MAKING ROOM

ASHLEY C. FORD

BRETT AND I DATED FROM the time I was fourteen years old until just a few months after my twentieth birthday. It was my sophomore year of college, his too, but we went to separate schools, an hour and a half apart. Back in high school, I could easily walk to his house from mine, just a few streets over and one long street down the way. My home was a hostile place, and he could get to me fast if I needed him, and that made me feel safe. My family structure had never felt emotionally safe for me, and from my freshman year of high school on, Brett had been the person I clung to for stability and consistent, reliable love and affection. It was enough that I could be silly, sad, and angry with him and he did not leave me. In fact, most of the time, he really liked me. And I liked him too. That was more than enough.

Home was where I felt most unsure how I would be received. The floor of my mother’s house was littered with eggshells, and I took big steps. I heard and said things I should not have, even if they were true, and in my home, that eventually led to pain. As soon as I was old enough, I spent as little time in my mother’s home as possible, preferring to spend time with my grandmother. She was tough, but she loved me, and sometimes she even listened to me.

During high school, I spent most of my free time with Brett, and despite being only six months older than I was, he parented me in many ways. He taught me how to drive, helped me get my first car, and insisted I apply to and attend college.

Now about eighty miles apart, we connected via phone, which had become less and less enjoyable over the two years we’d been chatting into various receivers. Most of our conversations began like we were testing the waters around the other, searching for a warm place to enter, but they usually devolved into arguments, and I hated myself for not being able to pinpoint and fix the source of our troubles. I come from a blaming family. If something went wrong, or if something made you feel bad, there was always someone to blame. If you couldn’t find someone to blame outside of yourself, you were the problem, and you should punish yourself twice as hard as you would have punished an offender. I was used to being a problem. Blame was like an old coat I’d worn before, at least if you take away the warmth and fuzziness: familiar, and stitched into my badness by own hand.

One night, while my friends were downstairs celebrating a Super Bowl win for the Indianapolis Colts, Brett called. I thought he was calling about the game, but as I stood in the middle of a bedroom above them, in the dark, I found myself trying to hear Brett through his sobs.

“I’m so sorry, Ashley,” he said, his voice splitting when he said my name. “I think…I think I’m gay.” I held my breath.

When I was able to speak, I said, “Come talk to me.” I needed him to drive through his pain, into the night, and say what he’d just said while standing in front of me. In my memory, I made this request with calm and perfect poise. I imagine a steady voice elegantly inviting her own destruction into her home, rather than having it kick the door down. This is not the way it happened. A quick return to a journal I kept during that time includes this recounting of my behavior: I screamed at him, “Get here now! You can’t do this to me over the phone!”

He made the trip, but once he arrived, he couldn’t say the words. Instead, we cried, held each other, had sex, and lay side by side without going to sleep. It was the closest we’d been to each other’s bodies in weeks, and I cannot speak for him, but I had never felt more alone. The inside of my head spun and sputtered with all the weak hope of a broken dream. My desperation for him, for our relationship, a safe space in a life that felt like enduring chaos, ran from the deepest pools of my heart to my curling fingers, gripping the bottom of his undershirt in case he made a break for it in the night. I did not expect to be able to hold him back, but at least I’d be awake to watch him go.

He felt away from me even when we were as physically close as two people could be. Even though we had been physically intimate with each other for years, there had always been a noticeable distance between Brett and me, and it made me want to peer behind his eyelids when he closed them to me. I knew he was seeing and feeling things back there he didn’t want to tell me, and I wanted in. I shared so much of myself, I felt I deserved to be let in. How else would I know when he inevitably changed his mind about loving me? I believed he was too good to be the thing that was wrong with us, and soon he would see it was me. I just wanted to see it coming.

My fixation on our relationship was less about whether or not I wanted to be with Brett and so much more about proving to myself the issue was my fault, and most likely always had been. I was not a child who had never been told they were loved, but I was a child who didn’t recognize or receive that love unconditionally. I was watched and judged. I had always suspected I was unlovable, and assumed someday someone would admit it to my face. I believed Brett loved me enough to be kind about it when he eventually told me how terrible I was, and that was the most I hoped for.

We were kids trying to figure out how to be lovers, and the stakes were always higher than they should have been, right from the start. We dated for six years, an eternity among our peers, before he told me he was gay. That wasn’t what made me angry. The thing was, I had been counting on Brett to make the life I dreamed of possible, the one I hadn’t gotten in my childhood. The one I was convinced I couldn’t make on my own. It wasn’t that he was gay. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being gay. It’s that being gay meant he couldn’t be with me.

When he left the next morning, we hadn’t decided on any specific course of action, but my heart began to accept that we were over. We had plans that would never come to fruition, and they played out behind my closed, crying eyes for days, a tapestry of my confirmed failure. Our parting was no surprise to me, but our friends and family were shocked, and a few even seemed personally hurt by our decision. After Facebook told our current and former classmates we’d ended things, a girl I’d known since middle school stopped in her tracks upon seeing me and wailed, “Ashley! What happened?! Not you and Brett!”

The breakup came right before college finals, and though I was sick in my sadness, I made it to every single class and ended the semester with my best grades yet. Now I was just waiting to go home, sit on the couch with my grandmother, work four different jobs, and try to make the best of what was beginning to look like a life that had lost its potential. I had been following my boyfriend’s lead for six years because I didn’t want to lead myself, and now I was alone.

To make matters worse, Brett was my co-worker at one of my jobs. Before we broke up, we’d both signed on to help our former marching band director with the incoming band members. Yes, I worked with my now ex-boyfriend at eight o’clock in the morning, five days a week, for an entire summer. We were cordial, and even hung out outside of work a few times, though less so as it became increasingly awkward. Brett really wanted to be friends, and I really didn’t want to be by myself.

The night Brett came to my dorm room, the night he told me he was gay, there was a moment when I tried to leave. My clothes started to feel tight, and I felt like my circulation was being cut off, and I wanted to run into the hallway for air, but Brett fell to the floor, grabbed my leg, and said, “Please don’t go.” He had been holding on to me for six years. He liked me. I was his best friend. He was trying so hard to love me, and had been for so long. The sex was a goodbye—and, incidentally, the best we’d ever had. There is something different about the way the body moves when people tell each other the truth. This was my first real heartbreak, and it only hurt so bad because while he left me, he begged me not go.

One evening, after leaving one of my four jobs for the day and using my iron will to not call or text Brett, I decided to spend a little time with my grandmother. We sat across from each other on twin couches while I curled up with a fresh bag of chocolate chip cookies and hit play on Diary of a Mad Black Woman for the two millionth time (at least) that summer. My grandmother enjoyed this film, but after a few viewings she was a little less than enthused to be watching it once again. She pinned me from the corner of her eye.

“Girl, you must be hurting real bad,” she said. I ignored the comment.

Two weeks earlier, she had said to me, “I hate that you and Brett broke up. You know, you’ll probably never find anybody that’ll treat you that well again.” I had long ago learned that tact was not her strong suit, and so I tended to avoid, as much as humanly and respectfully possible, talking to her about my romantic life. With a mouthful of chocolate chip goodness and eyes set on the television screen, I gave a quick nod, already dreading the lecture that was surely to follow. My grandmother loved to tell people about themselves, and I might have been her favorite person to get together.

“You know, you shouldn’t let yourself be bitter,” she said.

“I’m not bitter, Grandma,” I said. “Brett and I are still friends.”

“You are bitter. You’re mad at him. You’re mad at yourself. You want to punish everybody, but you’re too nice for that, so the only person you’re punishing is you. That’s why you eat cookies that don’t make you feel good, you don’t try to do anything with yourself before you leave the house, and you watch these sad-ass movies all the time.”

“I’m not bitter, Grandma.”

“Whatever. Just know that being bitter is swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. You’re not killing your body, but you are killing your spirit.”

I stayed quiet and kept watching the movie, trying to seem unaffected by her words, and probably failing. I didn’t want to be mad at Brett or scared of myself, and I didn’t want to keep watching this movie over and over until I died. I didn’t want to be bitter. I didn’t want my grandmother to be right, and I didn’t want to prove her right. And then I asked myself a question I hadn’t asked myself in a long time: What do you want? I’d stopped being a theater kid so that I could be more practical. I’d changed my college major four times already. I’d had countless jobs, taken a range of classes, and overworked myself trying to get closer to everything I wanted, and I didn’t know what that was. I’d been expecting Brett to tell me or show me. I hadn’t trusted myself to know what I wanted, and now I was afraid I’d forgotten how.

Four days later, I quit the job I was working with Brett two weeks early and went back to school. I decided to spend what was left of my summer finding out what made me happy. I took long walks in my favorite park, browsed used bookstores for paperbacks I’d loved as a kid, and listened to my favorite music turned up as loud as I wanted whenever I got into my car.

One day I used a new camera to begin taking nude portraits of myself. In those photos, I found a beauty I hadn’t known lived right here, in me, and on this skin. I’d only been made to feel beautiful by a look or a compliment from Brett, maybe even having my face caressed by the same hand that played music in a way that made it zip from the top to the bottom of my spine. But now, seeing a photo of myself, my eyes staring back at me, I saw beauty. I whispered to myself, “It’s you, girl. It’s all you.”

I was still me. No part of me had walked away with Brett, and there was no reason to blame or punish myself for being on my own. More importantly, I didn’t want to do that to myself. I’d felt split apart inside, but all the pieces were here, within me. In the end, when I thought I’d run out of places to look, I found my broken heart had been sewn together by own hand. My hand, alone. I belonged to and was led by no one but myself. Finally, I began to trust myself to be on my own side.