Look at me
Article by Alexis Cornachio, art by Lucy Kramer
He was much older than I was. Or at least it felt like it. I tiptoed along the tightrope that was the age gap hanging precariously between us. When I would lose my balance on the line, because I thought it would make for a funny joke or something, I’d mention the monumental 4-year age gap between us, and he would immediately correct me. He would say, “It's 3 and a half years.” Like the “half” that he was adding and simultaneously taking away made the world of a difference. He also liked correcting me. He was probably right anyways; he was much older than I was.
I was never interested in any of the boys from my high school. Because I could never imagine them being interested in me. That summer between my middle school years and the uncharted high school territory, I was deeply self-conscious of my body. I had grown into a woman with a speed unrivaled by most of my peers. I was jealous of their flat chests and how they didn’t tower over all the boys our age like I did, like a monster. I had gotten my period at the age of 11, and still, at the 8th grade moving up ceremony years later, I had not figured out how to use a tampon. I walked at the ceremony in a quick step, with my shoulders hunched forward, my hair long, distinctly covering the right side of my face. My 14-year-old self should have been buzzing with excitement. The true end of her middle school years had culminated in that moment. Instead, I just wanted to get it over with. I was long overdue for a “grow up”. And I thought that in high school, maybe I wouldn’t feel like my body was as out of place as it was in middle school. Instead, when I look back on it, the 14-year-old girl only felt an ever-lingering heaviness from the eyes of the audience, the same weight that put the hunch in her shoulders and the hair in her face. I’m unsure how or when it happened, but the burden of everyone else's perception had forced itself within my mind and on my body. I winced as I rewatched my mom’s recording of me accepting my certificate on that stage. I remember how I resented that moment.
I resented my body. I resented the way it moved, and the shapes it held that I felt like no other bodies around me did. Jack made me love a lot of those insecurities. I became so infatuated with the parts of myself that I noticed he liked.
Jack was my first love, I think.
Jack holds a lot of my firsts.
Jack was the first time I was truly obsessed.
The obsession was accessible. He lived just down the road from me that summer. I had my first kiss with him on my grandparents’ dock one night in early June. I felt like a poser who couldn’t purse her lips the right way. I spent the next day in angst thinking that my inability to kiss was just like how I couldn’t use a tampon. These insecurities stood as self-imposed contradictions against my body. But there was something in the green specks of Jack’s eyes when he looked at me that soothed those insecurities. That validated me. He had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, and they noticed me. They would look at me. And I remember the sky’s dots exploding and connecting in the most intricate patterns that night when he kissed me for the first time. So it was okay that he hated holding hands. Because our relationship had to be kept a secret. I convinced myself I didn’t like PDA either. But when he drove me around in his beige convertible with the top down, I felt like it was the first time I had ever felt the wind against my face. I wanted the winding roads to be more endless than they looked. I said I didn’t like to hold hands either. The truth was I wanted so intensely to have our hands tangled in one another’s as we walked along the coast.
I snuck out every night that summer, my arms floating through the midair nothingness as I ran past the couple houses between mine and his. Jack worked the night shift at Il Cappuccino, an Italian restaurant in town. I would wait for him all night until he was done and get to his backyard just in time to sit under the clothesline and watch as he finished his chicken parm dinner. We wouldn’t even kiss sometimes. Memories of him fit into a painful, perfect little secret box in my head which makes it difficult to write about now. Maybe keeping my memories of Jack for myself made it more special. That summer my heart was impossibly light. I tucked my hair behind my ears and licked melting ice cream, sometimes getting it on my chin. I was discovering how Jack’s love and attention could rush through me like pumping adrenaline. I learned how to float. I learned how to become intoxicated from someone else’s doing. I couldn’t believe this was getting to happen to me. This is what growing up meant. It didn’t feel like womanhood, but I was getting closer? At least I felt like my woman’s body, that held a kid’s mind and a 14-year-old girl’s heart of glass, was learning how to behave right. Did I think this because Jack validated my body so I finally could? I learned what feeling sexy meant. I finally learned how to use a tampon. I wanted to skip past high school years onto true adulthood because he made me love to grow up. I wanted to feel this free indefinitely.
Jack wrote me love letters over the school year, but I had eventually grown up and grew out of loving him. What I had experienced and learned from our relationship had become a part of me, but we were just temporary. We could never last indefinitely, but that feeling of arms splayed running to his house every night is indefinite. I made it to college, and I got to the age he was when he got to have so many of my firsts. It’s my first semester of college and my newfound best friend and I manifest lovers for ourselves at night.
My neck aches as I dissect my body in the mirror of my college bathroom. I’m twisting in all impossible directions trying to catch every angle of myself. Trying to visualize how others will perceive me. HOW DO THEY SEE ME? WHAT DO THEY LOVE ABOUT ME? Am I confident? Do I radiate that energy? I hate mirrors but I couldn’t live without them. I hate when all I see is my body and how compulsive I am to pick it all apart. Do I love the way I look, or do I hate it? Confidence feels like tinkering on the tightrope that connects me to Jack; that connects me to the male gaze. Like one step off balance could tip me over and I would shatter like my 14-year-old heart made of glass.
Just a couple weeks ago, this one guy held me in his hands. I was his glass of water. He decided to drink me up, every last sip of me, until the glass was empty. The glass dropped from his grip. Shattered onto the rusting turquoise tile of the kitchen counter, some pieces dropping to the floor. I think a couple got lost under the regrettable white carpet of the living room.
Broken glass pierced the foot of someone who stepped on it before I could clean it all up.
They bleed all over the white carpet now.
He dropped me. Shattered, broke. How are we expected to be whole when we have been shattered like an empty glass? How can you piece the glass back together when you are the shattered pieces themselves? And worst of all, is that the shattering was someone else’s doing. Maybe this is what you get when you become reliant on someone else’s intoxication? What if one of the tiny glass pieces is lost under the regrettable white carpet? What if someone steps on the pieces before it’s all picked up and fixed, with their bare feet, and they are bleeding all over the regrettable white carpet now.
You may have dropped me and forgotten, but since you had once wanted to drink me up, I have become infatuated with the water that you so badly needed. You drank up every last drop and left me questioning what it must’ve tasted like, and what it must’ve felt like to have me as entirely yours to either love or destroy. I am left with the brokenness that I have to pick up and fix myself.
When you are done with me, I am still left with me. To fix me.