‘You are a petty, selfish, manipulative, disciplined psycho bitch—’

‘You are a man,’ I say. ‘You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man.’

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Just last winter, a feminist spent evenings in conversation with a man whose voice fell across her like rain on tinted glass. She used to sit on the windowsill of his bathroom: one foot jammed in the wooden frame, flicking cigarette ash out onto the street below. They would share stories until the sun glinted above the horizon, and as they talked, he would run his fingers along the leg that was keeping her steady–not the smooth expanse of inner thigh, where his own pleasure might be found, but the strip of flesh that ran from knee to ankle: the shins that she had not bothered to shave since long before she met him.

Now, when he talks about his untidy love affair with this not-quite-woman, this feminist, when he makes jokes about her body–does he remember how tenderly he once learned to love it? When he laments how demanding she was, does he think of all of the times she scraped her knees against his bedroom floor, because she did not want him to have to ask? When he calls her cold, or hard, or unfeeling, does he recall how often she thawed and then scattered like a rainstorm, felt everything crash over her at once: elation, despair, desire, grief? When he speaks of her madness, her instability, has he forgotten how he, himself, used to break apart in incoherent ecstasy at the feel of his body beneath hers? When he says that he could not provide support for a woman who left half of her mind in a hospital, does he remember the nights he spent telling her every fear and regret: laying the weight of his head and his words upon her bare chest? When he deems his time with her a mistake, does he not realize that she is a universe, alive and unfolding? Does he not understand that the precious months of her life were not, could never be reduced to, so small a thing as one man’s regret?

Once, she was a living, breathing person to him. Now she is nothing but one more reason not to date a feminist with illnesses and ideals; unshaved legs and half-shaved hair; freakish hopes and tarot cards; perfectly positioned indifference and woefully misplaced love. She is a cautionary tale for him to tell to other men.

Until recently, I erected the near-entirety of my being on the foundation of affection that I never received: walking some inane tightrope between woman and man, gay and straight, sane and raving, narcissistic and self-loathing, unabashed and ashamed, alive and not exactly so. Of course, then, in writing the disappointments of the summer, the specter of my first, last love, the oldest memory that I have, weighs inevitably upon me: the man who used to tell me stories, fill my mind with visions of a life beyond what I had known.

When I say that my father taught me nothing but apathy, why do I not mention that I learned to read with my head on his shoulder? When I reflect again and again upon why I no longer speak to him, do I ever stop to remember the long hours spent in reverential silence, in car rides from cities to mountains to shorelines, while he played old rock albums, and taught me to really hear them? When I swear that I never needed his approval, have I forgotten playing the piano while golden afternoons passed like arpeggios–hand over hand, hour over hour–and I checked the mirror to catch glimpses of him listening in the other room?

If you are the sort of person that I am, then you will already know that it is not easy to love men, in any way at all, without impaling yourself upon them in the process. In fact, it is pretty fucking close to impossible. This does not mean that the converse is easy, that loving women is easy–because of course it isn’t. It can’t be. As a matter of fact, one of the cruelest things in my entire life was done to me, this November, by women that I loved. But still, the question remains. How can you love and trust men (or love and trust yourself) when every tongue you allow between your teeth could hurl the words “crazy bitch” at you, cut you to size, reduce you to your sex and your psychosis in half a second?

The problem is, it never seems as if it is going to be that way. For us, every new touch seems more promising, more thrilling, a kind of Russian roulette: get bored, or fall in love. We cling to the hope that surely, surely, this most recent effort will not be in vain. Maybe this one will be gentler, maybe this one will respect me, maybe this one will understand why I am so messy-guarded-demanding-impassioned, maybe this one will just give a damn, maybe–

But time and time again, we are left empty-handed, heavy-hearted. Do we know, somewhere deep down, that it is always going to end like this? That some worlds are too far apart to be bridged, that some people are not meant to meet at all–because one will inevitably go back to her words and solitude, and the other to his stories of that bitch he used to know, and neither will mention how the smirking man, and the half-mad girl who loved him, were each once the best part of the other’s half-formed world?