Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt

Everybody needs something.

It was fall. He and I were about to break up. I knew it and he knew it. Why neither of us did it, I don’t know. I’ve come to realize that you don’t know how wrong being out of love is until after the fact.

There are small similarities between loving and being unloved, so many in fact, that you can convince yourself everything is okay. They are the ones you call every night. They are the ones you share a bed with. They are the ones who hold your hand. In life’s more clever moments you are tricked. You think what you share is an intimacy with that person, when really, all you’re doing is marking time.

And so, while marking that time with him, I told myself it wasn’t so weird that we’d share a bed and not make love. It wasn’t weird that we never made each other laugh. It wasn’t weird that I could never be myself around him, that I felt like an alien, that he never understood me, that he thought I was stupid.

None of it was weird, none of it was heavy, nothing broke my heart.

There are those relationships that do not serve the usual intended purposes. Sometimes, there is no love given and so, no love lost. With he and I it was never about how he felt for me or what I felt for him.

I wanted someone.

As far as I can tell, so did he.

Til Death

He holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars, this is all I think of.



"I think I'm not married because I take it too seriously. I am too committed to the idea. I think when you get married you shouldn't take his last name, you should create a whole name. A whole new tribe, together. I think your husband should be your absolute first priority. If your husband is in a car, choking, and your mother is dying by the side of the road, you help your husband first. That's really what I think. He asked me to move to New Zealand with him and I couldn't do that because I thought of all the films I had in production, all the stuff I couldn't do there. I realized, this isn't right. Some things are more important than work. Some things should be, like your husband. I should have said to him, 'Yes, baby, I'd move anywhere with you.' I should have wanted that. I didn't."

She was the type of woman I admired but never wanted to be like.

I would have pretended to want to move to New Zealand and filed it under bridges soon to be burnt, never crossed.