Magic Carpet Ride of Shame

A misfired nude and misunderstood love.

In the spring of 2019, Greg and I hit rock bottom. We were temporarily living apart after sharing an apartment for almost five years. I was still madly in love with him but swamped with uncertainty. But, perhaps the hardest part was that we didn’t know how to be apart. We texted constantly and wondered what the other was doing in our absence.

I was getting ready to go out and I cannot for the life of me remember why, but once fully dressed, I looked in the mirrored closet doors in our living room and realized the bottom half wouldn’t do. So I promptly stripped it off —underwear and all— and was on my way to the bedroom to find a suitable replacement. At that exact moment, I got a text from Greg asking me what I was doing, and I looked up to see myself, in a sweater and comically nude from the waist down. I laughed remembering how he would always call this “Donald Ducking,” and quickly snapped a photo to send to him.

As my thumb hit send, and the photo began its near instantaneous journey to my intended target, I saw “Mum” written at the top of the thread. I screamed a scream of such horror that you would have thought I was physically harmed. “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!!” I banged on the small phone screen in a pathetic attempt to grab it back. Alas, it was sent and delivered.

My mind raced and I tried the next best thing, a text flurry. I texted my Mom one word at a time to push the picture further and further up the thread:

MOM

DONT

SCROLL

UP

THAT

WAS

A

JOKE

MEANT

FOR

GREG

NOT

YOU

PLEASE

DON’T

SCROLL

UP

OK?

My heart was beating out of my chest as I awaited her response. The typing dots popped up, shifting in color, appearing and disappearing. The three fates conversing and deciding my punishment. Perhaps a public shaming of this loose-as-a-goose 32-year-old woman? Time stood still. My eyes widened and I willed a response, but nothing. “Oh my God,” I repeated to my phone and clumsy thumb.

Finally, she wrote back one sentence, “I don’t like that.” I made a face. What a rude response to a hilarious half-nude, but I typed back, “Okay.” And we never spoke of it again. I, however, have thought about it many, many times since, allowing every mental replay to whisk me away on a magic carpet ride of shame.

I think too much about what people are thinking about me. Obviously. But I especially wonder what my family is thinking about me. In the big ways, like how Greg and I have kids but never got married. And in silly little meaningless ways, like how I sometimes re-write my whole essay after reading it as though I am one of my brothers. I pantomime them saying to themselves, “What is she talking about? That’s not what happened,” about some family story or part of my life. I imagine them judging me for whining about the same old things, or my life choices, and it all adds up to them thinking I’m some fantastical little nut job, which, perhaps I am. But maybe, I’m just telling on myself with this admission. One finger pointing out and three pointing back, as they say.

I’m listening to Jenny Slate’s new book, Lifeform, and it is a goddamn delight. I burst out laughing not just because she’s hilarious, but because she makes me feel sane. It’s a loud, abrupt, ugly laugh, like the quack of a surprised half-nude duck. HA! I feel that, too!

She writes about eavesdropping on an elderly couple at a diner. And how in one moment, she loathed the idea of being them. “I never want that to happen to me,” she thought. I remember this feeling, too. My mind time travels back to being on a lake in New Hampshire with one of my first real boyfriends in high school. I still don’t know how my parents let me go away with him for the weekend— they were not even close to those kinds of parents, but I have a feeling that Dustin being the boy of their dreams had everything to do with it. We headed out on his Dad’s boat to wakeboard and I spotted a couple. I clocked them as old but they were probably middle-aged at most. On this perfect summer day, they were simply sitting on their boat reading silently and separately. I remember scoffing at Dustin and drawing his attention, “I never want that to be us.” I also distinctly remember his look of confusion, looking from me to them, trying to decipher their transgression. But as was his nature he quickly and warmly agreed. He assured me that it never would be us. Ever the truth-teller, he was right, we broke up that fall.

From my limited teenage vantage point, I saw separation. And worse, I loathed how they were just sitting there silently reading, my God, how boring! How dreadful! Had they run out of things to say to one another? Where was the passion!? The thrill! The desperate need to constantly touch and profess one’s undying love! I didn’t want that, that…whatever the fuck that was they were doing with their silence and their books. I wanted intensity in all its forms. And as I sit here drinking my second cappuccino of the morning, that’s still true.

“It only has to make sense to you,” I encourage my class repeatedly. “You don’t have to do anything anyone else is doing, and no one will judge you, we’re all far too busy judging ourselves!” I’m talking to them and I’m talking to myself, willing it into existence. It only has to make sense to me, yes, of course, but would you mind also telling me in great detail how much you approve of what I’m doing so that I know to approve as well?

I suppose what I’m searching for is comfort. Comfort within myself, my choices, my relationships, quiet moments, awkward moments— ideally, with absolutely everything. And I am so sad to report that my instant comfort button is currently broken. You deserve a treat, I tell myself daily around 5 pm. You survived this whole day, well done, m’lady! I pour a glass of wine excited for the fuzzy feeling that acts like smearing some Vaseline on the lens. The chorus of voices grows quieter for those few hours. The voices are all variations of me but sound like cruel recollections of things people said, or more likely, imagined things that were never said at all. I have come to crave this brand of ease. And in the moment, it is an easy button, as Glennon Doyle calls this brand of escapism. But in the end, the result is often grief, added anxiety, and sometimes shame. I don’t know that I’ve come to the place where I say, that’s enough, but I do know that I felt incredibly grateful to wake up this morning feeling a little more steady in my body and with nothing to regret about my choices the night before.

Moments after her dismissal, Jenny hears this bickering couple laugh. They laugh in a way that’s deeply intimate and meant only for them. They’re in on their own little joke that the rest of the world couldn’t possibly understand, nor would they need that. She does a 180 and longs to be that couple.

Whenever my view changes, I hear Fiona Apple sing in my head, “But as the scenery grows, I see in different lights. The shades and shadows undulate in my perception.” My boat couple wasn’t bored or disconnected; they were in sync in a way I couldn’t grasp at 17. I, too, long to be them now. To know a quiet, steady kind of love. The kind where you don’t need to amp up the intensity, have constant validation or fill the silence for it to be real.

I crave an inner love that knows down deep in its marrow that a Donald Ducking nude is always funny. And appropriate! And not the least bit shameful. One that doesn’t need to tap out at 5 pm, can quiet the chorus of self-judgment and trusts that it only has to make sense to me.

(I really wish I could end this with proof of my Donald Ducking nude, but this is a pay-at-will publication and I would absolutely have to charge for that.)

a G-rated “wyd” answer pic I sent from our living room closet in 2019

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