The idea of being misunderstood is abhorrent to me.

So, know that I don’t want her.  She’s too child-minded.  I don’t want to teach her how to survive, nor about herself.  She deserves better than that from a partner.  Besides, I’m not so experienced I deserve to condescend, and she’s not so inexperienced she deserves to be patronized.  It wouldn’t work.

And I don’t want her, anyway.  She’s still hiding from herself.  She still doesn’t accept who she is.  It’s true that I don’t accept myself either, but I at least know who I am.   I’ve negotiated my time, even my body, to gain the answers from my rapists I felt I needed to get, and when that didn’t stop the flashbacks and the anxiety and the sexual dysfunction, I suffered the mental anguish an obsessive endures when a problem comes to our attention.  Meanwhile, she’s texting the man who victimized her.  I can hear her inside voices, insistent like creditors, chanting “I need to know.  I need to know.”  I know her heartbeat felt irregular to her, and her hands probably shook a little, making typing on her iPhone difficult.  And I know he had no healing for her.

It’s unfair of me to wonder amidst her piquing suffering, what happens to me while she discovers herself.  I try not to notice how much I want to kiss her lips.  I kiss her cheek instead.  No one ever told me a woman could feel emasculated.  As it is, I don’t feel comfortable anymore calling her with my problems, as overwhelming as they feel now.  I don’t want to upset her or seem weak.  I’m torn between protecting her and snatching her neck for my lips.

It wouldn’t work.  I’m a five-foot Dominican girl with a big puff of curls who wants to be a male sex symbol.