Iowa

Iowa Guy broke our silence when he called to tell me that he didn’t think we should keep up as friends. I thought that was implicit by our month-long lapse in communication. Dean said that call was “for him.” Abbie told me she didn’t think I respected him enough for us to work out. Paul said we didn’t connect.

I bid him farewell in a coffee shop, in the same booth as our first date. He paid both times, free vanilla lattes bookending our relationship (if it can even be called that. I don’t think it earned the title, but Tracie said a month of dates counts for something.)

Even so, this is not my long-awaited slander of Iowa Guy; though I rejoice over our separation, he didn’t earn my scornful censure. Rather, it’s a study:

I misconstrue holiness and asceticism, righteousness and self-deprivation, sifting through a self-imposed pressure to deny that I often swallow rather than shake. It limits who I date, what shorts I wear, what music I listen to. I subject my own will, cyclically convinced that absence begets uprightness, and so I must also manufacture my own jailbreaks, sparing myself none of the terror of intermittent confinement. 

I forced myself to entertain a man whose touch I recoiled at. I want to know why. 

Facts: Iowa Guy is 26. His church reminds me of a children’s museum. His hairline is thinning. His job is in pest control, but he says he works with wildlife. He reads a lot of marriage books. He was homeschooled. He sent me flowers three times.

POV: You’re at a Tommy Emmanuel concert in Des Moines with your best friend whose June wedding Iowa Guy asked you out at, and you’re avoiding eye contact with him. He can tell. He leans over and says that he knows PDA isn’t your thing, but would it be alright if he put his arm around you? It feels like November of 7th grade in the football bleachers when your pre-pubescent friends cheer for Tyler Camling to put his timid, sweatshirt-ed arm around you, except you were happier when it was Tyler. 

Stiff. Later, Iowa Guy asks if you liked the concert, if you’re having a good time. You feign tiredness and claim that as your excuse for sleeping on the ride back. The music was lovely, but maybe you and Abbie could just rest in the backseat? You do not sleep, but drift in and out of lucidity as you run through the “this isn’t working for me” speech. You are hazily panicking. You dream of tomorrow when you’ll flee, drive far away from Iowa, leaving him behind. Benefit of long-distance: You never have to see him again. 

On a plane ride to visit my sister in Oskaloosa six months prior to the Tommy concert, I pen a journal entry from seat 13A while sweating and picking tears out of my eyes. Beige, I write. There is no color here and everything is beige. Iowa is where people go to kill their dreams in exchange for husbands, selling their aspirations to matrimony. This is where my sister moved, married, resides, and I’m terrified that orthodoxy demands I do the same, that I suffocate in the colorlessness. If it does, I will. I’ll live there and stay there and die, sewing skirts and cheering on classical conversations and buying pasta and milk in bulk until I clock out in the home I rarely ventured beyond. I’ll leave behind hobbies and creations and clippings of my canned soul smeared with diaper rash cream and coupons, wrinkled pictures of vibrant college friendships painted over with the devotional content of my long, long life. My maiden name, staring back at me, blinking, asking if I’m satisfied. I’m not sure. I’ll have filled the earth, subduing my lot. And then I’ll die. At least my husband can cover the funeral costs. 

With every prayer, I am trying to curb-stomp my fantasy of both: a partner and independence, or a professorship, or a graduate program, holiness and friends, or a grocery store within 45 minutes of my apartment, or any sense of self. I feel naked as I peer out of my two-pane airplane window and down upon Iowa, the illustrious pimp who will take and return me, courteously, battered, to the doorstep of my boring yet reliable husband. I want love. I wish it didn’t have to flatten me, but that’s life; that’s Iowa. 

And then I meet Iowa Guy, who has a 401k and health insurance. I hunker down and stay until the idea of him touching me makes the convent seem more appealing than not. 

Re: my typical flavor of asceticism–self-imposed, desperate, crippling. 

Then I crack, and I leave him in an Iowa coffee shop with a skip in my step on the way out. I am the old hag, the chaste witch, the virgin queen roaring with glee as I push my way out the door, exit-bell jingling the anthem of autonomy. Reminder: He foots the bill. I kiss my car key.

I think of my last sip of the latte, how it swirls potent in my mouth like an espresso of lonesomeness and freedom, a cocktail of honey sap that, when caught in the light, either tells me that my dreams are worth solitude or that the two aren’t incompatible. I don’t know. I do know that I feel limitless flying east across I-80, and I cackle when I speed past the World’s Largest Truck Stop at 79 miles per hour, windows down, breeze unrelenting. This is bliss, private euphoria, so unequivocally mine that sharing it would curdle the rush.

Heidie Raine is an Ohio-based writer who works primarily in the realm of creative nonfiction. She loves asparagus, hates skinny jeans, and recently thrifted a vintage oil lamp that she is quite proud of. Heidie has works forthcoming in The Cedarville Review.