confessions from the lady in blue
Just before midnight on May 1st, 2013, my best friend, Dina*, and her same-age uncle, Tommy*, dropped me off at my mother's house and I was vibrating through my skin with a high only a good movie could give.
Although I was ambivalent to the book during high school and hated the long and white reimaginings on film, I couldn't miss a Leonardo DiCaprio film, with a soundtrack produced by Jay Z; even if it had ol' nobody do nothing, Toby Maguire. Leo's performance in The Great Gatsby did what F. Scott couldn't; it broke my heart. I felt the weight of every gaze he threw at Daisy, and every slight tremor of his hand when he went to touch her. It reminded me of how much I loved Derek during freshman and sophomore year of high school before I had to choose between his happiness and my sanity. The runtime for the movie is 2 hours and 23 minutes, and I cried for 97% of its entirety (1% was the credits, and 2% for when ol' boring face self Toby Maguire was the only one on-screen).
Since seventh grade, I have both hated and loved Tommy, and watching the movie next to him was making it palpable. Sitting atop the vibrations of the surround sound trickling through the seats, I kept stealing glances over at Tommy trying to decide if this was a time where I wanted to kiss him or pinch him on the back of his neck. During Leo and Daisy's montage of a rekindled romance, I decided this was a sign from God and prepared myself to finish Tommy with "The Kissing" move.
Side note: "The Kissing," move is something I created and perfected on my first date with a kid I met on MySpace, who later became my boyfriend, and then eventually ghosted me.
1: sit next to the person and, for the love of all that is beautiful about Beyonce, don't stink.
2: brush against the person's hand to establish a baseline of interest and intimacy. Sometimes they will grab your hand, or, if they are timid they will brush back, which is your sign to go in for the grab and hold.
Note: If they pull their hand away, don't convince yourself that they did it by accident; they didn't. They do not want to hold your hand, so stuff your face with popcorn and eat your shame silently.
3: now that you are holding hands, maneuver your body so that you can comfortably lean your head on their shoulder, while holding onto their hand, and simultaneously pretending to watch the movie you probably didn't want to see in the first place.
4: take a deep breath.
5: lift your head off of their shoulder and softly kiss them right before their ear. Once. Then, put your head back down.
6: take another deep breath, lift your head off of their shoulder, and softly kiss them right before their ear twice. Then, put your head back down.
7: take another deep breath, lift your head off of their shoulder, and softly kiss them right before their ear twice. Then, slowly and deeply kiss them down the side of their cheek until you get to their mouth.
8: YOU HOLD RIGHT THERE, DO NOT GO IN FOR THE KISS.
9: they will kiss you, and you will kiss them back. And something, something, something, marriage?
I was about to execute the second step, when Tommy snapped his gaze on me and whispered with pure resentment and disgust, "Are you seriously fucking crying right now? Fucking weird." So I pinched the back of his hand and told him, "Fuck off you fucking fuck."
I cried through the rest of the movie, eager to be loved like Daisy, or to love someone with a fever like Leo, or to, at the very least, be a witness to the all-consuming lightning of burning love like ol' snooze fest Toby Maguire. But instead, I was me and in between love interests, and desperate enough to start drafting the sexually frustrated and awkwardly tense sext I was going to send Tommy that night.
On the ride home, Dina drove through every speed bump and pothole, and Tommy mumbled quips at my expense, as I swiped through OkCupid's nearest matches, pointedly not checking to see if Johnny had responded to my messages. Johnny was black, three years older than me, lived in Boston, and, according to his profile picture, he loved a good cardigan; which, when added together, made us an 86% match according to the great OKC algorithm. Eventually, I decided to deal with my nerves and checked the app's inbox to see that Jay had messaged me. He must've been swiping through the app as well because one second after I responded to his message, he sent one back. The banter was effortless and I was vulnerable and wanting, so as soon as I crossed the threshold into my bedroom, I asked him to call me and we spent the next four hours talking on the phone.
And that was that. Or rather, that was that for me.
It would not have made the difference if I had known the term, "gaslighting," back when I chased after, loved after, and finally dated Johnny. Sometimes, naming the beast does not tame it; it only makes you more knowledgeable of your own complicity in your own emotional destruction.
Being in love with Johnny taught me some very important lessons, like:
1. How hard I can howl in ache without alerting the people in the room next to me
2. How to survive off of minuscule amounts of affection for extended periods
3. How great I am at shopping for men's clothing
a. Subsequently, how cheap Target appears to be but is not
4. How little my own money means to me when I am in love with someone
5. How to shrink myself exponentially as to not threaten or emasculate the man I love
6. How amazing it feels to lay naked in a sweaty bed with someone you adore
7. How easy it is for me to overlook someone's shortcomings when I feel lucky to be chosen
8. How quickly I will sell my own soul to be allowed to love a man who is determined to hurt me,
9. And, how a man can lay on my lap and moisten my thighs with tears, and still try to break me
The first night I had spoken to Johnny, I ended the phone call telling him all the good words I had for him in my heart and between my legs. And then I told him that in August, I would be moving to New York to finish my last two years of college at Pace University.
A few months before Johnny and I matched on OkCupid, I had been addicted to Lena Dunham's Girls and reruns of Inside the Actor's Studio hosted by the late Titan, James Lipton. I found it far too easy to convince myself to transfer to a college in New York City to become a television writer, because the fat, black, awkward, mentally ill, creative perspective was what the industry needed, and, more importantly, it was what I was willing to deliver. I had no applied interest in creating film or television, but I had so many things I wanted to tell people and thought that becoming a screenwriter would be the easiest mode of communication.
Spoiler alert: I hated living in New York after the first two months. It made me anxious, it always smelled like sewer shit, and I found the people, the pigeons, and the squirrels unpredictable. After my first semester, I learned that I didn't care for screenwriting, at all. Not even a little bit. It bored me and made me resentful of myself.
Luckily, Johnny had told me that distance didn't matter. He said that we could figure something out, which I immediately took to mean: fall in love with this man, and do not let go. And so I did.
Over the next few months, I ignored the fact that he overcooked his food, or that his carpet in his bedroom was cheap and filthy. I even pretended not to care when he would refer to celebrities by their first name; I remember once thinking to myself, "It's Nicki MINAJ to you, you ignorant slut." When he was mad at me, he would recite the ever-growing list of everything he disliked about me, and then he would purposely ignore me for hours on end, leading me to blow up his phone with my insecurities and toxic need for reassurance. Even if he was wrong, our fights would end with me begging and apologizing enough for the both of us, pleading with him to give me another chance.
When things were good, they were really good. He could make me laugh from the ashy soles of my feet, and sometimes when we fell asleep next to each other, he would hold onto me like I was important to him. Like I mattered. Like I existed. And with every good day we had, I found more things to admire about him, and repeatedly praise him for; however mediocre they were. It's pathetic, but in those moments it felt just like love, and even if I could not be loved by him in return, I loved being able to simply give that love to someone.
After a summer of forehead kisses, cuddling, inside jokes, and depression-inducing arguments, my moving date hung in the corner with a stench we couldn't ignore. Johnny and I were holding onto each other with fear and hunger and something else I could not easily define, and it was consuming me, and I was happy to be consumed by something. One night right before I had to leave, we sat on my mother's couch searching through OnDemand for a movie to ignore and make out to when I saw Leo's self-assured smirk in a black suit, surrounded by ornate black and gold detailing. Without asking him whether or not he wanted to watch it, I added $3.99 onto my mother's cable bill and started, The Great Gatsby. This time around, when Leo and Daisy were finding pleasure in the presence of one another, I felt my heart seize itself because here I was, found in the love I had wanted months ago, and willingly walking away from it to make something of myself. Before I could start "The Kissing" move, Johnny laid back, put his head on my lap, and cried.
The problems Johnny and I had while we lived 20 minutes away, swelled when I moved to New York. We would have terrible fights followed by bed-shaking phone sex. We would talk about the future and the past with resentment and longing. At one point, he visited me and went to a comedy show and got caught in a rain that drenched us down to our socks, where a comedian said we looked like a young Cosby couple. That night, as he showered, and I dried our socks on the heater in the room, I let him hear me sing for the first time, and when he returned to the bedroom he said nothing as he kissed me on the forehead and ran his hands through my box braids. We made love on that twin-sized mattress, and with every pulsing move, I felt us moving both towards each other and away from one another at the same time. At twenty, I had convinced myself that Johnny was the love of my life, and acted as such, even though he clearly hadn't made his mind up about me, and constantly made sure I knew that I was always a misstep from being discarded.
It was a week or two after his second visit to New York that he stopped responding to my text messages and calls. I was still broken when I boarded the Greyhound bus back home for winter break, feeling like Sheila from Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?; swearing to myself, "I'm going [to Boston] to save my [toxic relationship]."1 But, of course, it didn't work out. He had decided that he didn't want me anymore, and after all the begging and crying that a heart could sustain, I realized he was telling the truth and that it was over. Our relationship, or whatever the fuck it was, was over.
I got pregnant towards the end of that winter break, and by the end of March, I wasn't pregnant anymore. The first time I had mentioned the pregnancy to Johnny, was when I was a block away from the clinic. He didn't text me during the two hours I had waited to be seen, so I went through with it. Me. Jamilla VanDyke-Bailey. I, at twenty years old got an abortion in a New York City clinic, and the only one who even knew I was pregnant was the same person that escorted me back to my dorm room after the procedure; my college roommate, Priscilla Pacheco. Just before the procedure, I had to take out my septum ring and in the bathroom I sobbed myself horse, without tears, ashamed of who I had allowed myself to become.
When I found out I was pregnant, Priscilla and I had been in the urgent care room for at least an hour and a half. I was hungry and bitchy, and she was loud and dramatic. We kept telling stories and laughing to keep our minds off of the truth we knew was waiting in the nurse kiosk on the other side of that door. The doctor, a scrawny tall man with a curly afro of salt and pepper hair smiled and told me the good news. Being nice, he asked, "Would you like to hear your baby's heartbeat?"
And without pause, consideration, or hesitation I said, "no." I said, "I need to get an abortion."
I asked, "Can I get dressed to go now? Can I leave now? Please?"
The doctor didn't look surprised, or disappointed. He nodded and said, "Yes. I am going to sign off on your discharge papers, so you can go ahead and start getting dressed. The nurse will be here in a minute."
That night, while Priscilla worked out in our dorm's gym, I took a hot shower and cried and scratched my skin until the water burned me nice and raw. With every deep etching into myself, I let loose an empty howl into the rushing water as I imagined my father's voice saying Mac MacGuff's line from Juno when he found out his daughter was pregnant, "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when."2
I cried because I knew that I didn't have the strength to look my father in the face and say Juno's, "I don't know what kind of girl I am." Even though it was true. Because, how do you tell your Dad that you're pregnant by a person who never loved you and eagerly treated you like shit when you can't even say it to yourself?
By the time Priscilla returned to our room, I was showered, lotioned, and pretending to be asleep. In her thick Bronx-Dominican accent, she let me know, "You know I love you Jamilla. And I understand because, at the end of the day, you gotta do what's right for you. So there is nothing to be ashamed of. You gotta do what's right for you." Once the bathroom door shut, and the shower water turned on, I cried myself to sleep, noiselessly, and with a little less shame than before.
I prayed myself into a dissociative state through the majority of the clinic visit as I listened to Common's "Retrospect for life," on repeat. When they brought me into the blindingly white room filled with white people in white jackets, white masks, and white gloves, my mind wandered to the words of the poem, "tubes tables white washed windows," by Ntozake Shange.3
Someone held my forearm and guided me towards the medical table. A breeze grazed by my bare ass as I moved with my head low like a pissy puppy.
tubes tables white washed windows grime from age wiped over once legs spread anxious
Someone helped me lay back with my vagina on the edge of the table, and my feet in the stirrups so that the room was given easy access into my wet and heavy ovaries.
eyes crawling up on me eyes rollin in my thighs
metal horses gnawin my womb dead mice fall from my mouth
As they started moving around the room to triple-check themselves, I heard a voice within me say, "my baby," as my eyes became swollen with tears.
i really didnt mean to i really didnt think i cd just one day off
get offa me alla this blood
bones shattered like soft ice-cream cones
Some hand put the anesthesia mask over my face, and fighting the drugs overtaking my flesh and bones, I said, "my baby, my baby, my baby."
i cdnt have people lookin at me pregnant
i cdnt have my friends see this dyin danglin tween my legs
Another hand took the mask off of my face. These eyes looked at me sternly and said, "What did you say?" I whispered, "my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby," as I looked into her eyes, and shook my head slowly. She nodded, and I felt seen. Me. Jamilla VanDyke-Bailey. The girl who didn't know when to say when. The girl who didn't know what type of girl she was. The girl who was so desperate to be loved by a boy who did not love her, that she wouldn't be surprised if she had moaned prayers for this exact pregnancy.
& i didn't say a thing not a sigh
or a fast scream to get
those eyes offa me
get them steel rods outta me this hurts
this hurts me
& nobody came cuz nobody knew
once i waz pregnant and shamed of myself
She put the mask back over my face and rubbed my shoulder. I closed my eyes, counting backward on pace with the white-masked white faces in the room, still howling inside of myself, "my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby. please, my baby. don't hurt my baby. please."
I woke up in a room full of gurneys with women on them. Women who were now empty. Women who were now feeling everything and nothing. Women who were more like me than I wanted us to be. I looked down, and saw a makeshift diaper with a huge pad in it, and cried at the sight of the blood seeping and spreading and staining me because I knew what I had done. I cried from a place of grief and loss, hatred and resentment, and self-love and relief. Yes, I was relieved after my abortion. I had chosen it, and survived it, and told myself to set this experience aside without much emotional attachment.
I want to believe that Priscilla was right and that I had made the right decision for me. In part, I had an abortion because "i waz pregnant and shamed of myself," and I was afraid of the shame that I would bring to my parents who thought the world of me. But also, as Priscilla said, I had an abortion because I had to make the right decision for me. I had no right to be a mother. I had no ability to bring a child into the world and love them. I was empty and trying to find fulfillment in men who I didn't want to know. I was depressed and losing my understanding of reality. I was a girl who made a mistake and didn't want to carry that within me for nine months, only to make the child carry it within them for the rest of their lives.
I live with the weight of the decisions that I have made. The parts of my journey that I cannot talk to anyone about. The songs I pretend I have never heard. The movies I refuse to watch in front of mixed company. It wasn't until years later, when I held my son for the first time, that I thoroughly forgave myself for getting an abortion. Becoming a mother has taught me how to take the skeletons from the back of the closet, and bring them out to finally know me after all this pain, and after all this growth. Not to gloat. Not to dismiss. But, to see.
1 Perry, Tyler, director. Why Did I Get Married? Lionsgate, 2007.
2 Reitman, Jason, director. Juno. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007.
3 Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the End of the Rainbow Is Enuf. Bantam, 1982.
Jamilla D. VanDyke-Bailey is a 27-year-old, pro-black feminist who uses her writing to provide a voice for silent traumas, and to hopefully create a sense of belonging amongst the misfits. She has had work published in The Southhampton Review, K’in Literary Journal, and the Santa Clara Review. Her collection of poetry, than we have been, will be published by Weasel Press in the summer of 2021.