In the Dream House

When other teenagers were figuring out what good and bad relationships looked like, I was busy being extremely weird

How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”?

How do you get someone you want to want you?

You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

Your mind indeed is tired. Your mind so tired that it can no longer work at all. You do not think. You dream. Dream all day long. Dream everything. Dream maliciously and incessantly. Don’t you know that by now?

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending.

Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.

There isn’t a lot of writing about queer domestic abuse and sexual assault. But what I did find, kept me going. I read Conner Habib’s heart-stopping essay “If You Ever Did Write Anything about Me, I’d Want It to Be about Love” in the immediate aftermath of my abuse, and it devastated me and also gave
me something to hold on to. A few years later, Jane Eaton Hamilton’s exquisite “Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers” gave me new ways to think about what had happened to me. When I was trying to finish this memoir, Leah Horlick’s lush and devastating poetry collection For Your Own Good slayed me with its beauty. Melissa Febos’s essay “Abandon Me” traced queer relationship trauma with brilliance and candor. A chapter in Sawyer Lovett’s Retrospect: A Tazewell’s Favorite Eccentric Zine Anthology—“Hello…”—came to me just when I needed it. Terry Castle’s The Professor made me laugh out loud more than once, which was a pretty shocking thing to do in the middle of writing this book.