Letters to My New No One

“For now, all I want to say is that I’m extremely worried about you. And about Jamie. And I’m saying that because I love you.”

Do you remember that day we both played hooky from teaching to wander around our college undergrad campus? Less than a month before, I had sat center stage in front of the entire student body, trying not to shake-cry too hard as a six-year-old cancer survivor shaved off my foot-long curls. You’d recently traded your long, mouse brown hair for an almost-black pixie. There was a darkness—an edginess—about our new mirror-reflections, something reminiscent of words like “punk” and “survivor.” We were each delightfully transformed, grinning often at the gaze of the new stranger in the mirror, open to some sort of something on which we hadn’t quite yet put our fingers.

And when our high school students had begun to whisper about the meaning behind our new boyish hairstyles? You laughed when I told you.

“Like either of us would ever even consider being a lesbian,” you said to me. I tried my best then—as I try my best now—to smile and hope the hurt didn’t show in my eyes.

On our drive home from Ann Arbor, after a day of nostalgic photo opportunities and bad college cafeteria food, one of us brought up the topic of our bodies. How far would this metamorphosis reach now that we’d cut off all our hair? Who could we be, with these appearances that were more chrysalis than crystalline? Me—I started wearing a bra when I was eight, had my first period at ten. The new terrain of my changing form had been explored with my own curious fingers more than once since I’d hit puberty, and I laid the truth of all my fleshy shame at your feet. Women weren’t supposed to even give a side-eye to sexual desire before marriage; I knew this. It was part of why I’d always felt helpless, out of place, incomplete inside my skin. Shaving off all my hair, I told you, was the first time I’d ever felt like I had a healthy control of my physical form.

Silence crackled audibly after my confessions. I shifted slightly in my driver’s seat and tried to keep my eyes on the road slipping away beneath us. Then your throat constricted in a strangled yelp, and words began to pour out of your mouth—as if you couldn’t hold them in if you wanted to. You told me how your own mother had nearly died from giving birth to your brother and you. How you and your husband had been trying for two years now to get pregnant to no avail. There was a laundry list of fertility tests, and now your doctor had most recently recommended a physical therapist to help you learn how to relax your vagina. Your voice was smallest when you said, “All I want is to be a mother, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to become.”

In that moment, I worried about you. I had spoken of wanting, the sweaty press of someone else’s skin against my own. And you, even after years of being married to your college sweetheart, didn’t speak of physical connection with your husband, of whether or not he was a gentle or thoughtful lover. Instead, so many of your hopes and dreams were tied up in an end result, the equivalent combination of two cells in a petri dish.

You smiled at me then, the corners of your mouth still weighed down by the hurt you carried. If I wanted to, I could have traced the fracture lines that were already forming along your jawline.

Do you remember that day, No One? Do you remember that millisecond when we sat next to each other, raw and aching and alike? I think it started then—when I began to understand we each have a very different understanding of the word “wanting.”

“I know that we had started to drift a bit, and I feel so far away from you now, so startled by everything that I honestly don’t know if you would want someone as a close friend who can’t in any way celebrate this with you. Or what our friendship will look like now that these words have been spoken.”

When I first called you “friend” in the margins of our post-college years, you were the deviant pastor’s wife with a tattoo tucked behind your left ear, a person who always talked of the nose and eyebrow piercings you wanted to get someday—but never actually would. Your smile grew a little unruly when you told people you were a closet Beastie Boys groupie or about your dreams of becoming a college professor of Victorian literature. You never wanted to be the stay-at-home pastor’s wife who only saw the world through the lens of her children’s lives.

We came together in late-night coffee shop hours, ripe with cinnamon and animated conversations about young adult books and British movies and botched attempts at Pinterest art projects. Once, we tried our hand at homemade sushi together. You made twenty-three cupcakes for my twenty-third birthday. When we traveled together to Boston for an English teachers’ conference, I let you squeeze my hand white-tight to help you survive every piece of turbulence that rattled our plane.

What you don’t know—what you never knew—was the distance that started between us on the first day, the fissure that became more cracked and bruised with time. I’ve never told you about the sub-zero mid-January day (right after I’d just come out to my brother) when I spent hours carrying boiling pots of water down to my apartment complex parking lot to scrub the vomit off the side of my car. Because I knew you were coming to visit me and couldn’t comprehend a situation when someone would get drunk to the point of wobble-wide nausea. Or the time I bought you tickets to go see Les Mis in Chicago with my life partner Jamie and me, and I told you that we could save money if we got a hotel room with two queen beds. “Jamie and I can share,” I shrugged. Even though that meant her body was pressed tight against mine in a possessive S, while you had the other mattress all to yourself. Every time you visited my apartment, I guaranteed there was no sign of Jamie, never any sign that she really even existed in my life—to the point of upturning picture frames, hiding mementos, putting her favorite chips in the back of my pantry.

You asked me once why Jamie was so obsessed with me, and I couldn’t tell you even then that I was obsessed with her too. Because I couldn’t shake your hopeful eye-crinkle when you’d introduced me to your single brother and he looked me up and down in approval. Because I knew this would draw a line between the good Christian girl I needed to be and the deviant queer I was becoming in the pit of my stomach. Because if I told you—if I named my non-heteronormative identity out loud to you—I knew the distance between us would expand to a canyon. I knew you’d never want to look at me again. (I didn’t know if I’d want to look at myself again.)

Then when you found a pregnancy that promised to last, something in you became misaligned. You had to get rid of your cats Puck and Winston because your husband read somewhere that they might hurt your pending tiny human. When you moved to Pennsylvania for your husband’s first pastoral call, you struggled finding friends because you went nowhere beyond the church and the community college where your husband drove you to teach classes a few nights a week. Soon you’d quit working as a professor as well, spending your time instead building your mother-nest and working on your debut work as a Christian romance author.

Almost two years later, I met you again with a homegrown nine-month-old boy in your arms. We both shifted nervously in nutmeg-scented coffee shop air as I tried my best to catch a glimpse of the tattoo you now hid behind shoulder-length, chocolate-dyed hair. I was stronger then, even if you couldn’t see it. I still couldn’t say out loud to you who Jamie was to me or what rainbows now meant in my life. But I could tell you about how one of my students had been forced into conversion therapy by his parents, how he’d confessed to me that he’d almost killed himself over the repeated promise that God wouldn’t love him if he chose to be gay.

There was a pause before your response—much like there had been once, after I confessed my skin-sins on a drive home from Ann Arbor. But this time, your body was post-childbirth soft. Something about this realized dream had left your shoulders pliant and folded inward, where I had once only seen a straight spine and fierce wanderlust. This time, your mouth opened and closed like a fish and then you turned to your husband for the right words to say.

“They’re just worried about their son’s eternal soul,” he said all in one breath, a pounded fist on the coffee shop table for emphasis. And it wasn’t until he was done talking that you nodded your head in agreement. Clearly this is what you thought too, what you’d always thought all along but needed your husband to say for you.

I like to remember you as the girl who marathon-ed superhero films with me when we each had too many student essays to grade, as the woman who stood on the top of her desk during an especially raucous Disney sing-along. You starred as Lady Capulet in the production of Romeo and Juliet that I directed one summer. I was the one who let you out of your classroom when you managed to lock yourself inside one day after school. On snow days, we risked icy roads to make it to the mall and try on too-expensive dresses. But the voice of that person is now only a memory, lost in the folds of the prayer you now whisper (in your husband’s dialect) to wipe my gay away.

“Honestly, I just need a chance to gather my words.”

There was a person you once knew. Her name was Alicia, like me. But she was thirty pounds overweight and lost in the disappointment of everything she could never add up to be.

You met her not long after she’d accepted the defeat of job security over her lifelong dream of living in a big city far away from the American Midwest. There was a cat, some old high school friends she’d outgrown, and big adult bills that suddenly needed to be paid. None of it was easy. All of it was isolating on its best days.

After you and she were awkwardly introduced by a mutual friend, you invited her to your house once for a midsummer tea party. She could barely fit into any of her clothes anymore, but she managed to squeeze into a hand-me-down skirt from an old roommate. And when she arrived at your place with a plate of cookies in hand, you gave her one of the first reasons to smile that she’d found in weeks. Suddenly, in your presence, it didn’t matter that she’d found a job very close to her parents’ home right after college, or that she hadn’t yet achieved even one of her dreams for her adult life—or that she had begun eating her feelings instead of facing out loud that she was in love with a girl.

You saw her as she wanted to be seen in those afternoon hours you two spent together: bubbly, sincere, full of off-the-wall anecdotes—nothing more. And she was grateful to you for not looking any further.

There are so many moments like this in your years together as friends with this person, each one double-layered and often pressed too tightly together to peel apart. On one side is the card of two lonely women, each who found each other in a new city and rested in the promise of their newly formed friendship. And on the other? That’s where she hid all the things she was too afraid could make her lose you.

“Please, just let me say this once, though I’m sure you’ve heard it before: just because something makes you feel happy does not make it right. It does not make God’s word mean something else. I’m sorry if this upsets or offends you, but I want to be a good and honest friend to you, and so I must speak what I know to be the truth.”

You know, I never knew I was invisible until the day I was first seen by a boy; I was seventeen years old.

He was tall, the kind of teenage boy who’s more arms and legs than certainty. And even though my friend was the one who slipped him a note at a speech competition one half-away Saturday morning, I was the one whose email he asked for. I didn’t even think he was that attractive (but I chicken-typed notes to him nightly for almost a month).

I was raised in a Christian church where, even today, women are taught that Eves are only ever designed to use plural pronouns. And it wasn’t until I was given this opportunity of becoming an “us” with this boy that I realized just how much of my life—my self—I’d been missing out on. (We need eggs. We have plans Friday night. We loved that movie.)

Suddenly, I had a reason to think carefully about what clothes I should wear each day. When I read a book, I had to decide if my boy would like talking to me about it. I was especially careful to take extra care with my reflection, just in case this boy might happen to see me. (His gaze gave me meaning, and I didn’t want to lose that.)

Days before we went on our first date, my father talked to me about how I carried more value than I gave myself, that he only hoped I would end up with a man who would treat me with the respect and grace he thought I deserved. There was subtext about waiting for marriage, about the corruptive nature of sexual flames in the hands of a young woman. But I already knew I was willing to do anything for this boy, as long as he kept looking at me with that crooked smile he stored somewhere between his cheekbones. (“Christian” and “good” were becoming a little less synonymous in my life.)

Of course, the story ended in apathetic teenage tragedy. He was mostly interested in legs spread open easily for his entrance, and my trick-knee morals flared up in the final quarter. But more than anything, I realized—like a rock to the stomach—that I didn’t need his eyes to find value in myself. I was already more diva than wallflower anyway, and I could sparkle as a singular star in the cosmos.

No One, I believe in a Christian God that is greater than all the knot-tied rules that have come before us. Who do you believe in?

“No matter what, I will always care deeply about you. Always love you and want what is best for you, truly. And I will always pray for you, as I always have done.”

There was a span of almost six years that you didn’t know my deepest secret, that my queer bedfellow at night would make me more foul than fish in your eyes.

In those months, you were the Jonathan to my David—a copilot riding together the turbulence of each other’s newly minted adult lives. But I’ve also come to understand—like a fist to the face—I don’t need your eyes crinkle-tight smiling in my life anymore.

You sent me a handful of emails not long after Christmas this year, in which you shared how you had discovered my relationship with Jamie through social media and how you now felt it was your duty to extol the judgment of the Christian church upon my sinful soul. I know your heart was well-intended, that you were speaking out of your own hurt over my perceived deceit for most of our friendship. You genuinely believed your words could turn me away from eternal fire and toward the arms of the right sort of life companion for me. I write this to you now as my own version of an apology for the words left caught in my throat, as a memorial of who we were to each other for over half a decade, but, thanks to this, can no longer ever be again.

It’s possible that this isn’t all just on your thin shoulders. It’s probable that you are now the face of every hurt I’ve faced after coming out eight years into a queer relationship. And yet, there are also things that now can’t be unsaid between us. You have chosen your path, and I can proudly say that I have too.

I have removed the photos of you from my walls. I smashed the purple ceramic bowl you once made me for my birthday. Each day, more of you is missing, until all that is left are a few crumpled notes we once wrote to each other in the bottom of my desk drawer.

These letters to my new no one.

-Alicia Drier

Alicia Drier is a recent transplant to Indianapolis, where she is a high school English teacher and donut shop aficionado. She has previously self-published two novels through Lulu.com; been published by the literary magazines Confluence, Obra/Artifact, and Tilde; been featured on the podcast The Other Stories; and worked as a writer at Study Breaks Magazine.