Essay Feature: "King(s) of Convenience" by Lillian Wissler

I listened to a song that was on repeat during the secretive phase of my first relationship, and I dreamt of her as a result.

The dream itself was a microcosm of my life as it is. An accidental car crash and an inability to walk the cut-throughs of campus due to a combination of the cat carrier I won’t set down, bad shoe traction, an injury I am distantly aware of, and because I keep getting out of breath. In the face of these obstacles, I decide to negotiate my first girlfriend back into my life.

My awareness of her in the dream is her physicality; movements I then didn’t recognize as shyness, her motion-full neck and throat, her way of speaking, how she sounded. Her mouth spreading, corners jumping, and her uneasy full-body stretches I always took as confidence, confused when she rebuffed this description each time.

What is true is that our relationship was like a kind of violence to one another. I never knew exactly what pulled me to her, though my inventory of those nervous movements I later understood as accidental seduction. She told me she didn’t consider me until I brought up my attraction. What she forgot was her hand placement. We glared at each other in that in-between time.

I had difficulty believing her words; we had spent months locked around each other in my dorm bed, careful of lips, liberal of hands. She had difficulty believing I liked her. “I thought you were experienced,” she said, like offended, after we kissed and I said it was my first, too.

Now, it was clear to see that we both spent months building each other up rather than using our stolen moments to ask questions. Her roommate, my best friend, never asked what we had been up to in that time, though I knew she had to have guessed. Yet, when Stella finally seemed to come around to the idea of me as a girlfriend after her friend told her, “I think you’re in love with Lily.” My own best friend was shocked. “Really?” she asked me.

She took me aside to make sure I was serious. She finally said she had an idea of those months and how they were spent, but never an inclination that I really liked Stella. It seemed that we all had mismatching sketches for one another. Somehow mine grew heartless in the eyes of others.

Stella and I both faced those in our lives asking why we liked the other. We were so confusingly mismatched, the kind of relationship that only made sense when it was the two of us, alone, until even that didn’t work. Perhaps that is why those early months stretched on, a deeper peace than the actual relationship.

 “I wish I could freeze this moment in amber,” I wrote of the first night during that time, of us lying wrapped together in bed. “I know you know the future,” I said. “But I am content with this.” I ended my entire diary on that. A fear of what was to come was present from the first moment of union, a resistance that neither of us chose to look at head on. Or at least that I didn’t until the moment I knew we needed to break up.

Our togetherness, our officiality, was awkward. We only knew how to speak in private, in quick glances and lingering touches chaste enough to go unnoticed by our friends.

Stella asked that I not tell anyone for a few days, something that grated on me but that I allowed.

Once public, my way of speaking, of being, seemed to embarrass her. I have never done anything by half, yet that was her preferred way. “Can you not lean on me?” She asked, looking around the dining hall. This was our first day out together. “Can you not touch me when we are around people?” She asked later that week. This was the first thing that felt implacable. Touch is my love language, I was then just finding out.

I agreed, though sometimes I would bargain to hold her ankle when we had movie nights with our friends on her couch (my chair set at the end of the pullout so that I could not be tempted by hands or heads on shoulders). I was made to feel like a pariah as it all unraveled. Her own struggle was entirely internal. She would reference anxious calls made to friends, parents. Say she was fine, needed a night in.

I would use the toilet far off from her dorm room so as to not encroach on her in these moments, seeming to recognize her love as that of a skittish animal. I had raised a feral cat; I would weather the storm.

Privacy matters bothered her most. As a result, dating her was like permission to shut up. I was fresh off the car accident at this time, not even close to the year anniversary. Our relationship was littered with my doctor’s visits, ER trips, surgeries and the emergency follow-ups. I was a shell of a person, one that was too relenting. One that was well matched with someone who had grown up with a sick mother and as a result thought of discussing feelings as weakness. This is unlivable for me in the long term, someone who must plumb the depths for anything glittering in the gore.

At the time, though, she was the only one not demanding to know how I felt. In turn, she became the only one I wanted to talk to. An incongruence that she quickly shut down by saying, “It hurts me to hear about your hurt. I don’t want to talk about it.” My frustration with her in these moments took a physical outlet: I would kiss her instead of responding. Sometimes tears would streak down my cheeks as I did so. More often than not, really.

Thus, matters turned physical. Something that brought death to the relationship in time, even if these silent, sheet-tangling matters were what began our closeness at all.

Our only distraction from this was discussing the future as a given. We took turns describing unlivable lives to each other. We would nod, waiting for the hellish story to finish so that we could interject one minute detail that would prevent this imagined life’s suicide. “Of course,” we’d say to the other in response to those rushed saving graces of trips back to Dayton, a house in Cleveland by her work, “I can’t believe I didn’t say that.”  

“I want kids” earned “I don’t.” An acquiescence: “I will be the emotionally distant dad.” A smile but turning to the window before my eyebrows could furrow: “I will be an overattentive mom to our girl. Sparkly dresses and the sort.” Instead, I pictured my own mother: under-attentive and overworked. Stella more than likely pictured her father, a man who did loving acts for her in silence, embarrassed when thanked. Someone who acted like they were doing what someone else ought to.

“That house,” she pointed at an ugly Huber home, painted dark where I would’ve wanted light. Blonde bricks where I’d want red. Locked into symmetry with every other house around it. A tight feeling gripped my stomach. “I’d buy us that house. No stairs, so I would not have to worry about your back.” She thought for a second, “But if there were stairs, I would carry you down them.”

In this scenario, I pictured her as an old man, me his white-haired wife of decades. His own back rent forward. Yet, he must do this task.

I started to tear up; I hated the fucking house. I hated that her work was around the corner, and that selfishness seemed to be leaking off her image of the future, the only kind parts of it speaking to spots on my body I wasn’t allowed to talk about. I rubbed my head against her shoulder, though.

“Good flower beds,” I said, like the little housewife I would be. I had never given a fuck about flower beds that weren’t my grandmother’s before. “Writing office?”

She looked over at me as if confused by my physicality in that moment, confused to be thanked in my odd way for what would be our future. Confused that I would add one of those lifesavers here.

“Of course. I will put a desk right in front of that window.”

It was surprising that neither of us scowled in these moments. “Fit me,” we seemed to be screaming at each other through gritted teeth. “Be perfect for me.” Our words only came out in soft whispers, though, like we were still scared to be caught in that drafty dorm room from the very beginning. Even in a car empty besides the two of us. You’re all I have in this way, was the truth of it.

We were two children who had been through too much and needed to rest. We didn’t see each other as the catalysts we were. That there was no way for this to end other than in a slow bleed. This was no hemorrhage. At least on my end. Hers was revealed to be the opposite, but that was months to come. But perhaps I am just being generous. She was my first love, after all.

At the end of the trip, a day after seeing our future home, my family picked me up, a further childishness visited to our relationship. Our parents met, seemed to not like each other. Her brother barely stopped himself before commenting something rude. My mom reminded me to hug Stella, and the moment ripped me in half. I had grown so used to Stella’s rules that now I had confused my own parents with what looked like my uncaring but was really the deepest, most desperate opposite.

“Weirdos,” my mom said, teasing, but the barb had already struck true.

Stella texted me after as she hung out with a friend. “Maggie will loan you the book you want,” she said. I read this standing with my family on the top floor of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I began to cry in earnest, not having to hide it against anyone’s face, against a car window. Ridiculously, all I thought in this moment was that I would never get to read that book. For what it is worth, I didn’t.

For what it is worth, I don’t even remember the fucking title.

I am left with dreams of jumping throats, fast-moving mouth corners, the ghost of curling hair between my fingers, and remembering how cold a dorm bed gets when one’s body heat leaves it.

Lillian Wissler is a lesbian writer from Dayton, Ohio. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Short Vine Journal and Cornell University’s Rainy Day Literary Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in 30 North and VOIDZ magazine.