Powdered Sugar
by Roe McDermott
Christina McPhee, Democracy of Joy, oil, ink, dye, and collage on canvas, 84 x 52 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
POWDERED SUGAR
ROE MCDERMOTT / FEB 2021 / ISSUE 5
I didn’t want another long-distance relationship.
Years of moving between Ireland and America meant that I had too many under my belt already, and the last one had destroyed me. I spent all my money flying back and forth from Dublin to San Francisco for a man who said he loved me. He was married and I didn’t know. He had another girlfriend and I didn’t know. He started abusing me and no one knew. I wasn’t in one place long enough to see him clearly, or for anyone else to see me clearly, to see how I was slowly disintegrating. I swore I’d never have another relationship where the physical distance could disguise the dangerous type of distance—the distance between who a person can claim to be and who they really are.
Early in our relationship, I nicknamed my ex “Gatsby,” and rarely called him anything else. Later, a therapist pointed out how well the nickname suited my ex, both in character and in action. The nickname hid him from accountability for his abuse by keeping him anonymous, keeping the relationship in a state of unreal. I still find it hard to use his real name; it feels unfamiliar in my mouth, and that unfamiliarity feels shameful; an admission that I openly embraced an illusion.
Broken by that relationship and the abuse, the aftershocks still rippling, I felt suspended in a different state of unreal for two years. I lived a hermit life in Dublin, rarely socialising or leaving my house––unless I was going to the airport. I travelled on my own whenever I could, snapping up budget airfares and long weekends. I wasn’t trying to find myself. I was trying to escape myself. Less Eat, Pray, Love, more Fight/Flight, Actual Flights. I escaped into different cities and different men. A Dionysian poet in Split. A kind trust fund kid in New York. A deeply mediocre artist in Barcelona. The parameters were clear: I will never love you, never commit to you, we have these few days only. There will be no more projections across oceans.
Then came the musician in New Orleans, and a kindness and connection I didn’t know could happen over four days. We talked, laughed, danced, kissed. We had sex so incredible that I stopped him at one point to exclaim, panting and suspicious, “You’re not supposed to be so good at this.” We wandered through flea markets and bookstores, and ate beignets at three in the morning, leaving powdered sugar fingerprints on each other; a proof of this sweetness.
He fell for me. I started to slip, but caught myself by my fingertips. I wasn’t doing this again.
But we stayed in touch, and his constantly disarming thoughtfulness made my resolve waver. After months of four-hour long phone conversations every other night, I booked a ticket back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My defence mechanisms pretended this was just another travel adventure. But somewhere deeper, somewhere more hopeful, somewhere still terrified, I knew I was going to see if what we had was still real in person.
It was. It is.
On Fat Tuesday on Burgundy Street, we danced at a huge street party surrounded by crowds of costumed revellers. At one point he kissed me as a brass band marched by and I felt so safe I wanted to cry, to turn liquid, to melt into this trust and tenderness that I forgot was possible. I wore a crown of snakes and glittering scales. He painted half of his body grey and marbleised; a man turning into stone.
I spent a week in New Orleans, and by the end of the trip I had told him that I loved him. He had already said it to me, months earlier, had listened to my protests and deflections and reasons why I couldn’t say it back. He didn’t flinch, understanding why I wasn’t ready. He simply waited for me, and I had finally caught up. I left New Orleans on February 27, 2020, with plans to come back two months later.
What I didn’t know then is that our recreation of the Medusa myth was a foreshadowing. After this trip our relationship also became half-suspended, our bodies frozen in place; he became unable to gaze upon me without risking peril.
By February 2021, the Mardi Gras parades have long been cancelled. And I have not seen the man I love in a year.
*
In Dublin, I receive a grant to write a book about abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. I haven’t been able to write in two years, but my words are slowly coming back. He listens carefully as I tell him over the phone how my PTSD affects me, how I’m recovering. I notice that I’m running away from my emotions less; my bodily sensations are no longer terrifying. On the downside, sitting at my desk all day hurts my back; as Ireland moves in and out of lockdown, I’m too nervous to go to Ikea to get a decent desk chair.
The pain makes me long for his hands. One night in New Orleans, he straddled me as I lay on my stomach and gave me a massage. As he moved his hands over my body, I got turned on, but he just laughed at my unsubtle stroking of his legs, and continued rubbing my shoulders firmly. The pressure was intense, but then there was a release that made me almost light-headed. I felt exhausted and sore and relieved and soothed all at once. I had never had a partner massage me before. I realised that even though I was technically pinned to the bed underneath him, no part of me was braced, or scared, or leaving my body; a state of being that had become my default around my ex. This realisation, like the massage, came in a wave of pain and pleasure. There’s a grief that comes with knowing what you have endured, and what you could have had instead.
After the man in New Orleans finally stopped massaging, after he finally let me pull him into bed, after we finally became a tangle of sheets and sweat and flesh, I asked him if he was deliberately teasing me by making the massage so long, making me wait for him.
“No,” he laughed. “I just wanted you to have a different kind of pleasure. Just for you. I think you might need help staying with that, sometimes.”
I immediately got teary-eyed.
I am dumbfounded by how clearly he sees me, how much he cares, how long I have gone without this.
Months later, in Dublin, when I complain to him over the phone about my sore back, my stiff knees, he gently urges me to treat my body better. He sends me videos of back stretches and yoga tutorials. When I tell him I’ve eaten Chinese takeaway for the second time in a week, he sends me videos of him cooking dinner, rainbow peppers sizzling in a pan; blackened shrimp tacos with habanero pickled onions; sweet potato stew with homemade garlic croutons.
“I’m going to make you love vegetables,” he texts.
“Never,” I retort.
“I just want you healthy,” he replies. “I plan to love you for as long as possible. Scurvy isn’t stealing my time.”
I try yoga. I eat more vegetables. I find a ukulele in the attic and I start playing it, sending him videos of my tentative strumming. He is delighted and encouraging. I haven’t played an instrument in years. I have been terrified of inviting any criticism after living through an endless abusive onslaught of it; have been too scared of new things because for so long, all new things brought me were danger. But I find so much joy in my clumsy creation of music. He makes me want to try so many things.
He makes me want to try.
*
We still have sex, as best we can.
I’m living with my parents during the pandemic, so I wait until they have gone out on their daily walk. I disturb my new Covid kitten from her nap on my bed and put her downstairs. I put on lingerie that I haven’t worn in months and film myself masturbating. I send him a text saying “NSFW” before sending the film. There is a six-hour time difference between us, and Louisiana has more lenient Covid restrictions than Ireland. He might be teaching school kids guitar.
He asks me what kind of sext photos I’d like in return. He laughs at his own uncertainty. “Like, am I supposed to accentuate the bulge with my hand? I have no idea what I’m doing!”
I realise he is less used to performing his sexuality, less used to thinking about how to look sexy for someone else. He hasn’t had as many long-distance relationships as I have. Also, he is a straight man. But we are comfortable, and it doesn’t feel like performance, just connection.
He sends me a vibrator he can control with an app, across the ocean. His sexts are long and sensual. My confidence rises enough that I send him videos of me masturbating even when I’m not wearing makeup. He tells me that I am beautiful.
I read that your skin replaces itself every two to four weeks. The powdered sugar is long gone, but I have now also shed his fingerprints nearly twenty times over. And yet, it strikes me that even with 7000 km between us, this is the most embodied relationship I’ve ever had.
*
During Ireland’s first lockdown in April, I start reading him poetry. He loves my sultry rendition of ‘Oh God, Fuck Me’ by Ruth L. Schwartz.
“Fuck me, oh God, with ordinary things, the things you love best in the world,” I speak into a Whatsapp voicenote, making my voice smoky. “Like trees in spring, exposing themselves, flashing leaf buds so firm and swollen I want to take them in my mouth.” He sends me back videos of him playing guitar, the beginnings of a song about me.
In October, he doesn’t call me for a week, only texting. I get upset. “You don’t send me videos of you playing me songs anymore,” I accuse. The Covid honeymoon period is over.
But it’s just a bad week. He starts sending me songs again. When we have slow weeks, when Covid restrictions make our day-to-day existence boring, we ask each other questions.
“What have you learned from the people you’ve gone out with?”
“Have you ever had a religious experience?”
“When was the last time you experienced Schadenfreude?”
“In what areas are you less mature than you might be?”
Without the usual busy nothings of everyday life to fill up conversation time, we get to know each other more intimately. We start sending each other listings for houses in New Orleans. I have an Instagram folder of wedding venues.
There are so many reasons not to think like this; so many reasons not to trust this. But over time, the reasons feel more like excuses, like self-sabotage, like an emergency exit that has closed on my coat, keeping me struck. After years of my internal alarm bells blaring, there’s finally a quiet.
The world is terrifying. But he makes me feel safe.
*
In March 2020, a friend from London is due to move to California to live with his American girlfriend. Covid hits. His Visa and job transfer is postponed indefinitely. A few months into the pandemic, he and his girlfriend struggle to find things to talk about over Zoom, over oceans, over time. By January 2021, they have broken up. When I hear about my friend’s break-up, I get nervous. They were together for two years. My love and I have spent a total of twelve days together. It’s now been a year since we have physically seen each other.
I call him.
“Are you…do you…how are you feeling about us?” I stutter down the phone.
“I get why you’d worry,” he responds. “But I’m in this. I’m not going anywhere.”
None of us are going anywhere.
*
I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, but I’m learning how to want things that are good for me.
I want to wait for him, like he waited for me.
His name is Jeff.
Roe McDermott is a writer, journalist, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in Journalism and an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University, where she studied Irish women’s experiences of abortion. Roe is a columnist for The Irish Times, the film editor for Hot Press magazine and has had essays published in The Rumpus and The Coven. In 2020, Roe was awarded the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award for Literature. She is currently completing an MFA in University College Dublin and is working on her first essay collection which will explore PTSD, trauma, and patriarchal constructions of knowledge and credibility.
Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Across drawing, painting, video, networked and photo-based processes, she engages potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her new paintings in the series Trickster Utopia (2020-2021) entangle sensations of human, plant and animal spirits in a mashup of landscape, anime, and collage, together with traces of text and performance. Born in Los Angeles, McPhee grew up on the Great Plains in Nebraska. Museum collections of her work across media are with the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Art Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Colorado Springs Art Museum at Colorado College; and internationally, with Thresholds New Media Collection in Scotland. Solo exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C. and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, for her project Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries. She has participated in many international group exhibitions, notably with documenta 12. Drawings based on the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, plus a new video/audio collaboration with Ashon Crawley, will be in the group exhibition Otherwise/Revival, at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (April-July 2021). Her drawings have most recently appeared in print with Radical Philosophy (fall 2019) alongside an essay by philosopher Rei Terada. McPhee lives and works in central coast California.