left me a fool

Everybody loves you, and they want to know your story, you go riding out a mystery, concealed in all your glory, but when it comes to flesh and bones, you remind me of shallot, only made of shadows, even though you're not. I remember how I spent all my energy and time with affected conversation, trying to pry inside your mind; you are as beautiful as truth, and as empty as a shell, and i came to you one night, and it make me feel like hell.

Oh, to reach through all your surface, just to find an empty pool, and to suffer all your pride, as I lay down by your side, and you swallowed up my heart and left me a fool, left me a fool.

Everybody loves a hero, an image to create, antithesis of everything inside ourselves we hate, but you'd better close your eyes when it's time for them to die, because you'd hate to think the life you'd build upon them was a lie.

Oh, to reach through all your surface, just to find an empty pool, and to suffer all your pride, as i lay down by your side, and you swallowed up my heart and left me a fool, left me a fool.

I resign myself to silence. i will never blow your cover, no one ever has to know who the hero took for lover, but it comes to mind as you blaze on as brilliant as a star, how many you've left behind, how many casualties there are.

Oh, to reach through all your surface, just to find an empty pool, and to suffer all your pride, as i lay down by your side, and you swallowed up my heart and left me a fool, left me a fool.

--"Left Me a Fool" by the Indigo Girls





I sometimes wonder how long it's going to take to exorcise the presence of the one who taught me my first lessons of love...and how long, if ever, until those lessons are undone.  He still loiters in the dark corners of my life, so close and so far--ages away in my mind and as close as every heartbeat.  Memories that I've long repressed are flooding me lately.  I can't make them stop; they flash when I least expect it.  His hands clasping mine, lightly stroking my arm when no one was watching, staring intently at me during church meetings and Sunday school, telling me what he could and could not do for and to me, the kinds of sexual fulfillment he could provide...my insides tighten and lurch, and tears spring to my eyes, unwelcome and unstoppable.  The idea of being loved was so intoxicating that I blinded myself to everything I didn't want to see and went along for the ride in his twisted fantasies.  At 16, I felt so invisible that the possibility of ever being loved for who I was seemed remote at best.  Then he became a confidant during a time when I had big metaphysical and emotional questions, and he became an authority in my life.  I loved him, I am ashamed to say.  As uncomfortable and awkward as I felt in his presence sometimes, I wanted someone to see me as pretty; despite the terribly violating things he said, he also said the kinds of things I needed so desperately to hear.  I was willing to believe our lies, both his and mine, for the sake of being seen, wanted, and loved in return.

Several days a week I visited him between the time school let out and the time I went to my after school job.  One afternoon, he took my hand and interlocked it with his, my youthful, nail-bitten fingers between his large, wrinkled ones.  Normally, we talked incessantly.  That day, we were quiet.  He had a pacemaker or some other cardiac contraption that we could hear ticking in his chest.  In my head and heart, I was in love with him.  But when I looked at our hands, I felt disgusted.  It was so wrong, and I couldn't undo the wrongs or find a way to make them right.  It was too late.  He had divulged so much (truth or fiction, even he probably couldn't say) of his own life story--the suicide attempts, the lifelong battle with depression--that I really believed that trying to stop it or trying to hold him accountable could end with him taking his own life.

When it was over, after his wife found out but before my parents did, I tried to make peace with his wife.  The conversation went as well as could be expected; I tried so hard to make things right, never understanding it was not my responsibility to make amends.  Ironically, I felt like I had to restore my honor.  His wife said, "He's just sick, honey.  He doesn't know what he's saying."  He's just sick.  He doesn't know any better than to sexually harass teenage girls--doesn't have a better way to feel like a real man than to take away their self-confidence and their confidence in the religious leaders they should be able to trust.  He just doesn't know, at the age of 63, any other way to bolster his damaged ego than to talk dirty to a high-schooler about ways of life she can't even understand.

What he doesn't know continues to haunt me; the X-rated e-mails are burned into my photographic memory.  After a decade of not speaking to him, his memory catches me off-guard just when I think I can handle intimacy again.  It slithers into my heart when I want to trust someone and constricts me with a memory of how untrustworthy my own instincts are.  I am 28 until these memories hit me...then, a grief-stricken Cinderella who never made it to the ball, the clock rewinds.  Suddenly, I am 16 again, believing the lies and blaming myself for neither being able to help him or stop him.  He was the beginning, the one who taught me that I am unworthy of real love so that I could never tell the difference between real and false love.  In the name of Jesus he claimed to love me.  Ordained by Heaven, he fooled me into thinking that there was a possibility of being seen and loved.  Now, being seen and loved is equated in my heart with manipulation, violation, and fear.  And eleven years later, here I am: still unable to process what happened, to scream louder than the memories, or to internalize that I am worthy of love, that others are worthy of trust, and that it can be safe to be seen. 

I don't say any of this to be melodramatic--I say it because I don't say what I need to when I need to.  And I say it because I am so well loved that I fear I cannot accept or return it in kind.  My life has been blessing upon blessing with a few notable blips.  This is just a blip with a long history, and it's taken a decade to really delve into the details of what happened and how it has affected me.  And I know that I can't truly exorcise his memory until I am honest.  One word, one tear, one day at a time.

For you, may your life be filled with love, the respect of your heroes, and soft places to land if pedestals tumble.  Blessings,

c.