Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

This was the thing about boundaries: they made sense in therapy, but when you tried to implement them in the real world, people had no idea what you were talking about. Or, deep down they knew exactly what you were talking about and immediately set to work reinforcing their case of denial.

I tried to give the crowd a version of my life seasoned with enough “but really it’s fine” bravado to make the underlying desperation that compelled me to stand there in the first place seeking validation from strangers a palatable experience—delightful, even! When they laughed at my sort-of truth, I felt the thrill of being sort of seen.

Who is that ‘out of control’ woman you are so afraid of becoming? What does she look like?”

In these fantasies, I got to be both woman and man: shifting my consciousness from the wife to the husband to the wife to the husband. This felt less shameful than two women.

I could never tell how other people saw me. Most of the time I felt like I was riding around in a car with a fogged windshield that made it difficult to decipher the perceptions of others. They were all just kind of pantomiming outside, grunting, while I ran the wipers over and over. No matter how fast I wiped, I couldn’t clear the fog.

I had never imagined this kind of warmth could be so safe, abundant. I’d spent so much time cutting and carving away at myself, worshipping cold. I feared that light and warmth were a trick, a tease, false offerings that lured you into relaxing, and just when you made yourself vulnerable, they would be seized. Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold on oneself. Be prepared.

It was so exciting to hold her hand. With this simple gesture, I felt nearer to her than anyone. Her hand in my hand was a deeper intimacy than any sexual act, all my past performances of pleasure.

We were just two girls holding hands and eating candy in a movie theater, that was all. But my desire: I was sick with it.

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.

What did it mean to love something so much and also be wrong about it? What did it mean to love a version of something that might not really exist—not as you saw it? Did this negate the love? Was the love still real?

Love goes. But what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time.

I couldn’t tell what disgusted me more: him feigning tenderness, or the possibility that it might be real.

But it was better to stay in bed and dream of her than to be together in a realm where we had to pretend that physically we were strangers to each other.

Still I wanted it. I wanted a love contingent on nothing finite. I wanted a love without end. Everyone was always saying you had to give it to yourself. Self-love, self-love. What did that even mean?