Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called How to Disappear and Never Be Found? You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying. You already knew your father was morbid but assumed he was as happy as he was constitutionally capable of being, and that was some comfort. That this suggests otherwise is something you would rather not focus on.
These days, the tables have turned. You’re the one who’s distracted while your mother tries to talk. You’re the one who thinks fathers just need to get through their father problems. Now you always fall asleep before your little sister—you drop her at the subway stop and watch her disappear belowground. You hear she’s a great dancer from friends who run into her when she’s out at night.
You’ve always suffered from dissociation. Whether it’s clinical, as has been suggested by at least two therapists, or willful (“Are you listening to me?” your father is always saying. “I can feel you dissociating again.”), you can’t say, but that syrupy terror that characterized summer nights as a nine-year-old sometimes lasts for days now.
“You know that thing, when you’re having sex, but instead of feeling it you can see yourself from above, like you’re watching a movie?” you ask your friend Jemima one day as she’s painting you nude on her couch.
“Uh, no,” she says. “And that’s really sad. Have you talked to anyone about that?”
Everyone tells you that you look like your aunt. You have the same nose, the same butt, and you hug the same way, like an overcompensating koala. One day she tells you a story about when she was first dating her husband. She knew she wasn’t his only girlfriend, but she liked him anyway. One evening he went out to get beer and, when she heard him return, she pretended to be asleep. Just to see what he would do. Would he cover her with a blanket? Would he walk around like she wasn’t there, make an important phone call? Would he watch her sleep?
You think this must run in the family. You tried this just last week, with the person you are dating, and the results were disappointing.
The fact is, since that first blow job, you haven’t gotten any more comfortable with sex. Every sexual encounter has felt like a first visit with a new general practitioner. Awkward, burdensome, a little chilly. Eventually you learn some buzzwords and positions that make the whole thing flow more easily, and you always go into it with the best intentions of not watching yourself from the doorframe like a not-very-incognito detective.
But you are still running away.
One version of running away is to take a very long shower while someone you’re pretending to like sits on their bed watching trailers on the computer.
Another version is getting a UTI and, after hours of strained urination in a bathroom the size of a bucket, you slip out wearing just your nightgown, back to your parents’ apartment, where your mother has set out antibiotics and cranberry juice but has gone back to bed.
Another version is calling a cab in a haze of pills and getting home at 6:00 A.M. only to realize you’ve left all your valuables at the home of a guy who doesn’t wake up until two and can’t be summoned from his narcotic sleep by the buzzer.
Another version is sneaking off to meditate in the morning, then getting back into bed like you never slipped out. Another version is just meditating.
Other things you can try: Saying you’re sick. Saying you fell down in the street because of impractical shoes. Saying work ran late. Writing your head off. Saying you’re sick again. Saying you’re a person who gets sick a lot. Going radio silent, then saying you lost your cell phone somewhere in your bed. Going to work and staying there all day long. Listening to a Taylor Swift song about dancing in the rain. Not jogging. Never jogging.
Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don’t want to run from. At work you’ll realize that you’ve spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things.
And one day you’ll get out of bed to pee, and someone will say, “I hate it when you leave,” and you will want to rush back. You’ll think, Stuff like this only happens to characters played by Jennifer Garner, right? but it’s happening to you and it keeps happening even when you cry or misbehave or show him how terrible you are at planning festive group outings. He seems to be there without reservation. He pays attention. He listens. He seems to want to stay.