Elephant Love

# Elephant Love

Two elephants hold each other’s trunks in a quiet gesture of affection. The composition is zoomed in tightly on their trunks, capturing a small moment of connection while leaving almost everything else outside the frame.

That framing feels especially significant to me now. I focused on the point of connection, where the elephants were touching and showing affection. But there was so much more to those elephants than what you could see in that small section of the painting. There was an entire story outside the frame.

In some ways, that is also how I remember this friendship. At the time, I was focused on the affection, the closeness, and the fun. I didn't understand everything that was happening beneath the surface. I couldn't see the whole picture yet.

I painted this for my friend Luna when we were in our mid-20s. We had been friends since high school. Jenny, Nate, and I were an inseparable triplet, and Luna and Elise were an inseparable duo. Together, the five of us were the entire crew.

At the time, elephants felt like the perfect subject. Elephants entwine their trunks to bond and show affection. That was how I felt about our friendship then. We were incredibly close, or at least I believed we were.

Looking back, though, there was another side to that closeness. It seemed like almost everything we did together revolved around drinking. Luna was definitely the ring leader. We followed her lead, and her lead usually involved shot after shot after shot of booze. We had what seemed like a lot of fun, but the truth is that we were almost always hammered.

One night, Luna, Elise, Jenny, and I went to a downtown bar called The Underground. We had only had a couple of shots before we arrived, so we were still relatively coherent. Not long after we got there, a man bought us all drinks. My drink was drugged. I don't remember much after that.

What I do remember comes in fragments.

Coming into consciousness in a dark room, in a bed, with a man having sex with my body.

Then nothing.

Then coming into consciousness again, with a distinctly different man having sex with my body.

Then being helped into a living room because I could barely walk on my own, where my friends were doing cocaine.

Eventually, we all got into Luna's car and drove back to Jenny's apartment.

As we walked onto the porch, I was becoming more coherent and beginning to piece together what had happened. I told them, "They raped me."

Nobody seemed to hear me.

So I yelled it.

They shushed me because they didn't want to wake the neighbors.

We never talked about it again.

I had left my camera at the apartment where the men who raped me were staying. I couldn't even remember where the apartment was. My friends had one of the men's phone numbers and called him to confirm that my camera was there. Then they drove me back to retrieve it.

I went back to that apartment. I looked the men in the face and acted nice to them because I wanted my camera back.

It was a cheap camera. I could have walked away and never seen those men again. But I went back.

Sometimes survivors do things that don't make sense to people looking in from the outside. Trauma, confusion, fragmented memories, and the reactions of the people around us can all affect how we respond to what happened.

I never reported them. Why would I? My own friends hadn't even acknowledged what I'd told them.

Years later, we were still drinking just as heavily. I had a habit of blacking out, and when I did, I would sometimes call Luna a bitch and say horrible things to her. At the time, I couldn't understand why. I didn't feel angry with her when we started drinking. I had blocked out the memory of what happened at The Underground.

It wasn't until I was sober, years later, and working through things in therapy that I finally made the connection between that night and my behavior toward Luna.

My anger had been trying to tell me something I couldn't consciously remember.

Luna eventually ended our friendship because I couldn't stop becoming hateful toward her during our drinking marathons. It hurt, but by then I was also exhausted from always following her lead. I had spent years feeling like the group never really considered what I wanted to do when we hung out. It was always Luna who decided, and the rest of us followed.

So I moved on.

I never spoke to her again.

Years later, she sent me cruel messages that made it clear how negatively she viewed me and the choices I'd made in my life. A couple of years after that, she reached out again, saying that her daughter needed to know her Aunt Dora.

The shift was jarring. After everything that had happened between us, I didn't know what to make of it. I never responded. I figured she was still drinking and sending me messages while drunk.

I don't know where Luna and Elise are now. I don't know whether they ever confronted their own demons, whether they stopped drinking, or whether they found healing. I have no way of knowing.

I hope they did.

I hope they found a way to heal their inner demons and learn to love themselves. I hope they quit drinking and are healthy and happy.

And despite everything, I still love them.

That is part of what makes this painting difficult for me. It was created from a genuine place of love and connection. At the time, I saw two elephants holding each other's trunks and thought of friendship, loyalty, and affection.

But now I see the significance of the composition differently.

The painting is zoomed in on the affection. That was the part I could see then. The rest of the elephants are outside the frame, just as so much of the story was outside my awareness.

There was so much more to those elephants than the small piece I chose to paint.

There was so much more to that friendship than the affection I remembered.

And there was so much more to my own story than I understood at the time.