Playing God
The girl and the writer
Article by Katie Rowley, art by Kanitta Cheah
He says it in the back of my car. It’s the first time a boy has ever said it to me. It's the only time. In between kisses, the syllables escape from his swollen lips. His hands wandering around my sixteen-year-old body. He is reaching for my boobs. The black V-neck I am wearing that used to be my mom’s reveals my skin. Maybe too much.
He says it like a question. And he wants my answer to be sex. Or at least permission to touch more of my body.
But maybe that is not true. Maybe I have twisted his intentions for a better story. I have written this story so many times. In it, he always says it and it is never genuine and it always has impure intentions. But maybe he truly did love me at first sight/first kiss. Maybe he didn’t just want to have sex with me.
I took his words to heart at sixteen. Butterflies in my stomach. I was loved. I was loved and I wanted to shout it in the school hallways. I was loved and those three words that he told me every day were a promise. A promise and a protection. A promise that I was safe from everything that could hurt me. A promise that I was saved from loneliness. A promise that I would never ever be hurt again. I was loved by a boy, and it didn’t matter that he begged for pictures of my body every night. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what I meant when I said no again and again. I was loved and it didn’t matter that he was fucking some other girl after telling me how much he loved me.
I always write this boy as the villain. He appears in almost all of my writing. Even when he is not mentioned, he is there. And almost all of me wants him gone. I want to erase him. Both from my past, and from my words.
(Almost: If I were to truly expunge him from my writing, would I have anything to say? Do I have a voice that does not silently scream his name?)
I’ve made so many promises that I will stop writing about him. They’re all promises to myself. They’re all promises I continue to break. Promises I am breaking right now. (So meta, Katie.)
I wonder what he would think of his portrayal. Of his presence in every aspect of my life. I think he would be glad he still haunts me. It would boost his ego. He’d call me a liar, though. He’d tell everyone who’d listen that I said it back, eventually. That I made the same promises and so this hurt that I keep returning to cancels out. He would probably still hate me, though.
I think I hurt people when I write about them.
I promise I will try to stop.
I wrote a story about a boy on this campus, and I never thought he’d read it. I have this crazy idea that boys can’t read. Or, at least, that they don’t care enough to read school magazines. So, I published it, and didn’t even consider it’d fall into his hands.
Five minutes before class I got a text from him. We hadn’t spoken in over a year. I hadn’t thought about him in months. He read it and wanted to talk. I think something irrevocably changed in those few seconds it took for me to read his words. Like I had been in some awful car accident and was now paralyzed from the neck down. Like my arms were never going to work again. They would never write again. (Obviously, not true. Here I am, writing.) Or maybe, the paralysis happened somewhere deep inside my brain.
A fear: all I do is fuck up and hurt people through my writing. I make mistakes.
A promise: I will never write about someone else again.
A paralyzation: how to escape the people (boys, family, friends) my writing always returns to.
The words: gone.
I am currently writing my way through a senior thesis. A collection of essays ruminating on girlhood. I take walks and I try to write in my head. I try to escape the urge to write about the new boy I am seeing. I try to escape the urge to write about the boys from my past.
I write in my journal that “I do not know what I want. I feel paralyzed.” I write in my journal that “Sometimes I feel like a god.”
Isn’t that what writing is: playing God? I create the characters. I create their stories, leave out their redemptions. I tell you how to feel about them. And, for some reason, I cannot stop.
Brandon, my advisor and one of my favorite people on this earth, tells me that I do not need to apologize to the boy who I wrote the story about. That I am generous in my rendering of him. The boy tells me that I made him uncomfortable and hurt him. They battle inside of me. The girl who would never want to hurt anyone and the writer. I do not know who to let win. I think this battle is part of the paralysis.
I think Brandon would tell me that I have to learn to let both exist, and I have to carry the writer with me everywhere. And that sometimes, the writer does win. That is the cold, bitter truth. The writer wins. The writer controls. The writer lets the power of portraying those who have hurt her consume her. She lets it fill her up. She lets the power satisfy her.
And it does satisfy her. It satisfies the non-written part of me too.
I tried to think of a time I have felt powerless and came up with an image of a bed and a backseat and a roof and a couch in an apartment neither of us lived in.
The girl from the library tells me how good my story about the roof is. How it made her think differently about the boy we both know. I think about it for weeks. I feel able to leave the roof and the bed and the car. I can leave it all behind.
But, I am afraid the writer within me has lost her appetite. I keep returning to the first boy. I keep writing about him. About how much I hate him and how much anger still lives inside of me. But it’s starting to feel pointless. It’s losing its addictive bitterness. Maybe because he doesn’t care. Maybe because he will never read anything I write.
I don’t text the boy back after he tells me how uncomfortable my words made him.
A draft of a text never sent: I am sorry and I promise I am learning. I promise I am trying to be a better person. I promise I will never write about you again.
(Once again, a promise I have failed to keep.)
I am writing my thesis and I am trying to put the incident behind me, because I keep writing about people who have hurt me and if I think about how my words could hurt them, I will turn nothing in. So, I keep writing about these boys. I write about how they destroy me, over and over again. I spin the same situation seven times. I end up with the same answer: I am always the victim.
It’s not a lie. I don’t think I have ever lied in my writing. (Not true. I have already lied three times.) I have been disrespected and led on and hurt when I didn’t deserve it. But I have also hurt people. I have led on just as many men. I just don’t ever find myself writing about them, let alone thinking about them. (Perhaps that is something I need to work on.)
I have been thinking a lot about the boy from the beginning. The first boy. I cannot erase him from my writing. I cannot erase him from my past. He comes back to me in everything. I write about other boys. Nicer boys. Boys who wouldn’t place their bodies on me the way he did. But he always returns in words. Usually near the end. Usually full of hate.
I think it is okay to hate him. I think it is okay to learn how to free myself through my writing. I loved him so much I forgot how to love myself. I entangled myself with the idea of being loved and it became part of my very being. But I think my words have begun to unravel this self-constructed notion: I am only valuable if a man is telling me how much he loves me. I am learning how deeply I am loved by those who care what I have to say. I am learning how to listen to that love. I am learning how to let my anger speak. I am becoming a writer. (And I am loving myself, writer and all.)