You Thought You Loved Me

Whew.

I think I was born feeling guilty, which is to say I popped into the world the ideal future Roman Catholic. My parents say that when I was little, I used to cry when I even considered breaking a rule. It was kind of an easy tell, as you can imagine.

They would kindly ask me if I was thinking of doing something bad, and I would wail, “Yes!” and then I wouldn’t do it.

This doesn’t mean I have refrained from sinning throughout my life. I have heard that “to sin” means “to miss the mark,” and I don’t know if that’s true in the etymological sense. But it feels true, and while feelings aren’t facts, this one will suffice for now.

I am, in the main, a decent human being. But I have done shitty things on purpose, and I have done shitty things by mistake, and I have done shitty things just because I had the time that day and needed to entertain myself.

I don’t feel good about any of it. And I do not quite know how to forgive myself for anything ever, although I am trying. I have too often jumped to “forgive” others when, really, I was just making nice.

I am going to break one of my own cardinal rules of writing here, a thing that I tell people when I teach writing (Promotional break: if you need that sort of teacher or coach, here’s info on how to work with me.)

I always tell my students and clients, “Wait a bit after an event before writing about it in a personal essay or memoir. Take some time. Get some perspective. The work will be better, and you’ll protect yourself from writing something thoughtless during a passionate moment. When your nervous system is regulated and calmer, you can still summon the passion of your reaction, but from a safer distance.”

But tonight something happened, and I read a very good memoir after it happened, and I am up late doing laundry, and I cried a little about the thing that happened but have perhaps not cried enough, and so I am going to do the thing I tell my students not to do, and I am going to tell you about something that just occurred.

First, the memoir I read: “I Thought You Loved Me” by comix artist and writer Mari Naomi. Mari created the Cartoonists of Color Database, the Queer Cartoonists Database and the Disabled Cartoonists Database. Mari is very talented.

I like Mari very much, instinctively, though we don’t know one another well. We met in person for the first time in 2016 or 2017 at an event at the Central Library in the Los Angeles Public Library system. We were both onstage doing author things with other authors.

At least, I think that’s where we met.

Mari feels like somebody I know or have known a long time or grew up with, though this is not true. They were born in 1973 in Texas and grew up in California. I was born in 1980 in New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey. Why do I feel like we dated or went to the same high school or something?

My memory is strange.

Mari’s memory is strange, too, a subject they explore in this multimedia graphic tale about their friendship with a woman they call Jodie. They find it hard to remember events in this 14-year friendship, delving into old calendars and journals to determine why they’ve blotted so much out. You will understand why, when you read it. You will also understand why the best friends became estranged.

Publishers Weekly calls the book “a captivating collage of cartoons, photos, and text” that is “equal parts wistful and skeptical, wise and all too human.” I agree with that assessment. I read it all in one sitting, after the strange thing happened, tonight.

I don’t know how Mari went through all those old diaries without having a full breakdown and running into a local body of water whilst screaming. I am in the process of getting rid of all my old journals. I have kept them since I was in the first grade, and I find them embarrassing. It is painful to re-read them. I try not to catch even a glimpse of what’s in them as I destroy them.

I write them and then I rip them up, months or years later. I wish I could afford a giant paper shredder to just eat them all at once. I wish I could erase everything unhealed that wakes me up spinning out or keeps me locked in nightmares. Mostly, it’s stuff I’ve said or done. Mostly.

Tonight, right after I opened the media mailer containing Mari’s memoir and took a cute social media-friendly photo with my cat and popped it on Instagram and BlueSky to promote the book, which I knew would be a great read, I received a message that shook me up.

It was, out of the blue and entirely unexpected, an apology from a friend from whom I am estranged.

Ain’t life and art and (fine, fucking fine) Mercury retrograde funny like that?

We haven’t spoken in months, by my choice. They did something that hurt me, and confused me as well, which was almost as disorienting as the part that hurt. I had to say a prayer before I listened to it.

I am not used to saying that I was hurt. I am used to feeling guilty about hurting others. I am not used to receiving an apology.

The message was very kind and sounded heartfelt and it knocked the wind out of me. I put down my phone and the new book I’d just received, because I am practicing a thing where I just feel feelings as they happen instead of stuffing them down and doing something else.

I practice this sometimes, anyway. Not always. But I try.

They say they love me, and I take them at their word. I love them, I think, or I did, or thought I did. I at least want to protect them.

I don’t know what to do about them, but that’s been true nearly from the start of our relationship, which has stretched on rather longer than I had realized and which is maybe not actually a friendship so much as a union of two unchecked children, except along the way one of the children got a good therapist and got sober and is trying, as best she can, to be some kind of actual adult.

This is not to say the other party is a child. I think we both tried to be mature and well-behaved and have boundaries and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. This is me figuring it out, in public but not. Writers get to do that, which is bad and good and sometimes we miss the mark and sometimes we don’t.

It’s complicated, like all the other things people write about in memoirs and personal essays and sometimes also poetry.

I think I loved who I wanted them to be for me, which was a provably impossible fantasy. As for why they say they love me, I do not know. That’s none of my business, in the end.

Sometimes in this life you cross paths with somebody who is fucked up in the exact way you need them to be fucked up, because their wound fits into yours so well. You’re a stone statue yearning to be real and they are the right magic amulet to make you human, you think, but it isn’t true. You’re just a shitty rusted lock and everyone who looks good is a skeleton key.

I guess it isn't that complicated, after all.

Anyway. I don’t know what to say to them, or if I’ll say anything at all. I know I can’t speak when it feels dangerous, and it does feel dangerous. I am tired of loving, and liking, good people who are not good for me. It’s better than consorting with flaming trashbags, but it still stinks.

This is what writers do: we think too much, and we say too much, and we think about each other and we write about each other and we write with, for, to, and at each other.

This person isn’t a writer, actually. I wanted to claim they were. I don’t know why. It sounded good in my head. But they’re not. They do something else that’s creative. Every artist is a nightmare, but our methods do differ somewhat.

You should read Mari’s book, though. Now that’s a motherfucking writer.