I did art today. A friend invited me to a sketchathon in Topsfield and it sounded too delightful to not attend. I brought Mitra along, too. She always wants to be sketching.
I did a couple of object sketches and filled them in with watercolors. Those were cheerful. Then I sketched a chalice, based on a real chalice, and tried to fill it with flowers, from my imagination. They looked terrible compared to the vase, and I painted black all over them, like in the Rolling Stones song. My friend suggested I make it into a collage.
Right on top of the pile of available magazines was a cover filled with demons. Yes, that was it, that was what I wanted. That suited me better. So I cut out a demon and stuck him on with a glue stick. A little more black paint and it was perfect.
My cup overfloweth…with demon energy.
After the sketchathon, I drove to Rockport, which was sort of close by. I thought I could sit and write there. I don’t know why I always think that about Rockport. There’s only one café there, and the sitting area is really small. The town was overrun with tourists, even in April, so I bought saltwater taffy and bailed.
I wanted to write about the high school teacher who, I guess, groomed me, and then officially asked me out the day after my 18th birthday. He used to drive me up to Rockport a lot, before and after I turned 18.
My last relationship was the first time I’d been involved with someone significantly older than me since then. I had a lot of anxiety around it. I would sometimes feel like I was a teenager, as some sort of post-traumatic response. I would have to remind myself that I was an adult, almost twice as old now as the teacher had been.
I hadn’t realized how much of that still lived in my bones.
That was the summer I confirmed my father would never protect me. He said since he had started dating my stepmother when she was 19, he was in no position to judge, and left it at that. I was on my own.
Well, no. My mother was furious. Yelled at the teacher. But by then my father had already given it his stamp of approval, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
Yes, that’s what it was. My Dad had decided I was grown up enough for this relationship, and I needed to prove that I was. My mother was powerless against that.
I’ve never written about this. Not publicly. I’ve told the story a lot, but never wrote it out. The teacher was a writer, and ambitious about it. He was leaving the high school to attend a prestigious writing workshop. But he told me I would eventually surpass him, like an oracle pronouncing my fate. He liked dating a kid because it made him feel wise.
I think I might have stopped writing because of that. Because of him. I realized that recently. My writing became tangled up with all that weirdness and discomfort.
I’m writing now, though, and I did surpass him. He was right about that.