Nonfiction / Amie Whittemore 

:: Ten Scenes of Not Being in Love ::

1. Sit­ting on the front porch of a dive bar in Nashville with a man on our first Tin­der date (he drank rail whisky on the rocks; I nursed a local IPA), two very drunk women approached us. Hav­ing heard our dis­cus­sion about poet­ry, they asked to buy copies of my book, they asked to bum cig­a­rettes from the man. I walked back to the grav­el park­ing lot and pulled two copies from my trunk, sign­ing them in the dark, amid the cig­a­rette smoke, on the sour-smelling porch. 

Two years lat­er, one of those women found me on Insta­gram and, since it’s a pan­dem­ic, told me she paint­ed lines from one of my poems on her win­dow. That man? We went out twice more. He kissed like salt­wa­ter, pale and thirsty. Not my thirst. Some­times we wish each oth­er hap­py birthday. 

2. In col­lege my friends and I were very into Björk, so we went to the art the­ater twen­ty miles away to watch Dancer in the Dark. The haunt­ing, trag­ic film filled me with rest­less ener­gy, as if the spring air had stuffed me with lilac buds, as if the night had thread­ed its wings through my ribs. I walked past my favorite cof­fee shop and a man I bare­ly knew called out to me to join him and his friends. It was the kind of night where you say yes to strange things, so I said yes. 

He and I took a long walk around cam­pus, end­ing at his effi­cien­cy on the oth­er side of town. We drank cheap red wine, lis­ten­ing to Mazzy Star, and he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes. 

In those days, I wore my hair in twisty buns, like Björk, like hum­ming­bird nests, held togeth­er by bob­by pins. They fell around us on the bed like met­al rain. After a while, his toothy kiss­es tired me out. It’s late, I whis­pered, his head pil­lowed on my chest, and he offered to dri­ve me home. 

Home, in the bath­room mir­ror, I saw he’d left bruis­es on my neck, my breasts: lilacs unclench­ing their watery vio­lets. I ran into him once more, weeks lat­er, between class­es. He said he still found bob­by pins in his bed. 

3. The night after yet anoth­er Tin­der date, I dreamt my date and I were rid­ing in a self-dri­ving car; the dream turned lucid and I made the car fly, told him we could do any­thing. I woke ecsta­t­ic and texted him in the morn­ing. I was in bed with the Sun­day Times, my cats. It was June, the air balmy with promis­es. Some­times that sum­mer, he’d bite my thigh and leave such bril­liant flow­ers there, blue and crum­pled. Some­times his kiss­es were black holes I didn’t want to leave. He talked and talked and nev­er asked me any­thing. The last time I saw him I left a peri­od stain on his sheets and felt embar­rassed though I had warned him I had a body. I had a body I could bare­ly control. 

4. My first girl­friend asked me if it was impor­tant for both part­ners to orgasm and that’s how I learned I wasn’t giv­ing her orgasms. This made me try hard­er, though it also made me wilt and turn toward the blue light that streams from TVs left on in emp­ty liv­ing rooms overnight. 

My sec­ond girl­friend called our sex-life “cli­torif­ic” at a sex toy par­ty. I blushed. I still feel like some­one who doesn’t know how to give any­one orgasms. 

5. At his cousin’s wed­ding, my hus­band and I were recov­er­ing from one of our—I wouldn’t call them fights. It was less that we fought and more that we retreat­ed, like waves at low tide. Still, the moon swung us back again and again; we too often found our­selves on famil­iar beach­es, exhaust­ed and hurt. We kept touch­ing the parts of the oth­er person’s body where the bruis­es bloomed, crum­pled blue flowers. 

The priest didn’t men­tion the rip­tide of mar­riage. Only that the bride and groom had found “not the per­son they could live with, but the per­son they couldn’t live without.” 

For weeks, my hus­band and I chewed on that phrase, spat it out like gris­tle. The tide turned again. I have lived with­out him for as long as I lived with him: six years. 

6. The woman I was dat­ing invit­ed me to join her and two vis­it­ing friends for a Nashville bar crawl. Their names, occu­pa­tions, the way they wore their hair: unim­por­tant. They were a straight cou­ple and the woman loved Anne of Green Gables as much as I did. We talked about Anne on the roof, Anne in the woods, Ril­la by the light­house in her green dress, poor, doomed Wal­ter. The woman I was dat­ing and the vis­it­ing man looked at each oth­er, bemused out­siders to an unfath­omable intimacy. 

Lat­er, at the woman’s home, we kissed on her bed as she tried to talk me into spend­ing the night for the first time. Her friends in the next room, play­ing with her dog. Some­thing blue haunt­ed her—I imag­ined a bro­ken kite caught in her ribs. I want­ed to go home, to my cats, to my bed. What she didn’t know then is I had learned how not to feel respon­si­ble for the sad things I found in people’s chests—torn kites, wilt­ed bou­quets. Keys to nowhere. 

7. Tak­ing free yoga class­es in a ware­house in Port­land before Port­land was Port­land, I met a white woman named Saige. She had short black hair and two per­fect cir­cle tat­toos on her inner wrists. One cir­cle had a frog inside it, the oth­er some­thing else (a moth?). I was not good at talk­ing to peo­ple I desired then, nor am I now, but some­how I invit­ed her over so I could teach her to knit. And some­how I end­ed up at her house one evening, for sup­per, where I learned she and her room­mates were elim­i­nat­ing processed sug­ar from their diets. I thought this was stu­pid (this was before sug­ar-free diets were trendy) and I led them through a med­i­ta­tion my first yoga teacher taught me. It involves a for­est, a lake, a bear. A key, a throat with a stone lodged in it, if you’re me. 

We lost track of each oth­er; I moved away. Return­ing for a vis­it two years lat­er, a friend and I saw her at the food co-op. I had to look at her wrists to rec­og­nize her. 

In the park­ing lot after­wards, my friend said, damn that girl likes you, and it felt like a drought-thick after­noon, where it feels like it’ll rain but it doesn’t.  

8.  My first boyfriend was 19; I was 14. Some­times we sat on the couch in his par­ents’ base­ment and took turns run­ning our fin­gers through the other’s hair. Some­times he drew sketch­es of my hands or turned us into car­toons. After he kissed me for the first time, my first kiss, which was wet­ter and fuller than I expect­ed, he told me he loved me and I said it back not know­ing if I meant it, which is the same as know­ing I didn’t. But I did feel pow­er­ful and wor­thy when he showed me the blue and bro­ken toys he kept in his chest, and I held them care­ful­ly as if doing so could mend them. I thrilled know­ing no mat­ter how he touched me he could nev­er touch the stone in my throat, the one that hadn’t learned how to sing yet. 

9. Some peo­ple want your whole hand inside them. Your whole hand. As if you could cup their swal­low-nest heart, the mud and weeds of it. As if then noth­ing would be empty. 

I don’t want anyone’s whole hand inside me. I don’t want to put my whole hand inside any­one else. 

10. Two days before the pan­dem­ic shut every­thing down, I went on a first date with a woman. We vis­it­ed the Frist Art Muse­um, where an exhib­it inspired by the Voy­ager Gold­en Record was on dis­play. Images and sounds were pressed onto the record for the aliens so they could under­stand what it is to be a human on earth, the blue and salt of it. The music qui­et­ly played, the images flick­ered in a dark room. I love the gold­en record and the woman let me go on and on about it. 

Over din­ner, she asked ques­tions. Over din­ner, I hand­ed her a piece of the gray stone I car­ry inside, and she hand­ed me a cloth fox in need of mending. 

After din­ner, we walked in ner­vous time-stretch­ing cir­cles until we passed our cars twice and had to admit the date had end­ed. She gave me a suc­cu­lent. We hugged. We pulled away from each oth­er, the desire to kiss lin­ger­ing in the air like the promise of rain. I thought about pulling her toward me, mak­ing it rain. I thought there would be more time. 

She ghost­ed, or per­haps more apt­ly, the pandemic’s thick grav­i­ty kept her far from my shores. I lis­tened to the songs the aliens might be lis­ten­ing to for days. Some­times I look at her paint­ings on Insta­gram and her palette echoes some­thing inside me—the lilac and blue of them, the green spring of them. The row­dy, man­ic pink. Some­thing bright inside of me call­ing out, remind­ing me of what I want.

From the writer

:: Account ::

At the start of quar­an­tine, I found myself feel­ing both lone­ly and with more time than I usu­al­ly have. I often think about writ­ing cre­ative non­fic­tion but get intim­i­dat­ed by the scope of it; as a poet, I feel much more com­fort­able work­ing with a few hun­dred words rather than over a thou­sand. This means I often have to trick myself into writ­ing a per­son­al essay, usu­al­ly by mak­ing it as much like a poem as possible. 

I have read many love­ly vignette-dri­ven essays by writ­ers (who are also often poets) and have long felt the form might get me over my fear of cre­ative non­fic­tion. Works like The Cry­ing Book by Heather Chris­tle and Julia Cohen’s beau­ti­ful lyric essay “Genius­es of Love: To be held at arm’s length is not to be held at all” served both as maps and light­hous­es for me—offering both direc­tion and assurance. 

I also, in my quar­an­tine lone­li­ness, found myself think­ing about past roman­tic encoun­ters, how some of them held a lot of emo­tion­al heat but were not actu­al­ly moments of love. The moments cat­a­logued here all occur on love’s peripheries—outside it, after it, before it, along­side it. Through writ­ing this essay I have found that these bound­ary waters have taught me some­thing about how and why I love, what fac­tors can lead me into love’s strong cur­rents or nudge me back to shore. 

 

Amie Whit­te­more is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tion Glass Har­vest (Autumn House Press, 2016). She is the 2020 Poet Lau­re­ate of Murfrees­boro, Ten­nessee, and an Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Lau­re­ate Fel­low. Her poems have won mul­ti­ple awards, includ­ing a Dorothy Sar­gent Rosen­berg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Get­tys­burg Review, Nashville Review, Smar­tish Pace, Pleiades, and else­where. She is the reviews edi­tor for South­ern Indi­ana Review and teach­es Eng­lish at Mid­dle Ten­nessee State University.