bittersweet knowing

One of the first ladies’ retreats I went to at my mom’s church changed the way I felt out the world. Even before I’d left the campground that year, my brain felt overstuffed. Journals were quickly filled with poems and thoughts; the world spread out before me like something curiously kind and all things seemed softly possible. I still treasure the gold-tinged memories of that early voyage, in the bittersweet way of a first love.

Going that year wasn’t easy. The church was new-to-me, the people unknown, and I really, really didn’t like strangers. Tyler, where the campground was located, was not even a dot on the map in my head; it was a name mentioned with roses, but it could have been in Canada for all I knew of it.

A few months before the retreat, I’d had a disjointing experience. My boyfriend at the time, Matthew, and I were very contentedly in love. He’d come down for a visit, to meet my mom and show how just generally cool a person he was. He’d hung out with my brother, played handyman around my mom’s house. We’d had all the talks any one person has to have with another when there’s going to be more than coffee involved, and we liked each other more at the end of them than we did before.

I loved him, and he made me feel… beautifully normal. So I asked if he’d be ok with us being more physically intimate. He blushed furiously, stammered a little and agreed. The closer the time of his visit it was, the more good and right our decision felt to me. I was excited. He was kind that night, thinking turning off the lights would make me more comfortable. I was touched, and it was lovely… up to the point that I was jerked back into a vile, formerly-repressed memory.

All I could see was a different set of thighs, different colored hair. There was suddenly a different taste in my mouth. My body seemed distant, not at all mine. It didn’t fit right, and I couldn’t breathe. My vision narrowed, my throat closed up. I felt like I was drowning in darkness, but disappearing into it at the same time. Thoughts scattered like marbles on tile, and the only one I could hold on to was, ‘He tastes different from Daddy….’

I wanted to cry or scream or react, but I didn’t know how to not mar this moment for Matt. Ironically, the significant drop in body temperature and subsequent panic attack took care of me needing to talk. He was kind, so sweetly asking me what happened, and I hated the words I had to use.

We broke up not too long after that. He tried to understand, but I just felt like I’d smeared ugliness along his pale soul-skin.

Less than a month later, I went to retreat. During one of the group conversations my mom facilitated, it came out that my dad had abused me. I still see that brunette girl sitting on the blonde pew, and remember thinking, Dear God. Now everyone knows.

I should have felt isolated in that quiet chapel full of pretty women with suburban lives and ambitions. The sun shining through the glass windows should have been ironic, because my skin was cool and nothing chills like being the other in a room of same.

But it was ok. I was ok. Not perfect, not solid. But someone reached over the pew and just wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

I was shaken and completely exposed. But I was held, too. Since then, when it got dark in my head or when I started to think God is cruel for this life He chose for me, I remember the pretty church lady that held me while my soul cracked in public.

I was dirty and scared and she knew. That chapel, that hug, that moment was my retreat.

I wanted to tell the world, but I didn’t know that anyone would believe something so sweet still happens in this world. But I knew, and sometimes, just knowing is enough.