Redefining Realness (2 page)

My ultimate goal with
Redefining Realness
is to stand firmly in my truth. I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being
real
with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you. It’s through my personal decision to be visible that I finally see myself. There’s nothing more powerful than truly being
and
loving yourself.

They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing—self-revelation.

—ZORA NEALE HURSTON,
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

NEW YORK
, 2009

I
thought about telling Aaron on our first date. That moment in the back booth of that Brazilian restaurant in the West Village when my head rested in the space where his chest met his armpit. He smelled like sweat and cilantro and looked a lot like that one thing I yearned
and
feared: intimacy.

He was looking at me, his brown eyes studying mine.
Can he see me?
I thought.

“I see the little girl in you,” Aaron said, seemingly surprised by his discovery. “Will she play with me?”

I wanted to tell him then. He was the kind of charming I couldn’t resist blushing at and scolding myself for being moved by. I knew I was slipping away from my own barricades of insecurity and into a more honest nook. But decades of internalized shame about my past and its relation to my present couldn’t be undone by mere charm and romantic projections. It would take something special, outside of myself, to unwrap me. I had an instinct that Aaron was something special.

We had met only days earlier, the night before Easter Sunday 2009, at a Lower East Side bar called La Caverna. It resembled a cave—on purpose—and was spritzed in pungent hopefulness and perfumed desperation, the official scent of most of my single Saturday nights in Manhattan.
Maybe tonight he’ll walk through that door
, I heard the resounding chorus of women sing. They were lured to the city by the unattainable glamour and girlfriend-ships of
Sex and the City
or the navel-gazing of
Felicity
, the ones who flocked here to be among the achievers, who fled the tiny towns they were born into in hopes of growing up into starter offices and enviable wardrobes and a one-bedroom with the Channing Tatum of their reality. Maybe I’m projecting my dreams here.

Gratefully, the three slightly spilled martinis I consumed pacified my longing for all of this and much more. Pop beats filled my head as my booty and voluminous hair, draped over my bare shoulders, bounced on the dance floor. In this swaying mass, no one’s past mattered. Every person’s only requisite was to keep moving. I twirled and twerked to Kelis’s “Milkshake,” my gold-tinted curls bobbing around my face. I felt the brightness of my wide, toothy smile and the ampleness of my cheekbones, a feature given to me by Mom, and the prominence of my forehead, inherited from Dad. My pointed widow’s peak draped a thick tendril over my right eye, shaded in bronze eye shadow and framed by an arched brown brow.

I was soon stopped in midorbit by the sight of a man.
Fuck, he’s hot!
was my first thought. His skin was the color of sweet toffee, the kind that gets stuck in your teeth. He had shiny black wavy hair, just long enough to run my fingers through, and that indistinguishable ethnic look that one could take for Dominican or Brazilian or some kind of swirly black. He looked dangerously yummy, with sly brown eyes, one of which was punctuated with a horizontal scar that matched the mischievous curve of his smirk. His beauty—birthed out of my
mental sketch of Mr. Hypothetical Husband—led me to commit to sleeping with him if the night led us to a bed.

He said hey, and I said hey back.

“I’m on my way to the bathroom, but will you be here when I come back?” he asked.

I nodded while flipping my curls to the other side of my face: my go-to “My Hair Is Real I’m So Flirty and Effortless” move. He returned a few minutes later with that same smirk. “Take a walk with me,” he said, nodding toward the exit.

“I don’t even know your name,” I said.

“If you come with me, maybe I’ll tell you,” he said, pointing toward the exit.

I rolled my eyes and smiled as we walked out the door.

He led me a few blocks away to a fluorescent-lit twenty-four-hour coffee shop called Sugar’s, where I ordered a latte, he a coffee, and we shared an unsatisfying cinnamon roll and people-watched during pauses in our conversation. It was during those pauses that I heard whispers from deep within myself that told me he was
the one
. This notion was also apparent in the steadiness of his gaze as I spoke, in the tranquil curve of this one curl resting just so on his forehead, in the way his face lit up when he found pleasure in something I said, in the ease of his name, Aaron.

In two early-morning hours, you can learn a lot about a person who’s open enough to share himself. I listened as Aaron told me about his grandparents’ wheat farm in North Dakota, which served as the setting of his childhood, and how he moved to Maine with his mother, spending his adolescence on the basketball courts with visions of Michael Jordan leaping in his mind. He told me he was a dog trainer who longed to make films and to have horses of his own someday. As he spoke effortlessly about the details of his life, I wondered if it really was that simple to tell your story. It took effort for
me to talk to strangers, even more to men. I self-consciously traded similar details that matched the weight of intimacy he was clearly aiming to build with me. I told Aaron that I was from Hawaii and had moved to New York four years ago for graduate school. I told him I got paid to write about celebrities and that when I grew up I wanted to write stories that matter.

“What do you mean by
matter
?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Yes you do,” he said, sipping his coffee and lifting a brow. He was challenging me. He saw beyond the pretty, which I had relied on during many first meetings with guys, aiming to remain a mystery, to remain unseen because being prettily invisible allowed me safety. His cocked brow signaled that he wouldn’t be afraid to know the real me.

“I write about famous people, about when their new movies come out, what they’re wearing on the red carpet, who they’re dating and having kids with,” I said. “Those things don’t
really
matter. Yeah, it’s fun, but there are stories I want to tell and don’t know how to yet.”

I felt I’d said too much in the comfort of late-night intimacy. Insecure, I shifted my focus away from Aaron and into the emptiness of my mug and onto the clock above the espresso machine, which pointed to a bit after three
A.M.
We decided to split a cab, which slowed across the street from his apartment, lit by the lights of La Esquina’s taco stand.

I stared at Aaron. I wanted him to kiss me. He leaned in and pressed his cheek to mine and whispered good night in my ear. As the taxi pulled away, I watched his boots stomp across Kenmare Street and soon read his text: “You’re a complete pleasure.”

I had yearned for true love ever since my junior year of high school, when I read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
in Mrs. Chun’s English class. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that Janie’s “soul crawled
out from its hiding place” when she met Tea Cake. I wanted to come out of my hiding place. I wanted a love that would open me up to the world and to myself. I wanted my own Tea Cake who wanted all of me. I draped myself in all of these expectations when I arrived for my first date with Aaron a week after our rendezvous at the coffee shop.

I spotted him through the windows of the New Museum, all six-two of him. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and rustic brown boots, which reminded me of North Dakota and horses and steadiness. The skin of my armpits stuck to my leather jacket’s lining as we leaned in, our cheeks reconnecting. “Shall we?” he said, flashing the tickets to the exhibit.

The first floor acted as an icebreaker. I told him I didn’t care for supermodern art, whatever that meant, arguing that displaying the contents of a woman’s purse was not art. He smirked as I spouted my opinions about the exhibit, which included a woman sleeping on an all-white bed, a “performance” that drew a crowd. I giggled inappropriately at the sight of intent onlookers tuned in to this unmoving, sticky-haired blonde. After a couple of glares from fellow museumgoers, we excused ourselves to the second floor.

In the stairwell, Aaron grabbed my waist. I was standing two steps ahead of him. “I think it’s time we kissed,” he said.

It was an invitation, one that didn’t fit my itinerary for our date. I imagined that he’d kiss me when he said good-bye, under the glowing gaze of the moon and my neighbor’s twinkling lights and the sound of the city cheering us on. Not in the daylight with these brighter-than-white walls and the reflective metal rails. It was too sterile, too open, too early.

When I looked around to see if anyone was there to witness this impending kiss, Aaron laughed at me. I must’ve seemed about thirteen, like a girl contemplating taking a drag from a friend’s cigarette.
I leaned forward, placing my lips to the heat of his. We fit, the cleft of our mouths meeting and the pressure of his deep pink lips against mine.

“Now that that’s out of the way, I can concentrate on what you’re saying,” he said, smirking. His charm threw me, and immediately I wondered if he had a girlfriend at home, because there was no way this man was available. I didn’t know how to be truly happy. I had to cope with it by dismissing it, by forecasting its inevitable end. My belief system operated on the notion that the good things in my life were a universal hiccup where doom surely loomed. Happiness was fleeting and accidental; goodness wasn’t in the cards for a girl like me.

Video installations boomed on the next floor, allowing me to work through my awkwardness about the kiss during the final pieces of the exhibit. I squeezed my right hand into my left, my lifelong tell of nervousness, the same way I would when Dad focused on me as I searched for an answer to one of his probing questions. I felt out of control, as if I had crossed a threshold into fast-forward, no-turning-back closeness with Aaron. Getting close meant intimacy, and intimacy meant revelations. Sensing my discomfort, Aaron suggested we take a walk.

We headed west on the movie-set-ready blocks of Bleecker Street as the sun descended over this second island that I call home. Girls in printed frocks and summer maxis passed us, making me feel even more out of place in my leather jacket on this spring day.

“Let’s play a game,” Aaron said after a quiet couple of blocks. “We’ll ask each other questions back and forth. The only rule is that you have to answer the question. Wanna go first?”

My first question for him was the one I’d been asking myself since we met: “What are you afraid of?”

It didn’t take him but a few seconds to answer. “You,” he said, looking down at the gum-spotted pavement. “Because I told myself I
would commit this year to me, not a girl, not a relationship. See, I’m a relationship guy.”

Hearing him say that being in a relationship was part of his identity, in an age when men were believed to be afraid of commitment, had me feeling like I was in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. This was not what years of watching Carrie Bradshaw skip around the city had taught me.

“I’m most comfortable in relationships,” he continued, “but they distract me from myself. So my answer is simple: I’m afraid of you because I’ll break my commitment to myself.”

I was taken aback by his openness, which a part of me, from the world I’d grown up in, received as weakness. Aaron seemed available to the world because he knew, somewhere deep within himself, that the world was available to him. He probably never had to fight for anything, I thought. He probably had people in his life who listened to him, who waited with a grilled cheese sandwich on the table when he got home from school. He probably had
that
kind of childhood on the farm.

While I stood in judgment of a life I never had, the pressure of the date, of the kiss, of what was to come, left me. I didn’t have to say anything about my past, I assured myself, because he didn’t even want a relationship.

Then he took my hand, placing my fingers in between his. “Okay, it’s my turn,” he said. “And I’m going to steal your question.”

I’m afraid you won’t love me once you know me
, I wanted to say. Instead I led with another truth: “I’m afraid of getting too close to anybody.”

We stayed in each other’s company until dinnertime, when we kissed and cuddled to the sounds of Portuguese lyrics at a Brazilian restaurant, the one where he said,
I see the little girl in you
. I wished I could see her. She didn’t have the chance to just be, to frolic, to play. She was the wrong kind of girl. I let him gaze at her and knew that this night was the beginning of love: I knew right then that he saw me like no one had before, and there was no turning back from this kind of closeness. I let him see that vulnerable, wide-eyed girl inside me, and I kissed him until the dusty stained-glass lantern dimmed to darkness and the soft samba melodies silenced.

We said good night for the second time on the corner of East Fourth Street and Bowery after he showed me how to salsa and I giggled while moving my hips. The pressure of his hand on the small of my back told me it was okay to let him lead me.

In the coming weeks, Aaron and I took a nighttime stroll through Central Park; heard my intellectual girl-crush, Zadie Smith, talk about writing at my alma mater, New York University; licked ice cream cones outside Lincoln Center; saw a bad romcom during the Tribeca Film Festival; and had our first sleepover.