Summer I

She radiated Californian magnetism, tan and blonde and vibrant during a rainy Pittsburgh summer. Kelly, like me, was younger than most of the other people at the Chamber of Commerce meeting. We, the unlucky assembled of the Chamber of Commerce, sat in hard-backed chairs with suspicious stains on the patterned seat cushions. It was the ungodly hour of 7 am, and I was clinging to my styrofoam cup of serviceable coffee. Half a donut sat on my paper plate despite what I knew about the shop where it came from. The teenager who worked there most mornings would go straight from putting cash from the person in front of you into the register to palming every donut into your box with a bare, grubby hand.

At this shoddy table sat insurance salesmen and Xerox saleswomen (both genders being members of the Rotary Club which was better known as the-excuse-to-day-drink club), a trial lawyer with a walrus mustache and a boom to him that transported you straight into the jury box, and a young chiropractor who last time had spoken about some new stem cell injection technology they’d procured.

Kelly stood out with her calm and her loud laugh. It was so different from my energy. I was one of the beleaguered arts and nonprofit workers who showed up at times and talked about fundraising events we had, hoping to scrounge up sponsors for any number of local kids charities — or the small but pretty famous museum where I worked, for example.

When it was Kelly’s turn to pitch, she lifted her hands and people at the table turned, squeaking the pleather seats of their chairs to look at her. The thin lines of her eyebrows could have cut you, but the way her voice beamed out bright and throaty and honest wouldn’t let you believe that could happen. I inhaled the burnt scent of the Starbucks K-Cup pod sizzling in the machine behind me and adjusted my spine against the hard wood of the chairback, watching her, transfixed.

“I’ve found a home here,” she finished her speech about the soap company she loved working for, how it was local, independent, small and smart and close to her new home. I’d caught that she’d moved from California, like I had.

At the end of the meeting, I caught her for a moment, asked if she was new, if she wanted someone to show her around the neighborhood. I also lived there, and was honestly, just trying to be nice.

She gave me a distracted smile, more like a grimace. She was tall and smelled of something that was light, maybe citrus. Her skin was dewy. She agreed in a way where I couldn’t tell if it was real or a we-should-totally-get-lunch-soon social lie and left to go talk to someone else, matching this six-foot man’s height with hers.

---

The bar had been around since the 1890’s. It stretched out inside the building, all the brick and mortar longer than it was wide. One row of seats stretched along the actual bar itself and a few tall tables that were barely tables so much as they were tiny drink rests with tall chairs stood perched along the opposite wall. It was noisy with late afternoon drinkers. We got ciders, and I asked her how long she’d been living in the city.

“Oh, three years.”

I laughed, flushed, told her that was about as long as I’d been there.

“I thought you were new in town!”

“I thought you were just being nice! I didn’t think you’d actually show up, honestly. It’s rare to meet people who follow through.”

The compliment was so perfect, it demanded its own moment in time. It sank in like a square peg into a square hole in my soul. I responded with a too-internal something like, you know, they do not, while I let the comment fill me.

I’d just moved back to Pittsburgh after I’d supported my then-fiance in pursuing his MFA in California, cleaning his apartment, cooking, and, then, pretty quickly into his first year, doing much of the video editing — and even conceptualizing — for the projects that would turn the professors around when they were possibly going to fail him out of the program. The professors had loved the new work and had serious reservations about my participation as someone who wasn’t receiving the benefit of the degree, but we kept collaborating. The deal was always that we’d move to go get my MFA next, that we’d switch supporting roles, until the day he said, “I don’t want to move anywhere you want to go.”

I couldn’t touch my visual arts practice after that experience, quit altogether — but I never quit writing. I couldn’t. It was all that was tethering me to myself, the only thing that gave me what I wanted out of being alive. I wrote on the subway, and in cafes after work, in the mornings before work in empty mall food courts or on park benches, wherever there was public space. Unlike our complete collaboration that got him through his MFA (I was even quoted in his thesis), I never shared much of my writing with him. When I did, if I took his suggestions, it always made it worse.

I was still with this person when I met Kelly. This was what I’d experienced when it came to follow-through before I met Kelly. This is what her saying that I had follow-through meant to me.

I wore the all-black uniform of a museum worker. She had on what would turn out to be her uniform, a plaid shirt, open at the top to show off some cleavage, a camisole underneath which was really quite the throwback, and jeans, plus nice boots I think. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. We made a pair.

What’s funny is I can’t remember who sat on what side or honestly much of what we talked about besides what came next. I do remember my chest tightening and the mood darkening when she began to talk about her divorce. I’d asked her about how she got here, to our neighborhood, and she brought it up. Her talking became more heated, direct, running over me like the wheels of a train. I swallowed down the uncomfortable polite-people-don’t-talk-about-this-in-the-getting-to-know-you-stage feeling this all gave me. What did I care?

She leaned in close and then seemed to think better, leaned back, pushed her chest out and up, grew louder.

“I’m not ashamed of being divorced.”

“Just a fact.”

“Right.”

Kelly talked about a self-described manic period during her divorce, before she sought therapy and a psychiatrist. According to her, she alienated a ton of her friends. Her marriage happened when she was twenty-one. Both she and her husband had grown up religious, fringe Christian evangelicals. They’d finally moved away from California and their upbringings, come here for reasons I still don’t understand, and then they’d grown apart. She’d asked for a divorce during that manic period, and then her ex helped her through it in spite of that. On the other side of it, she realized she still wanted to get divorced, even if it was a choice brought to light by an episode. They DIY-ed their paperwork and divided up their stuff.

Her frankness fed oxygen to the little flame of respect building inside of me for her. Kelly was unafraid to start completely over. Meanwhile, tons of my then-friends were pretty open about having settled. At the time, I thought of my own relationship as less than ideal but couldn’t see what, if anything, I could do about it. It was, in fact, so less than ideal, that I would sometimes fantasize about what it would be like if my partner got into an accident and died. I’d cry a little, and then the most shameful part of me would latch onto what would come after. I’d be free. I’d actually feel like the rest of my life was ahead of me.

After all that disclosure, I think she might have asked me what I did in my spare time. I did the usual things in my spare time, I supposed, but there was only one real passion I held — writing. She got me to talk about it, and I did, with hot cheeks and the unassured way I’d addressed my extremely private version of my practice for the past six years. Then, like a cloud-parting, angel-trumpeting, Saint-canonizing miracle — she brought up a writers group she’d only just started with two other women. My eyes must have betrayed my hunger. She invited me, but really, she let me come after I asked if they were looking for anyone else.

That’s right. If we’re being completely honest, which we are here to the best of anyone’s ability, the real true answer to how I wound up in an almost-cult is that I invited myself.

---

I was almost too nervous to speak when I told my partner I was going to the writer’s group, kept my eyes down, looked up only quickly, waiting for disagreement. I got an affirmation that was somewhere between cold and neutral, and it was enough. I took it and ran with it.

I found Kelly and the others at a small table outside a cafe in the Northside. The air was almost too warm. Moments of cigarette smoke and tapping shoes from passersby infiltrated the calm at the table. Kelly and a brunette white woman with a small frame and small glasses balanced on her small nose — I thought she looked to be in her 40’s — shared a sandwich. She introduced herself as Jessica. A younger woman with long blonde hair and clear skin said she was Anna and went right back to talking. Anna’s voice was loud, batting its way out of the cage of her mouth, going whap whap whap against the conversation. I folded myself up and waited at the table, hoping to be no more obtrusive than an unused napkin. When asked, I offered them a short summary of my book and when Anna read her essay, I listened and offered what I hoped was helpful feedback.

Kelly read her own writing aloud. I’d been curious about what her writing would be like after talking to her. Here was an essay about the way Kelly had been raised, as many of them would be. Reading back over it now (it’s still up on her blog), I can see the disclosure / nondisclosure that made it so difficult to pull the threads of her web apart. I tensed my shoulders and wrung my hands even as she made me laugh. I thought, at the time, that it was just because I wasn’t used to her, not used to socializing with people who were connections of my own, who weren’t mutual friends of mine and my partner’s.

In the essay, she told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t see what she’d written so plainly because I didn’t want to, because her inner light shone too bright. Whether that twinkle around her signaled a guiding star or a life-annihilating forest fire, I couldn’t tell at this distance. I also didn’t care. I needed something to lead me away from where I was. I wasn’t conscious of it, but my body knew, so we followed.

In the essay, she wrote about meeting her ex-husband, the first man who actually respected her. She married him after a series of confusing relationships with men, and because it was her only choice within her far-right fundamentalist world if they wanted to have sex. She said he was her way out of the fringe religious group she’d grown up in. For the first time, she could have an opinion and not be accused of being “possessed by demons.” Her father, she told us, had a following, a cult. He’d even written a book about all the times Satan himself had tried to murder him for doing God’s work. He’d taken her and her siblings around the world on mission trips, from Mongolia to Monaco. They saw him, each and every day, trying to convince locals to jump on board his brand of Christianity. They all had to obey him, not just as a father, but as a very special representative of God.

In another essay, she wrote about wanting to be able to make every guy need her while she could remain cold and in control, how her parents raised her to believe she was pretty enough to always have the upper hand. It worked well enough on fundamentalist Christian boys who she never had sex with, but then the fuckboys she’d slept with since her divorce never fell at her feet. It drove her absolutely bonkers that she couldn’t control them, and here she was, writing an essay about it, trying to get to the bottom of why she longed so deeply for this specific dynamic with men.

Her essay construction was pretty darn good. I admired the way she told a story, stayed focused on delivering a specific point. It excited me to give her feedback, to encourage her, and I was similarly thrilled to know that she’d look at my writing, too. Still, these pieces had me on edge. She divulged so much. Each piece of writing felt like a mini-confrontation, and I didn’t know it at the time, or didn’t realize it, but my nerves were fried from endless conflict. I don’t think I was going a week during that period of time without at least one fight where my partner wouldn’t let me go to sleep until two, three, four in the morning, where he would just keep yelling and finding new ways to keep the fight going even when I relented, when I apologized, when I admitted I was a terrible person. I was always in some stage of recovering from at least one recent night without sleep.

So, after those two essays, it was a relief and a delight to dip into Jessica’s romance novel. It was sweet and satisfying. It needed a little work, but romance novels are beloved for a reason. It had all the ingredients. Not wanting to take up space, I didn’t bring anything to share for the first meeting.

My job was starting to come between me and my partner, but my writing was something I think he knew he couldn’t mess with, or, it was convenient because writing’s usually a solitary activity until you’re ready to share it. It keeps you working by yourself. It’s easy to encourage a writer to isolate themselves in the name of getting some writing done. He liked me to write, rather than go out. Now that writing also meant going out, something started to shift.

When I’d gotten the offer for my museum job a year or so before, I’d started shaking. I’d spent cumulative hours upon hours in this museum. I was intimately familiar with their permanent collection. This museum was practically a legend in my mind, and I am sure, in my partner’s mind. So then, why, when everyone who I told about the job told me to take it, did he tell me not to? Why? I can’t remember his arguments, but even at the time, they were strange. I took the job anyway.

I have that problem a lot, struggling to remember whole conversations from that relationship. Only the punch lines stayed. If I complained about working late, he complained I should be spending more time with him. If he was angry I worked late, I couldn’t expect anything else because he’d told me not to take the job, so he had a right to be angry because he’d already made it clear that he was unhappy with my decision. If I wanted a break on the weekends, he told me that spending time with his family, who, not only did I see more often than my own, but were also devastatingly boring, with his controlling mother, was what I’d signed up for because I was in a relationship with him.

On the days when I got home before him, I could breathe for a moment, alone in the house, putting dishes away or puttering around sweeping the floor. I’d smile and put on my music and dance, all while keeping an eye out the window. I could usually see him coming, watch him enter through the basement. Most days, his face would be all seething resentment before he’d even walked in the door. I’d turn off my music and listen for the door to open. Did the lights just darken? Did someone put the blue gel filter on reality? My yellow happiness disappeared in a rush of cold air. Hands clutching a dish, I’d wait, chest held still, not a pulse of air passing my lips. When he came up those basement stairs, only then would I find out which person I’d be getting when he opened the door at the top. I always kept that door closed after I got home, one last barrier between us.

The writer’s group was the perfect thing. He didn’t mind my writing by myself, which I did constantly. I wrote on scraps of paper, on notes on my phone, on weekends and evenings, on public transportation and on breaks at work, for whole days at a time when I had them off. This was the obvious next extension of that practice. Telling me not to do this would be too obvious in terms of sabotage. He’d never be able to get away with trying to keep me from going outright.

I played with the summer condensation on my glass while Kelly read my work to everyone at the second meeting, the opening chapter of my book. Later, the writing group — and especially Anna — left comments on the Google doc that ranged from suggestions about language to encouragement. I did the same for them, read thoughtfully, read everything twice or more. It was magic.

---

Another time, Kelly started in on an essay she wrote, read it out loud in a voice that was a little different from the one at the Chamber of Commerce. It had less give to it. It was more about performance and at the same time, even as it grew more raw, it held friendliness in the center. She was making fun of how confident she was, I realized. She read her personal essay about being a “self objectifier,” which she defined as being addicted to male validation, to doing the work of objectifying herself even without someone else being present to objectify her. She was completely unable to pull herself out of it. She’d tried a number of tactics before coming to this realization. She’d even gone to a Sex Addicts Anon group and gotten a sponsor. The opening line haunted me. In it, she wrote that whenever she felt alone and lost, she’d pull makeup across those Nicole Kidman eyes of hers and put on some alluring outfit and just go walk around the neighborhood until she was filled up with compliments and hoots and stares enough that she could go on existing.

Her rawness was so much more than I was used to. No one ever shared their deepest insecurities with me like this, not in person, anyway. Maybe if I read an essay online or a memoir or had gone to an official reading — but to sit at this table at this cafe with strangers and hear this was something new altogether. I’d gotten a hard cider. I sipped on it, letting the bubbles hit the roof of my mouth, wanting the sweetness and sensation to undercut the way Kelly’s heart and guts were splayed on the table.

“So you can’t do anything embarrassing?”

“I can never not be sexy.”

There was a laugh in my throat because it was ridiculous but I watched the way she moved and tamped my reaction back down. She always posed her body. Her eyes flicked around the room like two little birds ensconced in her skull, looking out for danger, for the danger that she could be caught in an unscripted moment. She never let herself be on display. No, instead, we only saw the mannequin whose hair she’d brushed just so. I realized that I was never really seeing Kelly, I only saw the doll that Kelly lives in, that she posed for me or anyone looking her way.

We talked about gaslighting and abuse, then, about the way that her dad’s inability to see her as a person helped nurture her own self-objectification. I had never heard this word — gaslighting — used this way, and it set something off in me that started to tick.

I checked the clock. I’d been missing from my own memory for twenty minutes. I walk somewhere else, slip in, slip out.

Fall

I drove home for lunch, as I did every day on my lunch break at the museum, to take care of Mya the dog. I took the wet, low road past a bar with a sign in the shape of a hog. Next thing I knew, I’d popped out at the end of a series of perilous turns about five minutes after I last remembered being at the wheel. I don’t remember if I caught my breath at the stop sign, but I must have. I turned to go to my house, to take Mya for a little walk in the crunchy leaves. The house was empty, safe. Mya settled back in on the couch after her walk. I put on some TV for her. I hated to leave her alone and would put on a nature documentary to keep her company before slipping out the door, locking it, crunching through leaves to the car.

We’d just gotten married. By the time I’d started attending the writer’s group, I’d already sent out invitations to our early fall wedding, already had the guest list finalized. Guilt for not inviting the writers group seeped through me at the reception. I let it go, I danced, I looked around at my joyous relatives, at everyone having so much fun, received compliments for weeks on the fun wedding I’d planned, down to earth, unpretentious, a really good party. It was also a party with no people. Did anyone really know me besides my sister, my closest family? There were over a hundred people here, but where were mine? Most of those people were there for my spouse, for my mother-in-law. I’d thrown numerous fits over this fact, wanting to cut her guest list in half, but that’s ‘not how it works.’ I danced with people who didn’t know me at my own wedding and went home with someone who didn’t seem to really like me at all.

I kept losing time, when driving, at home, at work. I caught myself standing in the living room, home alone with Mya, unsure of how long I’d been there, where I came from. I checked the clock. I’d been missing from my own memory for twenty minutes. I walk somewhere else, slip in, slip out.

---

We were so much more than a writer’s group. We knew each others’ lives, let each other in. Conversation flowed. We became the bearers of each others’ secrets.

Jessica had left her abusive husband before I’d met her…but not long before I’d met her. For a while, he’d been paying her unofficial child support for their two young teenage kids. Like so many abusers, he’d wanted to keep a hold on Jessica, so he told her that if she filed for divorce, if she tried to legally sever their ties, he would cut her and their kids off. She filed, and he followed through on his threat.

Now, three of the four of us stood in the kitchen. Our purchases, donations for Jessica’s cause, spread out before us. We were pre-making and then freezing two weeks worth of dinners for her and her kids. It wasn’t just about the financial relief. We could have given her the money we’d gotten together, and she could have easily bought groceries. It was about taking care of the labor so all she would have to do was warm something up at the end of the day and have it be something that was better than a frozen dinner. It was Kelly’s idea, and I thought it was a good one.

There were two things that were off about this, and I couldn’t unwind the first one from the other. Maybe I thought it was weird because I was anxious already. Kelly wanted to take all the meals into work (Jessica also worked at the soap company) and present them to her there. Her argument was something like the freezer at her work was empty and could store them long enough for Jessica to make room for the surprise, which kind of made sense, but what also made sense to me, that struck my antenna and made them tingle, was realizing that Kelly might have wanted to show off, to make a grand gesture. This was just the first, that I can remember, of many times when she would wrap us into making these huge presentations of our caring and devotion to each other, cementing us together, gluing us to her.

The other thing setting off my anxiety was the way that my then-spouse, made it clear from his coldness that he disapproved, especially whenever he came upstairs to grab something, usually another beer. He’d brush past us in the kitchen, brusque, giving me his secret cold glances as he went past. His eyes would shift when they looked at him, to a placid brightness, and if I caught his eye on my own, he’d settle into a ruthless glare. Mya watched us from the floor, wide-eyed and adorable, waiting for the moment we would drop something. My shoulders tried to tie themselves into a bow with the strain of it. I powered through, was as sweet as I could manage to my friends while letting my stomach sink. I remember making enchiladas, and mac n cheese with secret vegetables in the sauce from some blog-mom’s website. We used my oils and butter and seasonings, and then sealed everything up in tupperware we’d bought for the occasion.

After they left, he barely spoke to me all night. When I confronted him about it, he alternated between telling me that he was giving me space and that he thought they were annoying. He mentioned things about each of them, that Kelly was bossy and peacocky and that Anna never stopped talking. He implied, especially, that their earnestness was tacky.

---

I realized I had to formally come out to them, because they’d somehow assumed I was straight — which did not make sense to me as someone who clearly dressed like a bisexual vampire and who was also married to a former drag queen who acted like he was on stage wearing something sparkly at all times. Still, I didn’t talk about myself a lot, so they didn’t have much to go on, and straight people will see straightness to their detriment. So, I conveniently came out one session when I diverged from my novel and wrote a personal essay. While I read it, I could see Kelly staring through me like her corneas were x-ray glasses.

Soon after that, we met at Kelly’s apartment, instead of the cafe, because it was getting cold and the cafe was too loud for Kelly. I wonder now if it really was too hard for her to hear, or if it was just part of some long-game ruse to get us to visit her at home so she wouldn’t have to be out.

It was a third floor walk-up, with the final stair being within the apartment, so you have to come in the door, then close the door, then go up the stairs. It created a slow reveal. I ascended the stairs in my fall coat and looked up and around.

The entire apartment was dotted with clusters and singular paintings of naked women, many in the same style. The brush strokes came off the paper, were rough, in tones of beiges and orange, yellow and pink, bright red streaks of hair. The hairs of the brushes traced over clumsy bodies, drawn disproportionately, an elongated torso, large feet, too-long legs, ungainly breasts and muted little baby hands that could not have belonged to a grown woman of that height.

One such painting loomed large in the room. It was on a beige wooden board, not canvas, stretching maybe four and a half feet long and about two feet tall. Maybe longer. In it, in shades of red, beige, and jarring paper-white was rendered the image of a nude woman.

The nude lay on her stomach, supported by her forearms, almost in a plank position except her hips rested on the ground. Her shoulders were rounded too much, and between that and the pose, and the unspecific shaping of her upper arms and forearms, it looked, if you stared at it long enough, like her neck and head on top of it had been birthed out of the back of a too-thin buttocks elevated in the air by legs bent at the knee, the side of the right breast large enough against the unmuscled arm and depicted roundly enough that it could be mistaken for a swollen and hanging pregnant belly. It lacked the fat and the movement of a proper breast, and instead appeared to be swelling from the inside, like it held a fetus. The style of the face, highly detailed, did not imply that the stick arms and round breasts were intentional stylistic decisions.

“Do you like them?”

“Did you paint them?”

“They’re of me.” she tossed her hair over her shoulder, “I modeled for just about every painter in my county in California. They actually had a whole show once, just for these. It was all paintings of me, by all the local artists who I modeled for. It’s hard for artists to find a model who’s actually able to work with them. It takes skill.”

“Very cool,” I said with as much sincerity as I could manage. The paintings weren’t very good, but Kelly seemed proud of her contribution to them. She saw me looking at her. She adjusted her top, pulling it up. That action made my gaze noticeably unwelcome. There was a calculation in her eyes.

---

At some point in the late fall, at home, I open a bottle of the wedding champagne the head of the museum had sent us, boxes full of Cook’s from the museum’s stores to have a “champagne toast.” I consider putting on my wedding clothes and slitting my wrists in the bathtub while I drink it and wonder why I’m having these thoughts. Later, my spouse tells me he wants to kill himself, threatens me with it to get me to do something or other, fall in line, tells me I am a terrible person, that he’s the only one who would put up with me, that essentially everything I do, my existence, our relationship is a violence that is crushing his spirit. I consider what it would feel like to be as frivolous and selfish as he described me, to get my white jumpsuit and sparkly shoes all sopping wet.

She told us a story of ourselves, about how we came together, about how the four of us were stronger together.

Winter

It snowed, deep and heavy and soggy white that you had to use some real muscle to push off your car. Kelly’s apartment smelled like the bread she’d baked. She wrapped herself in an oversized sweater and set the loaves out with jam and butter. I was mesmerized by someone else making bread for me. I made all the meals at home, baked all the things, did all the grocery shopping. I’d brought the ingredients for the spell that Jessica had asked for, one to help get her abusive soon-to-be-ex husband off her back. He’d dragged out their divorce and had continued not to pay child support. She needed the divorce to go through as fast as possible so he’d be legally obligated to pay.

We opened a bottle of wine. Kelly asked us to sit while she read something. Anna borrowed a pair of Kelly’s fuzzy socks and fidgeted constantly on the floor while Jessica sat still, her hands in her lap, and Kelly read to us from a few sheets of lined paper. She told us a story of ourselves, about how we came together, about how the four of us were stronger together. She took the time to highlight what was special about each of us. We clasped hands and started the spell. I normally do this work alone, had for years. To hold hands with three other people — it reminded me of The Craft.

---

Everyone has mixed feelings about their birthdays.

As someone born during the winter in a famously snowy climate, blizzards with upwards of four feet of snow on my birthdays meant my classmates couldn’t come over. In my relationship, California to Pennsylvania, my birthdays increasingly were met with disappointment until I started my own tradition. Now, I take time off from work to write alone on my birthday. A lot of people think this is inspiring, but it was the best, most real way I could think of celebrating — for years, because everything my partner did made me feel awkward, like he either had to make me feel like a cockroach for daring to exist or to make me the object of showing off what a good partner he was.

For this birthday, though, we had a party that I think I organized. I invited the writers group. We invited my — our — old friends. After the party, my husband told me Anna was too loud, Jessica was too awkward, and Kelly was too-something-else. When I saw Kelly and my husband interact, it was like watching two planets collide, to vie for gravity. They fought, her six-foot frame boring down on him, his shadowed glare and the self-important line of his mouth looking up at hers. It was there for anyone to see. If it wasn’t an interaction within a relationship he’d had years to establish himself within, he was well out of his depth. Everything he said if he didn’t know you, if he didn’t have time to work on you, was weirdly, incredibly, wildly off. After the party, I got an earful about inviting them…my friends…to my own birthday party. What was so threatening? He told me our mutual friends were put off by my new friends, that by making new friends, I was casting them aside. Those friends never spoke to me again after my ex and I separated.

The next day, the writers group suggested we meet at a known queer / trans coffee shop and bar. They paid their employees a living wage, had coffee during the day, and at night, had cocktails and musical acts. It was mysteriously populated only by queers despite not being advertised as such, much to the confusion of cishet dudes who wandered in. In short, it was a perfect venue for what happened next.

They brought out a cake. I have a photo of Kelly holding this gorgeous thing covered in real, cut flowers. They brought me gifts, simple things like a candle to light while I wrote at home. And the best thing of all, they wrote me letters. Each of them had penned a multi-page letter to me, about what they liked and admired about me. It was the most loving thing, or I thought it was. Naturally, Kelly organized it because after something like that, how could you say she’d ever done anything wrong? It had me in tears because here, no one was telling me how much I sucked for making decisions about my own birthday. It was, maybe, the only birthday in years where I actually felt like the celebration was about appreciating me.

---

At one point, I was praying in front of my altar when my husband confronted me.

“Are you talking to the spirits about me?”

I told him I was not, and it was true. He told me that he always heard me whispering in front of the altar, that he couldn’t imagine what I was saying unless it was about him. I asked him why?

He said he felt like he was being haunted, like there were things watching him in the house. He asked me if I felt haunted. I recalled the first time I’d come into the house, before we moved in, the presence I’d felt, the offering I’d made, the welcoming atmosphere after.

I told him I hadn’t noticed anything different, and asked him again why he thought I’d be praying about him.

He said something about thinking I was asking them to curse him. I was very confused. At most, I’d asked for help resolving a fight. I reassured him that, no, I wasn’t doing that. He went upstairs, looking at me over his shoulder.

#

Jessica’s husband stopped trying to contact her soon after the spell. Not a week after that same ritual, my husband walked out after giving me vague ultimatums all week, starting even more fights that went on until three in the morning, locking me out of the bedroom, threatening to kill himself, and telling me again and again just how awful I was for him. Just before Valentine’s Day he slammed the door behind him and went to his parents’ “for space.” He refused to tell me how long he needed or when I might hear from him again. If I texted, he’d respond that he told me he said he’d needed space and that my inability to respect that was indicative of something or other. I was left alone, in that creaky house in the snow, to think about what a bad person I was. At least I had Mya.

Day 1: I was doubled over in grief. I had to run a brunch at the museum with a board member who was a highly paid attorney who was also engaged to one of our US Representatives, who kept telling me to try Rent the Runway “as a treat for myself” because she had apparently no idea how little the museum was paying me or what a “treat” for a normal person might look like (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?” etc.) The brunch was Valentine’s Day themed. I gave myself two minutes away from working the crowd to pet the bunnies the animal shelter had brought while I cried as discreetly as I could. My apologies to the shelter workers who had to watch this weirdo holding back tears while clutching at bunnies.

Day 2: The writers’ group met at an anarchist bookstore. Among books on revolution and feminism and socialism, I told them what had happened. They were the first people I told. “I knew something was wrong,” said Kelly. “You didn’t seem very happy to be planning your wedding,” said Anna.

Day 3: I woke up with my head feeling clearer than it had in a while. It was like the windows behind my eyes had started to defog. I hadn’t even realized they’d been clouded.

Day 4: An unfamiliar emotion emerged from somewhere so deep that it poked its head out like a parasitic worm. It’d coiled itself around my organs without my knowing it and now it squeezed. I could not tell why I was angry. I couldn’t place it.

Day 5: I was invited to a party the next day. It was a Friday. His mother called. I did not pick up, and instead picked out a sexy black outfit for this random mid-February party while she squawked on the voicemail.

Day 6: The day of the party, I arrived and wound up in a circle of people, only some of whom I knew. It was at Anna’s place, so there were friends of hers and friends of her roommate’s. A woman asked me how I was.
“My husband walked out on me this week.” It slipped out but also, what the hell else was I supposed to say?
“Oh!,” her curls bounced and her mouth opened with that this-is-too-much-from-a-stranger look.
“No, it’s okay,” I picked at the label on my beer and smiled, “I’m mostly really angry. Really, really angry.”
She laughed, “Well, good. That’s good, right?”
“I think it’s good. Yeah.”
As the night went on, I told Kelly and Anna about it, somehow about it all. By the end of the party, we screamed at each other, screamed into the night. At one point, Anna and I stood out back in the tiny snowy yard, “And where is your MFA? He got his. Where’s YOURS?”
“Where is it!” I screamed back.
We yell. We made plans, egged on by Kelly who planned to join us, to all live together.
“It’ll be an intentional community,” Kelly said.
I nodded, agreed, thinking that it sounded good but that I had to look it up.

Day 7: My head had not worked this well in years, in as long as I could remember. It was like the sunlight was brighter and the air more clean. My senses were sharp and my thoughts moved calmly forward without impediment. I burned the Valentine I’d gotten him, kept the gift for myself, and started packing up my stuff. I packed up garbage bags of old things I could bear to part with or that lost their shared sentimental value and hid them in case he came home, but then, on garbage day morning, I took them to the curb while keeping an eye out for his car coming down the street. I was on the phone for the whole day with these three, planning, plotting. Kelly started trying to convince Jessica and her two kids to join us, to find a place and move in with us. This was a little strange, but I hardly noticed with the brightness my ex’s leaving had brought. When it was just me, I could see everything so clearly. I no longer felt unstable, I no longer felt mentally unwell, or like my memory wasn’t trustworthy. I felt like I had Kelly to thank for that, and I didn’t question that it might have been good for Jessica to have roommates who can watch her kids once in a while.

---

I wasn’t supposed to tell him I wanted a divorce. It’s dangerous when an abuser knows their partner is trying to leave. I couldn’t see how to get around it. He was trying to ask me if I wanted to continue the relationship. I asked for it.

He looked at me like he’d been hit in the face with a bucket of cold water.

“Well, if I’m really as bad to you as you say, if I never change and I’m so incredibly selfish, if I can’t make space for you to thrive, then why would you want to stay with me?” I asked him.

“I don’t know…” His expression told me everything I needed to know, that I’d said just the right thing. In real time, I watched him realize that all the things he’d been telling me about myself for so long had finally come back, coalesced into one simple logical conclusion that was pretty difficult to argue against. If I was the worst person ever, then it didn’t matter if he was the only one “who would ever stay with me,” because shouldn’t he be concerned with getting out himself?

This was one of my proudest plays in overcoming the abuse and getting out. I’d shared it with my friends afterward. “I’m not that bad, though, right? Like, he’s been gaslighting me, right?”

“You’re really not very selfish at all,” Anna said. Jessica reassured me, too.

He screwed up his face, full drama queen. “I am going to treat you so well.” It took a while for him to come off his moment of talking about how good he’s going to be to me so that we can negotiate terms, all of which he’d challenge me on the next time we met.

---

Kelly continued to teach me about narcissism, gaslighting, and abuse because she was convinced her dad is a narcissist. She sent me reading material. Her father, plagued by Satan, saw his daughters, whenever they acted autonomously, as possessed, mostly because they weren’t behaving like the extensions of his persona that he wanted them to be. Kelly discussed gaslighting, another term I hadn’t heard of, a thing I didn’t fully realize, at the time, one person could just do to another in a relationship. Anna brought up her boyfriend in Argentina. She couldn’t remember what happened, but she is pretty sure she didn’t consent during their first night together, and after that, suddenly they were dating. Jessica talked about the way her husband treated her, the years she suffered while being demeaned and the increasing sexual abuse involving other men. He told her she would never survive without him, that no one would respect her if they knew about what he’d arranged for her via Craigslist. It got to the point where nothing he could do to her mattered until the day her sons talked to her like her husband did, which was the day she knew she had to get out, not for her sake, but for theirs.

Somehow, Kelly had collected the three of us.

The four of us texted almost constantly. I needed it, the more my ex started to show up to the house at odd hours even though he said he would leave me alone, the darker his looks got, the times he tailed me aggressively with his car when we left the same place. I continued to keep my packing a secret, acted like I didn’t know when or if I’d really leave, like I didn’t know what I was doing next. Anna, Kelly and I looked at apartments and rental houses after work. We found one pretty quickly, put our deposit down, and then it was just a matter of a few weeks and finding a weekend when my ex said he would be at his parents.

Together, we borrowed a van from the soap company where Kelly worked. We had to keep a single box of soap in it while moving my stuff so that the business insurance would cover the truck if something happened. On that fateful weekend, we ran the van over to the house and packed as much as we could. We took Mya with us on the first trip — in case my ex came back, so he couldn’t take her. She’d been staying with me this whole time, after all, and had started to ignore him even when he came back to talk divorce terms. Mya is a very friendly dog. I’m convinced she knew.

Slowly, signs of my existence in our home started to disappear.

Spring

At the first house meeting, I brought my notebook downstairs. Kelly asked me what I was doing.
“Taking notes.”
“Why?” she said like I was the most ridiculous person on earth.
“I have a bad memory.”
She pulled out a piece of cardboard. We wrote down our ambitions for the collective living situation on it. She kept using the term “intentional community.” Like the word “gaslighting” I’d never heard the term “intentional community” before spending time with her.

What I remember is that she emphasized “radical candor” and refused to let me put an emphasis on creative time on the board. When I asked if we’d ever get back to having our weekly writing group, she didn’t have an answer. She glared at me, like I was interrupting her peace.

---

We become wrapped up in each others’ lives. It was a comfort, to live in such a noisy space, to care so much about what my housemates had going on, to make dinners together and have movie nights. Kelly helped me take photos for Tinder. She did my makeup and directed me with the know-how she got from her photographer ex-husband. “You have to find your light,” she told me, and made me open my eyes wide into the sun while she snapped a photo.

A Tinder date distinctly could not understand my living situation, no matter how I tried to explain: “Is it a recovery house?” She tried to place what it sounded like to her.

Jessica distanced herself after making the choice not to move in with us. It made sense. We’d either have to move into her sons’ school district or they’d have to change schools, and Kelly didn’t want to leave her neighborhood. I wondered how much Kelly had to do with that because she’d put so much pressure on Jessica to join us. Soon, it was just Anna and Kelly and me.

---

Kelly established a lot of different rules, unspoken or not. Many of them she scrawled across a piece of cardboard that she tacked to the wall in the living room. We had to be radically honest with each other and offer feedback, but she never took hers well. We were supposed to take turns cooking meals, but when it was her turn, she was suddenly too tired and would be nowhere to be found. We were supposed to be making connections and building community, but Kelly didn’t want to have much to do with any friends Anna or I brought around.

She would engage us in random tests of loyalty — asking us to do something like go pick up a couch with her late at night even after I told her I was exhausted, and just badgering me into it and hyping Anna up until I said “fine,” and next thing I knew it was 1am and we were done and I had to get up at 6 for work. She would insist we needed to buy something for the apartment and push us all to chip in, and often, when I left for work, I would come back to my stuff having been moved around. She’d pressure us into contributing money toward shared expenses — but they were always items she’d decided on, fixated on. Often, we had to do things for Jessica. She organized a hotel stay for her and collected money from each of us so that Jessica could have two nights of alone time in a hotel room downtown. I remember Kelly was miffed when Jessica didn’t text her during to tell her what a good time she was supposed to be having.

Kelly constantly encouraged the “radical candor” aspect of our house rules. We couldn’t keep things to ourselves, no matter how tired we were, how much we wanted a moment and instead had to voice them immediately. This was also lopsided. Every once in a while, she’d accept a soft criticism from Anna or me with grace, I believe so that we wouldn’t notice when she refused to accept our concerns about larger behaviors. She’d encourage us to dig into our past and divulge our traumas for her, eyes glimmering when we handed her the jewels of hardened hurt we pulled out of our chests on command.

It’s so hard to explain how constant, sustained, small pressures added up, but Anna and I began to seek the relief of Kelly’s approval. I sensed Kelly trying to test the waters with me, to see if I’d turn on Anna, roll my eyes at her with Kelly, talk about how Kelly wondered if she wasn’t really that smart. I remember these incidents as some of the most deeply uncomfortable between us, because they represented a violation of the basic tenets of our friendship. Soon, the moments where Kelly gathered us together to tell us we were doing everything right in our intentional community grew fewer and further between.

Slowly, signs of my existence in our home started to disappear. I’d hung up some artwork I made and came home one day to find it taken off the walls and put in the damp, moldy basement. I came home one day to find Mya’s bed and her toybox moved out of the living room and into the entryway. It reminded me of the way I’d come home from work one day, after I’d said I wanted a divorce, to find my altar completely cleared off, and boxes of takeout my ex had bought stacked on top instead. When I saw it, he looked at me with a flash in his eyes like he wanted to see me react. “What is it?” “Oh, nothing.” I knew it was better not to give in to his attempt to upset me.

I tried to ask Kelly why Mya’s bed couldn’t be in the living room. “Is your bed in the living room?” she asked, which is ridiculous, because most dogs don’t have their own bedrooms. She demanded unilateral decision-making power, and also, in every way she could, kept trying to make me as small as possible.

---

When Kelly started to date a man from her work, she also spent less and less time at the house. Anna and I started spending more time together. We’d sit in each others’ rooms and decompress after dates, take Mya for walks with the dogs Anna walked for a living, go to art gallery crawls. Our talk strayed more and more from the intentional community stuff Kelly talked about. Kelly missed one group hang, then a movie night, then another. Soon, if we were home, she’d lock herself in her room, or leave.

---

By the night of Anna’s surprise birthday party, the energy had changed. I went and did some shopping for the party, picking up ice and drinks, cups and mixers. I was jazzed. Anna was, I was sure, going to be over the moon about her surprise party. Plus, this hot bassist who I’d met at a dinner party some months before had come back into town after touring and emailed me. I invited her to the surprise party because, um, as I mentioned she was hot. That’s the reason. (It was Sadie!)

That was how we’d split the labor of the party. I was in charge of beverages and the cake. Jessica was in charge of all other food. Kelly was in charge of procuring decorations and decorating. When I walked in with bags filled with soda digging into my forearms, streamers sat untouched in their bags, tape unused. The place wasn’t even swept. Kelly, wild-eyed, sweated with hammer in hand, by the wall over the couch.

What had she been doing for the past couple of hours? She’d been hanging each and every one of the paintings of her, the naked ones, up on the wall. I tried to ask her about decorating.

“I am. What do you think this is?”

She gestured at the wall of paintings of herself. It was one of those moments where I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t going to come around. I got the drinks set up, changed quickly, and came down to welcome the first couple of party guests, who I enlisted to help me hang up the streamers. I like to think they didn’t mind that people like to be helpful, especially if it’s conspiratorial, like it is for a surprise birthday party. I stared at that wall of nudes the whole time. What was so important about having a bunch of naked pictures of yourself up for someone else’s birthday party? I think I would have remained more pissed off if I hadn’t been concentrating on making sure everyone, Anna especially, was having a good time — something Kelly seemed wholly uninterested in. She was, I could see, mostly concerned with everyone seeing her nudes.

---

Finally, Kelly called a house meeting. In it, she read a letter aloud. I sat down on the couch, bright sunlight streaming through the windows. Anna sat in a chair, arms wrapped around her, discomfort. Did she know what was coming?

The letter was about how I’d ruined the intentional community. I was selfish for prioritizing my writing. Which, I had to concede, was true in a way. I had been taking more and more time to write, alone, in the attic, had been asking when we would meet as a group again. We hadn’t since moving in. It was like our original purpose had evaporated. It hurt my heart to go back to writing alone in the attic, to no longer have anyone who was interested in exchanging words.

Kelly continued on to say I was bad for all the reasons my ex used to give, reasons I’d told her about. I was on Tinder too much, too focused on outside relationships, not present with them. I was rude for feeling weird about random cis men entering the house.

In the letter, she said her therapist had told her I was manipulative and selfish, that her therapist suspected I may have actually been the abusive one in the relationship, that I could have them all fooled. This was maybe the worst thing anyone could have said to me at this point in my life. I think Kelly, on some level, knew that.

---

Just a few days later, I managed to write her a letter in return. I asked her and Anna to join me in the living room. In the letter that I read aloud, I apologized for everything.

Kelly thanked me, and we hugged. After a while, she changed the subject and started to tear up, her voice tightening with the gunk of a soon-to-occur cry lodged in her throat. “I just need a lot of space right now. I’ve recovered some memories.”

Anna and I asked what they were, and Kelly took us through an explanation of the EMDR therapy, something about lights and eye movement desensitization. Kelly told us that her therapist said she had PTSD and that she was helping her to recover lost memories.*

Kelly’s face twisted up, “My parents beat me! That’s what I’m remembering. I never knew before. My whole life, I thought it was just verbal abuse, but they beat me!” She sobbed into her hands.

We agreed to another ritual, another spell to rid the house of negativity. On the next full moon, I led the group as we banished negativity from the ground.

*It’s my understanding that the phenomenon of ‘recovered memories’ is highly controversial and that, in many cases, memories that are ‘recovered’ are actually, simply, false.

---

Within three days of the banishment ritual, Kelly told us she was leaving. I knew this would happen. By that time, I’d sensed she was, in fact, the source of negativity in the house, and well, that was what we were banishing, wasn’t it?

Anna found me in the kitchen one day while Kelly was out. I held a dish I’d just dried, my hands and heart cold, steeling myself up against what could come next.

“I have to tell you something.”

I nodded, ready to hear more about how I’m the worst.

“Kelly tried to come to me about you again.”

“She’s moving out. Is it me?”

“I don’t know,” Anna’s eyes looked up then around the room, she slid into the narrow galley kitchen, “and I told her to talk to you and she wouldn’t.”

“That’s not very ‘radical candor’ of her, is it?”

“No, it’s not. I said something like that.”

She paused and played with her hair and asked if she could tell me something. I waved my arms around the kitchen, where the largest nude painting of Kelly hung in a prominent place, watching, nakedly, over us, the head being birthed again and again out of the boob-butt. I waved at the friends I no longer had because they all sided with the other one in my marriage. I waved at the phone that no one called me on, like who was I going to tell? I said as much.

Anna told me the neighbors had told her that when we were out, they saw Kelly screaming to herself on the front porch.

“She was yelling ‘Why am I here? Why I am I here!!’ over and over again.”

I picture this. Our neighbors, having some beers, tending their yard chickens, playing with their dog. In my vision, Kelly emerged onto the porch, her face agonized and twisted in the same way it was when she told us about her parents’ abuse. When she yelled, was she performing for someone? For one of us in case we came home? For the neighbors? Was this no longer a performance, the Kelly underneath the surface emerging at last? From my perspective, and I said as much to Anna, Kelly didn’t seem to be getting better with the treatment at her clinic. It looked like Kelly was unraveling, even in the moments she let me see, and even more, it seemed, in the moments where she might have thought she was unobserved.

“I’m sorry I let her write that letter to you. She told me she was going to do it and I didn’t say anything to stop her. That must have been horrible for you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I hope that when she leaves you can actually heal.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I probably wasn’t healing, that I was doing something else, swimming around in some kind of stasis. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Kelly had picked up, in a lot of ways, right where my ex left off. Unlike things with my ex, though, I had serious doubts as to whether her behavior was intentional.

It felt like I’d been set up to fail in this friendship, this intentional community, this whatever-this-was.

Summer II

Sunglasses on, windows down, farmland rolling past, Anna and I discussed Kelly while on our way to the Rainbow Gathering.

Anna told me that Kelly said I made too big a deal out of my ex’s abuse. She’d said dealing with realizing her parents beat her as a child was worse and that I should have been making space for her to deal with that. I said that I had been making space, and Anna agreed, because she’d done the same.

“She said you needed too much support.”

“I was just getting out of an abusive relationship. It’s not like I never gave her support, too.”

I talked with Anna about the fact that Kelly’s memories might not be real. It didn’t make her father any less abusive, but it was strange that she was focusing on recovering memories. It was like she felt she needed to have that physical aspect to justify her trauma. I asked Anna if she believed Kelly.

“I don’t know.”

I told Anna that I also didn’t fully trust those therapists, especially the one who’d diagnosed me as some kind of manipulator without ever meeting me, just based on Kelly’s words — if that part was even true. Kelly’d also told us about making out with a different, male, counselor at this very same Christian therapy clinic. THAT was deeply unethical. It just didn’t seem like a quality operation.

As we drove on and the sun started to set, Anna and I tried to figure out how Anna and Kelly got involved in the first place. Much like getting together with her ex boyfriend, Anna was fuzzy on the details of the beginnings of her relationship with Kelly. After a while, we worked out what was so odd. We realized that when Anna met Kelly, she’d mentioned being rejected by a different friend group, very recently, and that within days of their meeting, they were hanging out, but what was weirdest, was that Kelly had contrived a reason for her to need Anna to give her a ride home. She wasn’t drunk, her car wasn’t actually broken, even though she said it was — she’d driven it the next day to their hang out. We tried to figure out what the game could’ve been. Why had Kelly felt the need to be deceptive with Anna from the start?

Jessica had recently left her husband when she and Kelly became friends. Anna and I figured out that Anna had only known Kelly for about two weeks longer than I had. We’d both run into her around the same time.

Anna told me about how, the first night they’d met, Kelly’d come up with an excuse to get a ride home with her, to get her alone. Anna told me about how they’d talked about Anna’s missionary father the night they met, bonded over their shared upbringing, about how they were, all of a sudden, friends after that. Anna also relayed a conversation she’d had with Kelly’s former friends. There had been a whole friend group she’d lost, the final nail going into the coffin not long before she and Anna had met. She’d burned through an entire group of people and had to start from scratch. It explained why all of her friends were so new.

Anna put her hands to her face, looking out the window into the fields in front of us, “She targeted me.”

We turned to each other and screamed.

---

When we arrived at The Gathering, a weeks-long, anarchically-organized convening of hippies, gutter punks, nomads and interlopers like ourselves, about the size of 20,000 people in a public forest each year, we got our directions from a man who spread out a map on his dirty chest for us while smoking a cigarette dangling from his lip. We hiked the six or so miles in, the tent and tent poles split between us, backpacks heavy on our shoulders.

It was while chopping beets at a table, red spreading across my fingers, at a “kitchen” being run by a family who told us they’d been briefly detained for murder in the last town they were in, that I started talking to Anna about what had happened with Kelly again. We talked about her need for male validation.

“We could never compete with that, I think,” I said while cutting through yet another beet. “As soon as she had a boyfriend, our attention suddenly wasn’t good enough.”

It was a simple process. You pulled a beet out of the solution of a water and bleach solution, wiped it off, peeled it, cut it up, and dropped the bits in a giant bowl. There was a spray bottle of bleach water, one of an uncountable amount at the gathering because keeping food-borne disease down at bay in a situation like this is paramount. We’d eat the beets I was chopping later on in the meal circle (a series of concentric rings in a field) that fed the whole of 20,000 people that night.

“I don’t think I would have left my ex if it wasn’t for her.”

“Yeah,” Anna nodded, “I’m not sure what I want to do next. I wanted to stay, but she just made me think that I wanted to put down roots here, that we had something special.”

I had finally finished the most recent draft of my novel before we’d driven off to The Gathering, and had been grateful for the space I had, at last, with Kelly gone. I asked Anna if she was going to return to the essay she was workshopping.

“Maybe, but, you know. It was weird that she got me involved in that. I was never interested in writing.”

That part stung. I knew Jessica had been a writer before she knew Kelly, but did that mean we were the only two people in that group actually interested in the writing? Kelly’s essays always seemed like a means to an end, which is hard to explain. Essays are always a way of communicating — mine are, at least — but hers were a part of the careful construction of a persona. Her writing wasn’t separate, in a lot of ways, from anything else she did, from the ways she posed or rules she tried to make us follow that put her at the center of our world, her writing wasn’t for its own sake, it was a part of a plan, whether it was there from the start or evolved over time, it was never genuine. It was a scheme. Anna was just doing what she did, and trying to fit in. Now, she was ready to move on. She told me she wanted to move to Alaska.

We kept talking, and Anna told me that Kelly had talked with her and Jessica in private, from the beginning, about how she didn’t like my feedback during the writing group. She had said I took up too much space. Anna had pushed back and said that I just wrote every week but that everyone was allowed to write every week, even if they didn’t always do that.

I squashed down the shame that came from feeling like I’d been fooled, like I’d been tricked into sharing some of the most vulnerable parts of myself, my writing included, with someone who never was actually invested in our shared growth. She’d been brainstorming for her novel for about the entire time we’d had the group, never working on it, not really. For all her talk of radical candor, she’d kept criticisms secret from me from the very beginning. It felt like I’d been set up to fail in this writer’s circle, this friendship, this intentional community, this whatever-this-was.

---

I never “recovered” anything I didn’t remember after I left my relationship. But during? I’d been made to believe so many things I’d witnessed hadn’t happened. My ex would deny things he said. He lied constantly, compulsively. I still don’t know if it was for fun or comfort. I have no way of knowing, to this day, what of the things he told me were true and which were completely made up. He also managed to, by suggestion, convince me of things that weren’t true. His favorite thing to convince me of was that I’d said something really mean or not-very-smart at a social gathering. He’d tell me about it. I’d say I didn’t remember. He’d insist. I’d say I didn’t remember that. He’d insist again. I suppose the most important thing was that, by the end of the conversation, I was left wondering, then dreading, then guilt-ridden over the idea that I might have in fact been as cruel as he’d said.

If Kelly had never mentioned recovered memories, or gaslighting, or anything she talked about, I think my healing would have been much more stunted, because I wouldn’t have done any research, wouldn’t have realized that what my ex was doing to me was intentional, designed to make me doubt everything, that my losing time was a result of the gaslighting, a manifestation of profound levels of anxiety.

Would a regular, calm friendship have allowed me to make the kinds of moves I did? Was it because Kelly wanted me untethered and on my own that she encouraged my divorce? Would a more stable person without ulterior motives have encouraged me to stay in the relationship? Yes, I think, so. In fact, most people around me encouraged me to stay in the relationship. That’s one of the reasons it was so difficult to leave.

What does it mean that I could only get away from an abusive person with the help of an, at times, equally manipulative person? Does it mean my personality is nothing more than a moon, swept up by planets with heavier gravitation? That this moment was a cosmic collision that sent me on a different course? No, I don’t think being manipulative makes you a greater person, but I do think that the not-very-manipulative among us, without self-work and intentional training to the contrary — stand very little chance of making it out unscathed when we assume everyone is acting in good faith and telling the truth. I do think that blue-fire-brightness of her personality and the fact that she’d started a writing workshop group, of all things, were two of the biggest factors when it came to me getting out. I also have to level with the fact that I had a crush on her, this straight woman, to top it all off. I got out, ultimately, because I’d do anything to keep writing, and because the love-bombing stage of our friendship made our time together intoxicating enough to help it outweigh the consequences I suffered at home.

One day during our week’s stay at The Gathering, we went to the Hare Krishna outpost because someone had told us they’d made something for folks to eat. I held out my hands to be sprayed with bleach by a tall, thin white guy with a scraggly dark beard and the kind of eyes that said he’d made a bit of a habit of talking over people who weren’t cis men.

“I’ve been seeing you around,” he said to me.

“Mmmm,” I raised my eyebrows and ignored him, took my bowl of sweetened grain and raisin dessert and sat down. All around us, the [mostly white] Hare Krishnas chanted and chatted intermittently while I commented to Anna that the food was really quite good. They handed me a pamphlet about joining, and I smiled my thanks, but I was happy to just enjoy the company. I didn’t need to do any joining at the moment, didn’t feel compelled or drawn toward anyone else.

I knew, as we hiked through that Gathering that, in fact, I’d been navigating the world alone for the duration of my abusive relationship. Everything I’d accomplished had been in spite of my ex’s resistance. And Kelly? She’d been hurt, too. Her memories didn’t have to be real for her pain to be real. She also went her own way before she took things too far. They’d both been obsessed with constructing shells. They were jealous people, because they thought everyone was always and forever out to get them. Kelly seemed like, in some ways, with us, she was just reenacting what she’d learned from her upbringing, the ways that she’d been shown how to relate to other people by her father, gathering Anna and Jessica and me together into her own proto-cult and then pushing us away when we didn’t act just the way she wanted. My ex’s art and Kelly’s seemed like it existed to serve their ego in the most basic way. I don’t think Kelly would ever understand someone who just did something for their own edification, someone who wrote romances for fun like Jessica did, someone who spent years on a still-unpublished fantasy novel like I did, someone who just wanted to be in love with the work.

I knew then, that regardless of how much she or anyone else had hurt me, or doubted me, or wanted me to stop being myself, that I was still here, still alive, still going to keep writing. It was a sweet realization, to wish Kelly happiness, to know that I was capable of finding my own. And the snack really was delicious, too.