Once upon a time you were fifteen-years old. You were fifteen-years old and learning about love. You were boy crazy and doing the thing that you did when you were first learning to play Double Dutch — when you had to time your feet to jump between two ropes moving in opposite directions while everyone was watching.
There was a rhythm to it and you had to focus on the girls who held the rope as it shifted. You had to pull each leg up just in time without getting caught. At my school it was just girls who played Double Dutch. Occasionally a boy would come over and mess with the rope. Or jump in and get hit in the ankle. Laugh it off. Walk away.
But you were dead fucking serious about jumping rope. You would tie jump ropes to the ends of things and work on your timing. Took great pride in your ability to acclimate to the movements of other people’s hands. To push the air in front of you in tandem with the circling of two different directions until it was safe to jump in.
You stopped jumping rope in junior high and became obsessed with boys instead. And when people said things like “I’ll show you the ropes” you thought about the jumping, remembered how to pay attention. Where to put your hands.
I have been thinking so much lately about the emphasis we put on big moment trauma as these blasts that immediately shift us. How for me, that has not been the case. The invisibility of moments that didn’t outwardly break me were where I became my most fragile.
We are given casts for broken limbs for which to heal and language to name our most traumatic events but what of the emotional bruises we are never quite able to place? When you know where your scars have come from you can learn to circumvent specific injury. But when the pain is small enough to ignore… When you learn to brush off mild scratching, are told, ‘if there’s is no blood, you’re probably fine,’ you learn to believe you are probably fine.
It was the seemingly innocuous years of pre-pubescence that trained me not to hold the ropes steady but to jump through them. On bruised legs, scratched but not bleeding. Long before I ever broke a bone.
It was an art back then. Knowing when to time your footsteps, how to lift your shoe at the precise moment when the rope hit the ground as not to get caught and trip.
This is how you learned to be loved. Not by being yourself but by paying such close attention to the needs of others. Specifically boys. Forging your identity not in your image but from theirs. By following the rhythm of other people’s (t)ropes, you were safe to jump.
You’ve written about this before, of course. But it’s easy to paraphrase one’s adolescence and a very different story to set off on a paper trail. Beyond that, this is apparently the story you feel you have to tell over and over. You are Humpty Dumpty, who, in having great falls, learns to put herself back together again only to climb back onto the wall having learned absolutely nothing.
***
Now you are 42. You are 42 and you have just reconnected with the boy who broke your heart in high school. The kind of heartbreak that took over your formative years and made you hate yourself. Like, actually hate yourself no hyperbole.
You sort of know this but it’s been so long you can’t really remember. So much has happened in twenty-five years and while you know the house is haunted, you seldom make your way inside to hunt for ghosts.
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