“Somehow, no matter how in love I am with the world, I can’t find a single face in the crowd to weather this wreck of a storm with me.”
-Ellise Ramos
I hate to be the one who has to say something like this.
Maybe I don’t know enough men. Despite once marrying one, having another as a best friend, and having a son.
I am surrounded by them, but also, maybe, I don’t know them.
Maybe the reason I find it more comfortable to befriend men is because they never really show me who they are. They hide their struggle, which makes them easier to read – much easier than women – endless lines of women weeping, harassed, lonely, grieving – there is suffering everywhere when I am with women.
But men – they make their intentions known, quite early in the conversation. Either they want to decimate my body, or they don’t. The ones that do – stop the conversation willingly once I’ve made my intentions clear that I don’t plan on getting decimated, not by you, not by an ex-lover, not by anyone.
(At least, not anymore.)
They are more than happy to leave. The more cowardly ones ghost, which is more than fine with me, less pretend goodbyes to have to traipse through, the better.
The ones who have no interest in decimation, however, stay. And they become friends – for decades. We eat pizzas, play video games, watch scary torture movies just to see if the other one would squirm. They don’t invite me to go shopping, to get my nails done, to take me to see rom-coms or go to Katy Perry concerts which is all beneficial to me.
And they never try.
They get drunk and talk about the women they’re in love with and they get sad and they never try. And it makes me feel comfortable to get just as drunk with them so I can talk about a husband who possibly no longer loves me and I don’t try either. Because there is nothing there but uncomplicated friendship and it is too beautiful to destroy with something as messy and trivial as “decimation”.
But the women I know, they struggle and they cry.
They fight for everything they want and convince themselves they got what they wanted even when they lose. I then become the one person in their lives who refuse to acquiesce, who refuse to deny reality with them and shake their shoulders and remind them of who they once were, remind them that the things they wanted are not worth forgetting. That one can keep trying, even if it means starting from zero.
And some of them understand, the rare few. Of course, most of them stop talking to me. I am not supportive enough they say, not supportive in the way they want me to be, and it frustrates them, no matter if they’ve seen this same exact thing happen to many women in my life who came and disappeared when I refused this submissive persona they’ve moulded themselves to become – and no matter how much they are troubled by the blindness of the women who have given up, who can’t find enough fight in themselves to face their real enemy so they create me to become one for them – how unfortunate, how much they refuse to see, a sort of self-decimation, somehow, even them, even my maid of honour who once walked me down the aisle, choose to forget themselves and me, rather than changing their lives to take from it what they truly want, like the things they told me when they felt truly free, that I’ve stubbornly held on to – this glimpse of undeniable happiness I refuse to let go of – or so they tell me.
And for the rest – well, the rest do listen, but in a twisted, co-dependent way, in which I become the way to this new, challenging life they aspire to. The most confusing thing about this is that, out of what I can only assume as desperation, is that they try. They try with me. They tell me how in love they are and how I’ve changed their life.
And I tell them, in their drunken, miserable stupor, this is not love, this is loneliness, this is confusion, this is cowardice.
-Ellise Ramos
I shake their shoulders to bring back some sense, vibrating this woman back to logic – can’t you see that I’m just as miserable and drunk as you are, that I am just as lonely, just as confused, just as cowardly – and in this rare, brief honest look at myself – they recoil, they shiver in disgust, they back away and shake their head and mutter to themselves, how could I possibly have known, how could I have been ever convinced by this woman, by this lunatic, that she was once the answer, because she was supposed to be brave.
Why we can’t storm this weather together is something I’ve mulled over a million times before. Why one always have to face the struggle alone and fight in the dark is beyond me. Somehow, no matter how in love I am with the world, I can’t find a single face in the crowd to weather this wreck of a storm with me.
"There is so much chaos, and it's all around us, and one by one we turn against each other and fight a million wars on our own, our hearts on our fists, guarded by looming, majestic concrete walls that keeps us apart, our hands closed over our hearts, our stupid, stupid hearts."
-Ellise Ramos
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