She likes attention.
Was that all it was with me?
Perforated paper, torn clean—
just a strip in the binding.
A reminding—
of notes exchanged
when we were strangers
in a foreign land, sharing
the same mother tongue—
just familiar noise, warm spit,
slick on the pages
wrapped around me.
But I like attention.
Maybe that’s all it was for me.
"I pray that the little stones that I put into the mosaic of my life may make a worthwhile pattern. I pray that I may persevere and so find harmony and beauty."
I was an only child. I suppose I still am, in a way. Without many friends, I spent most of my time watching TV, reading books, and studying how people acted. Not really people—characters is more accurate. In all that solitude of my formative years, filled with fictional stories and fictional lives, I suppose at some point I split.
I knew, fundamentally, at some deep inner level, that I was not like my classmates—my peers—who so easily befriended, so easily talked, so easily moved through hallways and classrooms, who so easily completed assignments without a disdainful questioning: Why? Why am I being asked to do this? This worksheet. This project.
In elementary school, during a unit on Native Americans, we were tasked with choosing a “totem animal” to represent our family and explaining why. My father was in prison for child molestation. My mother was absent, working full-time and going to college full-time. I did not give two fucks what my family’s totem animal could or would be. The girl next to me chose wolves because they stick together and are pack animals. I don’t care. I told my teacher as much, loudly. I don’t care. Can I choose nothing?
I was difficult. I was a difficult child. I have no doubt the teacher planned to discuss this in some third-grade parent–teacher conference my mom did not attend.
As much as I felt different from my peers—loathsomely different—I also felt desperate for their acceptance. I still do.
For as long as I can remember, I have lived a fractured life.
There is my “real life.” Right now, that includes my marriage, my job, my friends. It’s tangible. It’s objective. Others would confirm that how I perceive it is how they perceive it. If you showed them a picture of my husband, they would say, “That’s Caroline’s husband.” I even have a paper from Madison County stating such.
Then there is my “inner world.” Mostly fiction, built on a handful of small moments I’ve twisted through funhouse mirrors and stretched again and again, like taffy. This is why, for years—years—I believed myself in love with someone who, at most, would call me a friend. If you showed a picture of them, others might say, “That’s someone Caroline knows.” Not even friend. And this is in a post-social media world where everyone you know is called one.
It was obsessive. Scanning pictures for hints of who they were, what they liked, what we could possibly have in common. Looking for the small gaps where I could fit—like a scarf tied around the neck at the last minute, technically present but not necessary. Something that could be removed without consequence.
I filled those gaps however I could. I am just checking social media again. I am just liking a post. I am just sending a thumbs-up emoji. I am just the sideline screaming for attention I know I will not get. Not really.
It’s impossible to completely ignore someone screaming from the sidelines, and on some level these crushes—I'll use the word for lack of a better one—encouraged my indelible vulnerability. I’m not completely embarrassed. As a split person, I know that while internally I crossed too many lines—drowned in my lack of emotional boundaries—externally it likely read as nothing more than normal interaction. A moment of poor judgment. A brief impulse. An awkward phrase.
I just don’t really know how to human. It would be easier if I could follow a script all the time. Even inside my head.
So I pull myself back from the past and return to the present. I had a few rough weeks. Rough is the only word that fits. Externally, my life is a well-oiled machine by design. At most, there was a brief hiccup. But internally, I was face-to-face with the stark reality of who I pretend to be.
I pretend to be a romantic. I genuinely believed this was about desire.
Yearning. Want. Even need.
But, it was fear all along.
Fear of being alone.
At fourteen, I discovered that while I wasn’t very good at making friends, I was plenty good at attracting boyfriends. By then I had developed a 38DDD chest, and with my childhood training, I knew how to feign sexuality. I had seen enough movies to play a top-tier manic pixie dream girl to any guy who was, fundamentally, not in my league. Two to five levels below me. That was what made it easy.
And all those guys came with families who loved me.
I don’t know what it’s really like to be alone anymore. Not since I was fourteen. I have always had my left foot in the next relationship as I pulled my right foot out of the last.
I need to be frank. I actually like my life. My real life. More than the pretend ones I tried to plan with these crushes. And that scares me.
At seventy-four, I can assume my husband will die before me. Though arguments can be made that, based on family history, I may die first. Or maybe genetics don’t mean anything. Yeah. Science isn’t real.
Sometimes, the idea of dying before my husband is comforting. I would never be faced with being alone.
So where am I going with all this? I wasted time, energy—even money—on crushes in the vague hope that I could partially set something up now, in preparation for when my husband dies, so I could minimize my time alone. To prove that I could still find and trap someone. That someone other than him could love me. Whatever. Whatever!
I did not care whether this was wanted by my crush. The more I reflect on what I once framed as harmless, juvenile fun, the more I see how selfish, self-serving, and manipulative it was. In fear of losing what I have right now in some imagined future, I turned my back on my real life to force something that was not meant to be—forcing my will, psychically, onto another person, with complete disregard for their feelings and for my husband’s.
I was running from a future that looked like my lonely childhood.
Let as get real. If I genuinely wanted these people....I would have left my husband. I would have considered it. Leaving my husband for them was never on the table. It wasn't in the room. It wasn't outside the door.
It wasn't a thing.
This blog is one of the few spaces where I have allowed all pieces of myself to run wild. And run wild they have—feral, in all directions. I don’t delete things, but I don’t want this to be the only place where I am fully myself anymore.
I believe my inner world can—and should—fit into my external world. That I don’t need to attach myself to random people in some parasocial emotional contingency plan. That my time, energy, and obsession can be devoted to those who are devoted to me, now.
Ignore the future. I’ll probably die in eleven years anyway. My husband will probably live another twenty. I can’t keep living in contingency plans. I can’t build a life on fear.
A life built on fear can never feel whole.
A life built in fantasy will never feel real.
I am taking a break from this blog. Not forever. A break—to give myself time to weave what I share here into my real life. A break from social media so I only see my real world: the dinner my husband made, the mortgage paid, the air in my lungs, the shampoo I like, the ritual and flow of our days together, the small laughs and inside jokes.
I have faith in the possibility of a real world I am fully in.
Last night, while cleaning the kitchen after dinner, I thought about what my life would be like if I had never met you.
It is strange how much space you once occupied, considering how little remains. Had we never met, almost nothing would be different. I would have eaten the same dinner, cleaned the same kitchen, used the same soap in the same bathroom, watched the same movie, and gone to sleep in the same bed beside the same man.
Did knowing you change me at all? The conversations, the intimacy—where did they go? And you—are you any different? Would your life look the same if I had never existed in it? I assume it would.
I’ll never know. I’m awake, my sheets just as fresh as if we had never met.
Can you keep a secret?
It begins with shoes.
When I was in kindergarten
I had a favorite pair—
white knockoff Keds
with Rudolph painted on
in cheap craft paint,
probably from a church sale.
I wore them nearly every day.
No one said anything.
Not when they were out of season,
not in the rain,
not when my toes bunched
painfully at the tips.
Then one morning
they hurt too much to wear.
We bought replacements that day.
I cried and cried.
Who could have guessed
a child would outgrow her shoes?
If an adult had intervened,
I might have worn them
just three weeks—Christmas only.
Instead, my pinky toes still curl
like lotus feet, bound
to the shape of those shoes.
And you—
like them, I loved you too long,
until the hurt made me
discard you at once.
Still, I carry you:
the spark of what once fit.
You are a pinky toe
curled in
