GIRDED

God, before I was formed, I was unworthy. And now that I have been formed, it is as if I had not been formed. I am like dust while I live, how much more so when I am dead. Here I am before You like a vessel filled with shame.

She lays there, half frozen, her mind racing against the improbability of what is happening. Having progressed so suddenly, so unexpectedly, she has had no time to process. She can’t decide what is happening or what she feels. But she knows that something isn’t quite right. The shock of his entry sends her mind back to sixteen, staring up at his ceiling. Her mind is wandering to biology class, the books she’s read and wants to read, the project they are supposed to be working on. She had agreed to this, but everything feels wrong. Why would he have been so insistent for this when they had just shared her first kiss six weeks ago? Will this finally make him happy, quiet his constant stream of criticism? Her mind fills with questions until the weight of her own thoughts brings her back to the present.

She speaks. She tells him of her ambivalence towards what happened. She shares her past and her fears of being broken. She admonishes him by sharing the pains that protect her heart. And he shares how he was recently tested for STDs; how his ex-girlfriend, now a lesbian, aborted his child; how he would love her even if she was fat or crippled. The conversation shifts from speaker to listener and she holds his pains against her own in a hope for reciprocity. Though the conversation never makes it back to what has happened in that hotel room, she has found favor for herself in her admonishment, her courageous act of speech. She gets dressed and kisses him goodbye.

That night, she sits silent in her driveway. The darkness distorts the lines of the familiar, blurring boundaries as she looks at the parking lot two doors down. She can see his car parked in the church lot seven years ago, waiting for her. His hands dig beneath her clothes, fingers slipping under the waist of her pants, searching for an opening. It was less of a question and more of an appeal, the delicate string of their bond tensed to breaking before she eased the tension by conceding her ground, allowing his hands to continue. She feels herself walking home, her mother’s white-gray pullover sweater not quite large enough to swallow her up with her fear and her shame, the imprint of his finger still inside her. She makes it home, to tonight.

She calls her friend to debrief and process the evening. As they speak, her friend’s periods turn to ellipses, the faint implication of a question. The three dots swell and grow heavier as they absorb her story until they drop soundlessly, one by one, splashing their question as they land. The droplets of the inquiry dampen the layer of her narrative, adding weight to the evening in an incomprehensible way. But without the full force of a true question to drench her story in truth, stripping her narrative of its protection to reveal the outlines of the pains of her soul through the sopping layers of her own words, she simply shakes off the droplets and forms the only response she can give. She opens her mouth to respond, and without the words to describe what has happened, her voice issues a defense.

That evening would be brought up many times over between them, but not the part that one would expect. It would instead be the mysterious and unexpected appearance of her most recent ex. As if his appearance at the beginning of the evening, his passing car backlit against the sunset sky, had cast a shadow over the following events, overshadowing her experiences of that night. In fact, the entirety of her story was lost among the unbalanced ledgers stacked high with his countless accounting and recounting of what she had done with whom and when. The red lines of his accusations threaded into the fabric of their marriage. Their marriage a patchwork of miscolored threads, the pale colors of her hidden pain shifting in delicate hues, almost indiscernible, to the overpowering colors of his control.

At her deepest depths, she believed in man’s natural impulse towards happiness. She believed that joy could be spread in the littlest details of life, and that self-acceptance could motivate others towards acceptance. These core beliefs had been frayed as she had untangled herself from her high school relationship, the snags in her beliefs causing her temporarily to mute her self-expression, to quiet her wardrobe in deference to his worldview. Though her beliefs would be revived and reinforced through experience and education, his words would echo forever in her ears “You can’t do that. That’s not how people work.” Seven years later, when she had pulled this memory down from where she had hidden it, had peeled back the layers of wrapping protecting it, had tracing the creases of her life along it’s contours, she had expected him to receive it gently cupped in both hands. She had waited for him to feel along the seams of the memory, nimble fingers at the ready to repair the weak spots. She wished for him to shake her memory out and dress her in her own beliefs, sturdy and fresh as they had been at sixteen. But instead, his busy hands felt along her gift for weak spots, picking it apart and harvesting the materials of her memory.

He was an artist of sorts, with an uncanny knack for splitting her threads, paring them back and teasing them loose enough to be able to dye them in his own choice of colors and reweave them to tell his own story. With the skill of a master weaver, he could knit the threads of her life into the cloth of his own comfort. The threads came, in part, from the unraveling of her own clothing. Each article of clothing was searched for stains of past or rips of indiscretion. His remarks bit into the seams of her style, unraveling her wardrobe and deteriorating her confidence. His reproach stripped the truths she used to gird herself with to protect against the harsh elements of the world. Though she might tug on a thread here or there, anxious to recollect her own experiences, she couldn’t free herself from his loom, the constant back and forth of his shuttle against the experiences of her life.

She stands before him, naked, waiting to be clothed. As he has stripped her of her story, so has he stripped her of her autonomy. He circumscribes her life, restricting the range of her motion, measuring closely the parameters of her freedom. The smothering safety of his embrace pushes her inwards. She feels like she is imploding from the weight of his reproach, his constant commentary on her words, appearance, behavior. She is restrained not by the shackles of his embrace, but by his words, looks and even his distance. Her mind feels another pair of arms, the physical embodiment of his control, encircling her, surrounding her. She calls out to her friends from the other side of the classroom where her friends eat lunch. She is separate from the rest. The ravine feels impassable, standing on the rocky shore of her teenage relationship longing for the opposite shore of warmth and friendship. But ownership is care, and she remains locked in his embrace.

For a few years, she had felt the nakedness of her spirit, the tatters of her beliefs and esteem the only protection against the magnanimous layering of his accusations against her. But without a mirror to see herself in truth, she had assumed that she wore the same clothes as him, but that the air around them was chilly. Surely he would never strip her of her protections only to gird himself against reproach. Surely it was only the external forces of their experience or the mental illness in her head that kept him safe and warm while she felt the chill of loneliness. Though the air nipped at her, stinging her through her meager protections, biting at her habits and hobbies, her humor and humanity, she clung to the warmth of the hope he offered her.

From her nakedness she produced life. She had felt it grow inside her, the tiny life providing warmth and comfort, purpose and companionship. Now separated from her creation, she saw through it’s eyes, perceived that she was naked, felt the chill of her condition. Her love for this life renewed her desire to live, gave her another sun to cling to, to weave her life around. She fled his heat, scalding against the nakedness of her skin. She hid. She nursed the warmth of the babe. She allowed herself to feel the tatters in her clothes, the rags she had been reduced to. She searched for a mirror to find the truth of her state. She wept with the fear of the unknown.

Later, Time would present her with the gift of sensitivity, a warm garment colored in a million shades of gray wrapped up in the tissue papers of Trauma. From this place of protection and safety, she would examine her experiences, picking up each part piece by piece. She would try hard to hold each one close and thank it for its part in her life. She would try to get rid of the parts that were no longer true and would return the rest to her wardrobe. She would piece together a patchwork quilt of her own self with delicate patterns of her passions and preferences, abilities and affinities. She would reclothe herself in her own truths, and walk out into the world ready to share from her own closet, ready to clothe the weak and lift the weary.

The pains of death encircled me, the confines of the grave have found me; trouble and sorrow I would find. Then I would invoke the Name: “Please, God, save my soul.” God protects the simple; I was brought low, but He saved me. Return, my soul, to your rest; for God has been kind to you. For You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before God in the lands of the living.