I Called It Devotion. It Was Just Erosion.

A guy I dated once, deep enough in that I should have known better, leaned back and told me he knew from the start. He had this slow smile, almost proprietary, the kind of look you get from someone who's already decided how the story ends. As if my excitement at seeing him, the way I picked up his texts first thing in the morning, the call I made him that night my car broke down somewhere on the highway, none of it was real, all of it a script I'd been running for his benefit.

I didn't know, then, how to say it. I wasn't performing. I was coming apart. I just didn't have the words.

The first time I noticed it, I was getting dressed. I'd been seeing him a few weeks, long enough that I'd started planning outfits like they were proposals. I owned three dresses that I rotated like uniforms for his apartment, the green one because he'd once said, casually, that green made my eyes look brown, the black one because it looked slightly rumpled and I thought I was supposed to look slightly rumpled, the way girls in films looked right after someone had just left their apartment. I stood in front of the mirror until the light in the room changed. There's a stain on the sleeve of that green dress, I think. Olive oil, from something I made a few months later that I was too proud of. I put on lipstick and took it off. I put it back on. I checked my phone to see if he'd texted to confirm, even though we'd already confirmed, twice. By the time I got to his door, my heart was doing this specific, almost theatrical drumming it had never done for anyone before, and I had no idea what to do with it except make it look good.

So I performed it. I smiled too wide. I laughed a half-second before the joke landed. I asked about his childhood dog. I had read somewhere that men open up about childhood dogs. I wrote down the answer in my head so I could ask about it later, casually, like I'd been thinking about it. I bought the wine he'd mentioned liking once, in passing, weeks before, because I thought this would be the detail that finally convinced him I was paying attention. We were sitting on his fire escape in late summer. His ashtray was balanced on the window ledge and one of the cigarettes had burned down into a long curl of ash no one was watching. The smoke drifted between us. He looked over and said, quiet enough that I almost missed it, "You seem really happy right now." Something in his tone, in the way he'd been able to clock my happiness like he was checking it off a list, made me want to throw the wine at him. But I didn't. I nodded. I smiled. I confirmed it.

The second part came later, and this is the one I'm least proud of. I'd been at my cousin's engagement party somewhere outside Hartford when my apartment got robbed. They came in through the back window while I was gone, took the laptop, took the ugly silver ring my mother had left me, took a year of journals I will never, ever get back. I sat in the parking lot of the venue for a while after I found out. Long enough for my hands to stop shaking and then start again. I called him before I called the police. Before I called my sister. I called him because I was shaking so hard I couldn't hold the steering wheel, and I needed someone to tell me where to put my hands. Months of building him, without quite admitting it, into the person I'd call first when something went wrong.

He picked up almost immediately. He was kind. He was competent. He asked me the right questions in the right order. He told me to pull over, which I hadn't yet done. After I hung up, sitting in a gas station parking lot off the interstate outside Stamford, I had the realization I have not been able to shake in over a decade. I had organized my entire nervous system around him. I'd made him the structural beam of the house. He would get the breaking point. The rest got the leftover me. They'd have to wait until I'd lost enough composure that I could no longer perform composure.

Long enough, anyway, that the man behind the counter at the gas station came out later and asked if I was alright. I told him I was. I drove home and slept on his couch that night and didn't cry once, which should have been the warning.

And then the third thing. The jealousy. I'd absorbed it somewhere. Some glossy magazine. Probably some film I watched on a flight once, half-asleep with a blanket over my lap. The lesson was this: if she gets jealous, it means she loves you. If she asks where you are, it means she cares. If she goes quiet when you mention another woman's name, it's because she knows what she has.

I knew the names of his three ex-girlfriends, where two of them worked. I knew what kind of car one of them drove, because I'd seen her once in a Target parking lot and pretended I hadn't, and I'd stored the information somewhere in my body, the way you store a warning you know you'll need. Reading texts over his shoulder. Inventing errands near his apartment. I once canceled plans with my oldest friend because he was having a bad night and I couldn't stand the thought of him being alone with his phone while I was out being a person. I was already at the door, coat on, keys in my hand. The keys going back in the bowl when I canceled. I texted her I was sorry. I never told her why.

I told myself this was love. I told myself I'd relax eventually, when I'd performed reliability long enough to relax into it.

It turns out you do not earn relax. You earn a much smaller cage.

There's an article I think about sometimes. I read it years ago, in a waiting room. It laid out the signs. Women who are willing to be "conquered" exhibit these specific behaviors. Excitement at seeing him. Calling him in crisis. The jealousy. The signs are real. I exhibited all of them. What gets me, when I think about it now, is the framing. Conquered. As if there's some fortress I'm holding and a man has scaled it. As if my joy at seeing him is his victory, not my loss. That framing wants men to read these signs and feel flattered. I want women to read them and feel sick. They're not evidence of being loved. They're evidence of being arranged. Of having laid yourself out like a map and handed someone the highlighter.

The worst part is I don't think I would have behaved differently. I would still have stood at the mirror. I would still have called him first. Not because I wanted to be conquered, but because I had not yet met a man interesting enough to make me want to compete with. Because performing surrender was easier than figuring out who I actually was in his presence.

I'm trying, now, to love without it feeling like a piece of string I'm tying around my own wrist and handing him the other end of. Trying to feel relief at seeing someone without needing him to see I'm relieved. To call my sister first, when something happens, and let her be the one to tell me where to put my hands.

I am not succeeding particularly well. The other night, a man I'm seeing made a passing comment about a coworker, and something in me caught before I could stop it. The smile already starting to form in my throat. I caught myself, almost didn't, and redirected badly into a joke that landed wrong. He looked at me in a way I couldn't quite read. The smile that freezes the face, the question you ask that is not actually a question but a sonar ping. I went home and lay on my own floor for a long time. There was a dish in the sink I kept staring at, a plate with a single fork on it, the kind of small ugly mess you only notice when you're trying not to notice anything else. I lay there longer than I want to admit.

I remembered what it felt like to want him to know me, badly, and the wanting felt, at the time, exactly like the loving, and I don't think I get to call that wrong, even now. I don't think it was anything other than the most human thing I did. Which doesn't mean it isn't also a thing I am still paying for, in ways I haven't finished naming.

I don't know, by the time I get to someone's door, whether being delighted is the point or the warning sign. Once I'm inside, I can't always tell if it's him I'm delighted in or just the version of me that seems, in his presence, finally to have landed somewhere worth being. I don't think I'll ever fully know. The green dress is still in the back of my closet. I keep meaning to throw it out.