What Kind of Love Do Disabled Girls Deserve?

by Molly Higgins

When you are young, you see women, beautiful women, all over the pages of magazines, on the television, illustrated in your favorite cartoons. They rest their long, painted nails on men’s shoulders, throwing their heads back with laughter. With your small, gnarled hand and stumped arm, you wonder if you’ll ever slow dance in a partner’s embrace.

They are wanted by men of all shapes and sizes, who write them love songs, poetry, and odes. Men fight wars for them, get in bar fights, write novels, and set off fireworks.

You spend hours flipping channels, looking at the beautiful women, trying to practice your makeup skills. You watch that scene in Titanic over and over again, wondering why you’re feeling uncomfortable under the warm sheets. You kiss the pillow and dream of your very own Jack who will save you from the cold, dark ocean. You learn who’s hot and who’s not on MTV, you feel bad for the women crying after not getting roses. You look from the outside in, watching teen movies about proms you’ll never attend and frat parties you’ll never do keg stands at.

You wonder how much of this beautiful, wondrous life you will miss out on.

You’ll try to kill yourself once in sixth grade, again in eighth, and one last time in eleventh, for good measure.

In sixth grade, Ben makes your life hell. You sit alone at recess, watching the other kids jump rope and try to bash each other’s faces in with the tetherball. You look at the pebbles that litter the ground below and begin to find beautiful pieces of broken glass scattered among them. Jacob mocks you, putting his hand inside of his shirt, flailing his elbow around in a show of grotesqueness. Seemingly all of the kids on the playground are watching, laughing at an inside joke you aren’t let in on.

Nine years later, Ben will put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger. You won’t go to his funeral.

In eighth grade, you go over to your best friend's house before school starts again. Her neighbor, already in high school, dares you to play seven minutes in heaven. You watch from above as a girl who looks just like you gets her shirt taken off with the boy’s clammy hands inside of a dark closet that smells like mothballs and cedar. You can taste the blood from where his braces cut your lips.

The next morning, when your friend’s mom confronts the boy, he simply responds, “No offense, but you think I’d do that to her?”

In eleventh grade, you finally have your first boyfriend. He’s not at all what you had imagined. He doesn’t write you love songs or pay for your meals, his face is pockmarked, and he makes lame jokes. But you’re happy. You finally have someone who likes you. Who picks you up from your childhood home and drives around, along the back roads that smell like skunk, past the dark graveyards and cow pastures. When the music from the car blares and the wind makes your face red, it feels like the teen romances you’ve watched your whole life.

He breaks up with you a week before prom, two days before your birthday. He’s decided to go with someone else; his mom said the pictures would turn out better anyways. After all, prom is something you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Each time, the syrupy Nyquil makes you gag, the Advil is too weak, you can’t steal enough of your mom’s Xanax. After a while, you realize maybe you don't actually want to die.

Later, you will meet men. Many, many men.

But, you’re still not sure what kind of man you deserve. You fall for any man who wants you for a moment. You grow up from feeling like the most alone, unlovable person in the world—but then it happens.

Men begin to see your blue eyes, big breasts, the way you’ve learned to tilt your head back in laughter and lead with a joke. They notice the way that your jeans fit the curves of your hips and begin to wonder what your strange body would look like naked.

And you let them see.

You fall in love with men so beautiful you can’t believe they would ever look at you. Men who pose for black and white photos, only in their underwear. Men whose faces you recognize when you drive by the advertisements on the side of the bus. Men who work late nights at bars, that you only see when last call strikes, the streetlights begin to blur, and the sidewalks are empty. Their breath smells like tequila as they take your face, apologizing, you can’t remember why. Men who pretend not to know you during the day, but cry for you at night. Men with tan lines on their ring fingers, men who wear silver suits in big board rooms. Men with leather jackets and motorcycles that you ride when you feel like dying on a cold Monday night. Men who break beer bottles and spray paint on concrete walls. Men who wrap their fingers around your neck until you gasp for air. Men who whisper I love you before leaving you naked in bed before the sun rises. Men who you feel so lucky to have been kissed by, to have cared for. Men, who ultimately, will leave you for someone they can take on brunch dates and introduce to their parents.

Fucking beautiful men feels powerful, but fucking ugly men feels even more so.

You will love being with men who wouldn’t dream of being able to touch you. Men with oversized glasses that fog from the heat of their reddening faces when you laugh at their jokes. Balding men with crooked teeth that look dangerous to touch. Sweaty men nervously covering their bulge when you lean in to whisper in their ear. Men with shaking hands as they try to unclasp your bra. Men with bellies that sag as they climb on top of you.

When they hover above you, thrusting, you clasp their face between your arms, making the pouty faces you’ve seen the girls in the videos do. You tell them to look; you tell them to stare. And they look at you—the sexiest woman they’ll ever fuck—before their body convulses and they make the ugliest faces you’ve ever seen.

Eventually, one day, someone will bend down on one knee and ask you to be his wife.

He will propose with the most beautiful ring you’ve ever seen. But it looks like a toy from a Cracker Jack box on your twisted, gnarled finger. When people hear the good news, they don’t ask to see the ring because they can’t bear to look at your withered hand.

He will propose in a restaurant, and you pretend that you haven’t been the hungover waitress, making fun of the dozens of lame and unoriginal proposals you've seen during your shifts. Feigning excitement for the surprised bride-to-be while you sneak tequila shots from behind the bar and wipe plates of cold, half-chewed bites of steak into endless trash bins.

You’ve found someone who doesn’t know about all the times you have come home from the bed of a man who’s name you didn’t quite catch. Nose still crusted with blood, mouth tasting of chalk.

Your husband-to-be loved high school—made the varsity tennis team, was nominated for prom king, and definitely wouldn’t have talked to you in English class. He initiated hazings at his fraternity and prayed for forgiveness at church every Sunday.

You have Thanksgiving dinners at his childhood home, hugging his cousins tightly in your deformed arms. You explore the beaches of Tulum together, eating fresh fish caught on a spear and drowning together in bottles of mezcal. You watch sexy women dance on stage and watch his eyes follow their perfect moving bodies with hunger. You get Chinese takeout and watch hundreds of hours of TV. Together you develop your own language, mannerisms that are whispers of one another. He tells you he loves you so much, says he’d die without you.

So, you say yes.

And pray it won’t be like your sister’s, your mother’s, your aunts’, your cousins’, your best friend’s marriages.

And when, two weeks before the planned wedding, his phone lights up with pictures of a naked girl who couldn’t be more than eighteen—you breathe a sigh of relief. Of course he did that. Of course, it’s what men do.

You won’t be stuck under a man or beside a full laundry basket. Somehow, you’ve escaped the pile of dirty dishes and dried toothpaste on the sink. You can now be anything you want. You, disabled and unlovable, are thankful you’ve learned the power in being by yourself. And for the first time in your life, you’re happy to be alone.

BIO: Molly Higgins is a disabled essayist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently a writer at WIRED magazine and former associate editor at Kansas City magazine. She has published nonfiction essays "Mother's Daughter" in the Write Launch and "Born for This" the Iowa Review. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri—Kansas City and a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA.