My parents fell in love when they were twenty-seven. It was 1977, and they both lived downtown and ran with the same crowd of artists who wore Chinese slippers and played tennis ironically. My father framed pictures, and my mother took them, and so she asked him to help her, and the rest is history.
“Tell me again about how you met Mom,” I ask my father.
“Not if you’re just going to write about it,” he says. But ultimately he can’t resist—describing how odd her sense of humor was and how impossibly dramatic her friends were. “They just walked around starting fights with people.”
The story has everything: drama, jealousy, drunkenness, friendships ended, and cats inherited. He liked the way she dressed, a little mannish, and the way she carried herself—same. She had revised her original opinion of him, which was that he looked just like a mouse. They had no cell phones so had to make plans and keep them or walk over to each other’s houses and ring the bell and hope for the best. Sometimes he got drunk and made her angry. Sometimes she started fights just because she was hungry. Sometimes they went to parties and watched each other across smoky lofts, amazed. Despite different genetics and cultural affiliations, they had identical coloring, were about the same height. Weighed the same amount, too. Like long-lost siblings. I love imagining them then, knowing no more than I do, just that they liked the way it felt to be together.
Devon didn’t fix that dissociated feeling for good, and when it came back, it came back harder. I had broken up with him on my seventh try, and one try didn’t even count because all I could muster was “I love you.”
“I know you do,” he said. But he was wrong.
I lay in bed all day, rubbing my feet together and whispering, “You are real. You are real. You are …”
And when I emerged, fifteen pounds lighter but too shaken to enjoy it, I thought, I could spend the next eight years just getting to know myself and that would be fine. The idea of sex right now sounds about as appealing as putting a live lobster up there.
Then he appeared. Gap toothed, Sculpey faced, glasses like a cartoon, so earnest I was suspicious, and so witty I was scared. I saw him standing there, yellow cardigan and hunched shoulders, and thought: Look, there is my friend. The next months were a lesson in opening up, letting go, being kind and brave.
I have written all sorts of paragraphs recounting those months together: first kiss, first Mister Softee, first time I noticed that he won’t touch a doorknob without covering his hand with his sweatshirt. I have written sentences about how the first time we made love it felt like dropping my keys on the table after a long trip, and about wearing his sneakers as we ran across the park toward my house, which would someday be our house. About the way he gathered me up after a long terrible day and put me to bed. About the fact that he is my family now. I wrote it down, found the words that evoked the exact feeling of the edge of the park at 11:00 P.M. on a hot Tuesday with the man I was starting to love. But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.
I don’t love any of my old boyfriends anymore. I’m not sure I ever did, and I’m not sure if at the time I thought I was sure. My mother says that’s normal, that men are proud of every one of their conquests, and women wish they could forget it all. She says that’s an essential gender difference, and I can’t say I disprove her theory. What keeps me from full revulsion, from wanting the sexual equivalent of an annulment, is thinking about what I got from each one that I still hold on to now.
My college boyfriend got me more in touch with my gut health (both a blessing and a curse) and made me ask some larger questions about the universe that I had been ignoring in favor of buying US Weekly the moment it hit the stands every Wednesday.
Ben taught me the term “self-actualized,” and it became not just a favorite phrase but a goal.
Devon made me a pencil case with a built-in sharpener, lent me his watch, showed me how to keep all my wires from getting tangled, and changed my iPhone alarm from marimba to timba so that I wake up happier, more soothed.
And now I come to him, whole and ready to be known differently. Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.