purse. I don’t really have the energy for anything right now. I’m sort of halfway watching TV, but it’s not anything I care about, just an episode of Mythbusters. Last night my sister and I decided to watch America’s Next Top Model, for lack of anything better to do. But I left in the middle to play the flute. I really can’t get in to much of anything right now. Except maybe government class. That keeps me going.

I could lie here for the rest of the day though and be content. I’m with Bart, and I saw him on Friday and Saturday too. There’s nothing left to do that we haven’t already done except meet my family later on to go hiking, like we’ve done before. When we go, I like to feel like some sort of wilderness woman, some sort of brave adventurer. I play these games in my head all the time. I’m a writer, what can I say? The slightest thing can lead to inspiration.

It’s warm and sunny outside; it’s boiling hot in here, which is why I’m naked. Bart’s family are all gone—somewhere. I don’t know where.

“Do you want to have sex?” he asks me.

“No,” I say quietly, not really thinking, just wanting to relax. We’ve already made love twice today, once upstairs and once in the hot tub. I’m satisfied and tired and not in the mood for that right now. I just want today to be like yesterday, when we fell asleep together on his bed.

“Come on,” he says.

I shake my head. But he doesn’t listen. He comes on top of me, slides inside of me, and smiles. His face seems to ask: You want it now, don’t you?

But I still don’t. I do nothing. I don’t think about anything except that I want this to stop. I lie there. “Stop,” I say. “Just stop.”

For some reason he listens. He stops, pulls out, apologizes. And I look at the smooth, seemingly innocent face of the man who I believe loves me and can’t believe this has just happened.

In the woods, later, we somehow end up far ahead of my family, somehow finishing a two-mile hike in twenty minutes. We sit in the open trunk of my car for the next half-hour or so and I identify all the cars that drive into the parking lot. And we talk, we laugh, we act more like friends than lovers.

This is exactly what I wanted earlier. Had I gotten it I could have remembered this day as one of our last good ones. Instead, I have to mark today as the day when everything truly began going downhill.

“There are things we never will define...” –The Shins, Sphagnum Esplanade

Many times over the past year I’ve had people tell me I’m brave. And I take that as the greatest of compliments I could be given for reasons I cannot explain here. My wisdom teeth are removed? Suddenly I’m brave. I guide my family through a blizzard on skis? Brave. Drive home from work in the pouring rain or snow? Brave. Break up with Bart in order to not get caught in his dissolving life? Brave.

But the one thing they don’t and will never know about might be the one thing that could either mark me as an even braver woman, or could make me once more a giant coward.

I know Bart is that coward. In a poem I wrote in February I called him “Io’s true coward”—Io because she was one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs and because Jupiter is the ruling planet of Sagittarius, his sign. There are other reasons why this phrase was included in my poetry, but once again they’re unexplainable here.

I choose to believe that living through this pain makes me braver. I used to think that to tell anyone about this I would have to be under the influence of alcohol—but that isn’t true. I told Devin, my new boyfriend, over the phone on our seven-month anniversary when I was completely sober.

Braver… but crueler. My ex-best friend Megan is now dating Bart… and she refuses to believe me when I tell her what he did. This so-called feminist believes one of the worst liars I know over me, who remembers everything. And since I can’t abide by this, I have severed ties with her. The pain of hearing her call him gentle is too much for me.

When you know the truth, and when the truth is evil, lies bring pain. Cowardice brings pain. And I refuse to live another moment of my life as a coward.