Excerpted from DYSCALCULIA copyright © 2023 by Camonghne Felix. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
All my life I had been waiting for someone to stroke my cheek and cradle my preciousness. I fit in both his hands. I was in pain, and unwell, and he wanted to take care of me, wanted to keep me alive and keep me inside my body. I fell face forward and tucked myself in.
After a while I became neglectful, we were distracted, it was too still a love for me, I needed the friction of evolution, the rub of a higher frequency, but was too coward to admit it, my belly round and well fed. He gave me more than enough and I filled up on it, my ego growing beyond scale and beyond speed. I fed and grew and grew until my need was the size of my shame and my shame was the size of a mountain, where I teetered at the edges of my desire and ignored him with my indecision and my impulses. I fed and watched the color drain from his fingernails, his body begging to be given grace, sucking in the blind of the night at his sores, promising to deserve what he was so full of.
I tried and tried but couldn’t do it, failing at the basics of love, the basics of affection, forgetting birthdays and anniversaries, forgetting the shape of his face in the dark. He was begging for my focus, begging me to prioritize my better angels, to deserve him, pulling my teeth out over the sink, pointing at the blood in the mirrors. I was too consumed with my parameters, with the simple ways I’d learned to stay safe, vulnerability a raw performance but not an honest one.
I cheated on him, a lot, with a lot of people, and then I lied about it, and then I gaslit him about it, and then I spent a year cleaning up my own mess, trying to finish the puzzle I’d complicated after I’d lost the pieces, trying to get back to the beginning of the story where it was easy, and I was easy.
And then I asked him to open our relationship as a consolation prize, as if, maybe if another woman could do my work, show him his inherent value and virtue, he wouldn’t need to use my body as the proxy for that learning, someone to show him he was indeed beautiful and deserving, and most important, deserving of me. There were rules and guidelines and policies: there was to be nothing serious, he had to do what I had done, f**k without giving away any of the love he’d cultivated in me, hold steady the hegemony of our structure, put me first, make me the sacrosanct of his affection, he had to be strong enough to open up and never give us away, no matter how hungry, how needy.
But I was not attentive enough, giving the caretaking work to another woman hoping she would do just enough to send him back to me in a new shell. It didn’t happen that way, he fell in love with someone who is not me (I maintain to this day it was the idea of her, not the her of her, I don’t care what kind of arrogant that makes me) and broke all the rules with someone I deemed radically unworthy, mostly to hurt me but also as a defining mechanism, out of it born a whole glossary of definitions—this is what it means to punish me, to render me small, to make me feel the way he felt, which was much and out of scope.
If he found someone to do all the things I couldn’t be bothered with, to do the caretaking I’d never learned, then all the other things I was good at, that made me deserve him, would be primary, and I could just do what I knew and not have to learn skills I could never master: like the ability to love his present self as it was versus the potential I had thought up on his behalf, like the ability to see him at all.
The Math had not mathed at all. I had radically misunderstood him, my own abilities, my true glib desire; I had misrepresented need and given it unfamiliar names, I had canceled out his access to perform love as I had been taught it, to build a pathway toward something that had always evaded and will always evade me, brought fidelity into a train that was always on its way to a stop.
I lied to him over and over again, murdered his dream of me, and so, in the end, he took himself back, and I realized the blood was the fault of my own cutting, and couldn’t imagine continuing to live this way; to live out my own violence on the bodies of the people I want desperately to love and be loved by, to live it out and to fail, so radically, so dangerously, with so much harm around me, not having known that I put myself miles away from the love I desperately want and need, with my inability to see how zero is indivisible, how you welcome in the negatives when you try to give from a well where the water never was and will never be again. I couldn’t live this way anymore. So I died.
Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix is available from Amazon and Bookshop.