I keep telling myself I’m done explaining men, but explanation has always been my softest vice. It’s easier to anatomize damage than to admit how willingly I walked into it. The abusive ones never announced themselves as such. They arrived as confidence, as certainty, as a hand on the small of my back that lingered just long enough to feel like protection. Later, the same hand would become a lever, a reminder of weight, of gravity, of how easily a life can be steered if you let someone else pretend to be the map.
I loved them all in the wrong order. I loved them before they loved themselves, and after they decided I was the problem. Abuse is rarely a shout; it’s a whisper repeated until it sounds like your own voice. I stayed because staying felt like loyalty, and loyalty felt like a character trait. Leaving felt like failure. I was very good at reframing bruises as metaphors and silence as a sign of maturity.
And then there is Kennedy.
This is the part people pretend not to hear, because it doesn’t fit into their filing system. They want crushes to be age-appropriate, neat, governed by calendars and consent forms. My affection for Kennedy has always been impractical and deeply personal. He belongs to an era I never lived in and yet somehow remember. I fell for the cadence of him before I fell for the idea—those sentences that walked like they knew where they were going. He spoke as if time could be persuaded. He made belief sound like a civic duty.
It’s not that I think he would have saved me. I don’t believe in rescue anymore. It’s that he represented a masculinity that seemed curious rather than punitive, elegant rather than brittle. A man who could hold power and still sound human. In my loneliest rooms, I mistook that for intimacy. I mistook proximity to myth for love.
People ask about the age difference, as if time itself were the most scandalous thing about longing. Fine. Let’s do the math, since numbers comfort those who don’t like feelings. If, impossibly, I were impregnated by Kennedy today, I’d be in my sixties by the time the child turned thirty. Kennedy would be over a hundred. The arithmetic is absurd, which is precisely the point. Desire doesn’t run on calendars; it runs on narrative. It wants coherence, not permission.
I don’t want to be judged for this any more than I want to be pitied for the men who hurt me. Both reactions miss the point. I am not confused; I am reflective. I am not naïve; I am sentimental with intention. Loving Kennedy is not about sex or salvation. It’s about language. It’s about believing, even briefly, that words can lift us out of ourselves and into something shared.
The abusive men taught me what happens when power goes unexamined. Kennedy taught me—still teaches me—what happens when power tries to sound like hope. Between those two poles, I keep writing, keep revising the story, keep refusing to end it neatly. American cantos are not lullabies. They are laments with ambition.
I have survived men who wanted me smaller. I have adored a man who exists only as an echo. Somewhere between the whisper and the myth, I am learning to speak in my own voice, even if it takes me the rest of my life to decide what it means.