kismet, if there ever was.

a love story.

In the summer of 2003, I was twelve. My family moved to a small town in the flatlands of Indiana from a reasonable city in the hills of Pennsylvania. Well, I guess it was more like they dropped three kids off (ages 12, 10, and 6) at my aunt and uncle’s house, then disappeared for three months. At the time it wasn’t all that strange; not until adulthood would I realize that was, in fact, very strange.

I would live with them again: in the fall of 2005, then summer of 2007 when I moved in permanently, gathering what I could in a trash bag and just leaving. I would stay until the spring of 2009 when I moved in with my then boyfriend and started college at IU South Bend. 

That fall I started college and an antidepressant. I failed every single class. My GPA was a 0.0. Every time I drove to campus I could not get out of my car. I would have a panic attack, then, gutted with shame, drive home. I quit the meds and struggled painfully through the next seven years that it took to get my undergrad. Smack in the middle, I was hospitalized and diagnosed with a mood disorder – finally on the right meds, I felt less reckless even if things still felt out of my control. Better was a miracle itself.

In 2016 I got married in a courthouse in a pale pink body con dress I’d bought at Charlotte Rousse. (Donald Trump had been elected. It was, maybe not impulsive, but misguided. I was scared. I wanted babies. I wanted safety.) It was velveteen and reminded me of the early 00s. I put a cream colored, lace, long sleeved crop top over it, held two tulips (my favorite flower) that were fuchsia (my least favorite color) with feigned gratitude, and got married secretly with only my best friend and my ex mother-in-law (giver of the tulips) there. 

The white balance on the few camera phone pictures is off. We went to the sushi place across the street and drank champagne and it felt lonely. Later that night, in the dim light of the car, I mixed green beans and cream of mushroom soup on my lap as we drove to my family’s thanksgiving dinner. I slipped my heels off at the door and told no one. The beans were frozen and we were late: they didn’t cook in time, and it would be the last Thanksgiving with my family before everything broke under the weight of all the secrets this one stood next to. 

In 2015 we had gone on a trip to Pittsburgh and I chose my ring from this incredibly odd little shack full of second-hand engagement rings. I chose one – the white gold art deco one over the yellow gold with a single, respectable rock on it. The latter was much more expensive. On the other side of the glass counter, the older woman who owned this place with a ½ address, looked at me earnestly from underneath the magnifying glasses that she wore on top of her prescription glasses (yes, that’s two pairs of glasses), and said:

Are you sure? Someday you’ll be alone.

What she said had an ominous clarity to it, but I wasn’t able to understand it as a truth. She was right. I chose the wrong ring. In 2022 I’ll sell it at a pawn shop on Valentine’s Day and only get $30 for it. That same summer, out of nowhere, I’ll develop a severe allergy to gold.

2017 I had a wedding. I looked stunning. I hated the song we had chosen for our first dance as soon as it started playing. My face burned with embarrassment. Later, though, I danced to Feel it All on my own half way through the reception – as I had known I would, had planned. Under the edison bulbs surrounded by brilliant noise and a dance floor crowded with the friends I hadn’t seen very much for so long; cocooned by evidence that I was still a real person, the tulle from my blush colored ball gown floating like I was making a wish on a dandelion –  I was all mine and it was one of the most incredible moments of my life. When I think of my wedding, I think of that.

I graduated college that same spring. My sister and I are the first generation to finish college and after seven fucking years, I had done it. I woke up proud and happy on commencement day. I got ready at my sister’s; did my make-up with my niece who was still just a toddler. I wove my way through the process of graduation in 3 inch heels and emergency replacement hosiery, but, like most things that mattered to me, the person I married unraveled it all with small, calculated, snips at fragile family threads. 

By the time I had crossed the stage, completely and blissfully unaware, they broke. No one was there afterwards. No pictures were taken except for one group photo with my advisor and colleagues. I drove home alone and a keening sound fills that memory from a heart I didn’t realize was my own. I went to bed nauseous from all the swallowed snot after crying so hard for so long. I made it out of that night with only my sister left; she was the only one of them at my wedding. We never went to another holiday at my family’s house again.

In the fall of 2019 I tried to have a baby. In the fall of 2020 I stopped trying to have a baby. 

That same fall, separated by only weeks, my marriage ends. I moved into an apartment that I fell in love with. I shared it with no one but my cat. There, I grieved, then I hoped, and sometimes both. I watched the tree outside of the bay windows transform from orange to bare to budding to green once, then again. 

In the winter of 2021 I get shingles, then a stomach bug, then an odd cold (and test negative for COVID multiple times). The omicron wave comes and I choose to stay alone in my apartment for 6 weeks. At the turn of 2022, I go to the emergency department for the first time, believing I am experiencing anaphylaxis. As the year unfolds I’ll return again and again for the same reason, and because I think I’m having a stroke, and then as I begin losing sensation in my body – first, my hands, then my face, then my arms, my feet, my legs. 

I’ll be admitted to the hospital on Mother’s Day. I refuse to wear the gown which irritates the night nurse. She tries to give me anxiety medication, which I decline, now irritated, myself. I watch the sun go down from the window; can almost see my apartment from there. 

Every test will be negative – every MRI, x-ray, EEG, EKG. Every specialist afterwards will have no answer. The allergist I’m referred to will be awful, reaching under my clothes to examine me while I’m flat on my back on the table, a resting heart rate of 150 and sticky EKG leads like ribbons flowing from my body. I don’t know what’s happening. Every appointment after he’ll tell me to remember what he said at that first appointment, then leave the room – keeping what I’m supposed to remember forever a mystery.  

I’ll become convinced that I am going to die from an unknown allergen that’s contaminated my life: my apartment, my car, my clothes, my hair, my skin. I’ll start staying up for days at a time mopping my ceilings and walls, vacuuming into the early hours of the morning, giving away my furniture, and fraying on the edges of what it means to be a person. I’ll stop being able to work. I’ll stop being able to leave my apartment, then bedroom, then bed. I’ll live by impossible rules that take hours. I’ll stop eating or drinking water, I’ll begin covering my entire body including my hair to keep myself from being contaminated, I’ll take so much benadryl for so long that I’ll begin hallucinating. I’ll stay on a low-histamine diet for so long I lose 20 pounds.

It turns into autumn, and one of my closest friends helps me bandage my entire right hand in her kitchen. Most of it has lost the first layer of skin; I won’t be able to open my phone with my thumbprint for months. My fingertips and palm have cracked in several places and bleed. I get rashes along my wrists from the gloves that I almost never stop wearing trapping moisture against them. It is painful and gross. I will continue to clean constantly nonetheless. I’ll overcompensate with my left hand until it looks the same. 

The same fall, I’ll get a second opinion from a different allergist. At this point I will have truly lost my mind. I’ll fully believe I am covered in hives that don’t exist; that my face and throat are swelling closed. I’ll take photo after photo of my face to check it. (Now, it’s hard to take selfies). I’ll look back at them much later and only see a stream of pictures of a completely normal face on someone who looks ill and defeated. The only change is in how it becomes more gaunt as time goes on. I’ll re-home my cat because I believe I’m allergic to her. I will be wearing a mask every single second of every day on my face and a pulse ox constantly on whatever finger is the least damaged at the given moment. I’ll be taking benadryl three times a day along with 4 zyrtec and 2 pepcid. I’ll be dehydrated, gaunt, bloody. I’ll be making myself vomit water constantly to clean my throat and washing my hands and arms all the time to get rid of a rash that only I can see. 

I think I’m dying. 

This new allergist will come in and, while very much being a doctor who isn’t much good at this kind of thing, gently explain to me that even people with the most severe allergies do not choose to stay in their bedroom for months. She will not say what she thinks it is, but she will sympathetically discuss my anxiety and emphatically tell me that I need to see a psychiatrist. She tells me to stop using the pulse ox and taking benadryl immediately, and when I’m ready, cut my allergy meds in half. It’s odd that she emphasizes “when I’m ready.”  This is oddly the most disappointing and relieving conversation I’ll ever have in my life. I sob in the parking lot on the phone with my girlfriend, absolutely lost. I have no idea what this allergist is trying to say. Not yet.

Before all of that happens – while my hands are smooth, I leave the house regularly, my weight is stable, I’m still working, still living – I go on a date. I had made the most out of hot vax summer the year before, and been more seriously dating this one (there was the one with mortician who lived above a funeral home, the unlikable grad student who was doing research on my field but had never actually worked in it, the toxic situationship that I’d almost call a reprise with a much older woman I’d carried teenage feelings for since she taught my youth group). I feel nervous about this date, although I don’t know why. 

For two years, I didn’t bring anyone home. I would go home with girls, but not mine, and I’d always leave before sunrise, preferring to wake up in my own bed, alone.

The morning after our date, I woke up with Mercedes next to me in my bed, in my apartment, under the morning sun that shone through my room. The next time she’s there I’ll make coffee in my tiny kitchen in the morning and look through the doorway at her sitting on my couch, this blonde gremlin in a too big t-shirt. It will feel like she was meant to be here the whole time, as though I didn’t know she was missing until she got there. 

For the next four months we’ll get to know the four hour stretch of highway between South Bend and Bloomington like a kind of home. My heart will fall hard and scrape it’s knee. She will see me, and I will trust her to see me. She’ll learn all of my rituals and compulsions like the back of her sun-tanned hand and never make me feel crazy, even when I start keeping all of the laundry outside in huge plastic totes. She’ll hold me as I fall apart in the middle of the street outside of my apartment one night, having only taken steps from her car after that four hour drive, and hold up my malnourished body that sinks to the ground as I sob like a child.

I’ll need her.

In November of 2022 I move to Bloomington to be with her. It is not romantic. It is traumatizing and heavy with grief. I’ll have very few choices left in a very short period of time as my life finally falls in on itself, just gone. I’ll wish that wasn’t true. Within days I’ll have put the entirety of it into boxes, made as many moments as I could to say goodbye to the people I love in this place I’ve called home for 12 years, and feel myself disappear. 

It is the summer of 2023. I’ve learned that I have obsessive compulsive disorder and begin the early stages of exposure therapy. The skin on my hands has healed, although I see how heavy that year was in my face, more weathered than a single year of weathering should look. Mercedes weathered her own storms, ending a 10 year friendship that became too toxic to continue – an incredibly deep loss. She chose to stop drinking for four months and joined the sober curious folks (arguably as cult-y as the AA folks, but with less god and more yoga). 

Yesterday she was filthy with garden soil, her image framed by the kitchen window where I was inside at the table, working on my laptop. A portrait of a life so very average, common, ordinary and perfect.

In my mind, the universe is watching us. It’s watching us weave completely separate lives, never having met despite the fact that we grew up in the same small town. It watches a decade pass. It knows we won’t be ready. And then, on a day in June, it finally says, “now” and we’ll find one another, almost a near miss. I think it knew we would need each other at the exact same time. It knew exactly when we’d be ready to need each other. It is not an easy thing to need.

I am convinced that we have always known each other, that for as long as energy has existed ours has been finding one another’s. I have been soil and she a tomato. I have been water while she was a rock in the river. Before that, before things I can know we might have been, we were and we were it together. We were there when the moon was still a dream, then when it came to creation, and we will watch it go as the universe folds in, like slipping a love letter into an envelope and dropping it into the mailbox: going, not gone.