I smelled him before I saw him, clean like soap yet spicy and masculine. All of a sudden, a stubbled cheek pressed against mine as he bent close to speak. His lips smelled like Carmex. “Is that dude you were sitting with your boyfriend?” His voice pierced my heart like a knife, and my voice caught in my throat. I shook my head, deciding right then and there that my feelings for Jason were most definitely of the friendly variety. He asked for my number, and I mentally had to calculate whether there was enough money in my bank account to get my cell phone reactivated by the time he was going to call me. I could probably hustle up a freelance copyediting job right quick and get Sprint their money, so if he was one of these cool guys and waited a few days, I’d be all good. But what if he, you know, liked me liked me and tried to call later that day? Then I’d either look like a broke bitch or a lying asshole, and, yeah, I’m probably both, but he ain’t gotta know that yet. I snatched a pen off the bar and wrote down the number to the house phone I had initially sneered at when my roommate insisted (thank goodness for sensible people). He smiled, revealing a row of perfect teeth that stood in stark contrast to his deep chocolate skin even in the almost-dark, and enveloped my hand in his big bear paw. My insides turned to jelly, and I fought the desire to get on my tiptoes and kiss him.
The courtship was amazing. Until I met him, I had been an unwitting victim of a lot of Netflix and Chilling, except that wasn’t a thing then. Let’s just say I spent a lot of nights on various boyfriendly futons watching HBO for whatever amount of time is long enough to feel like a not-prostitute before having unenthusiastic sex. I was twenty-five, man. No one was asking me to dinner! It was like, “Oh, hey, cool, you gave me your number at that De La show! Wanna come over and watch me and my roommates play Resident Evil for three hours?” So I would say yeah, and shave my legs, and get all my shit on, and go to some kid’s house to watch him smoke weed and play Xbox, and then when he lost, we’d go to his room and have loser sex atop the pizza boxes and Jordans and DVDs scattered across his bed. And by “have sex” I mean “lie stiff as a board with all my muscles taut so his roommates wouldn’t hear the bed squeaking.” Lather, rinse, repeat for the entirety of my early twenties until this adult human male picked a time and a restaurant that served food on real plates. In the cab on the way home, I whispered to myself, “This is it.”
I knew it was love because he was busy with school, and I was not busy—at least, not busy in big and important ways—and it’s cute when you’re not busy to mail care packages to your boyfriend who literally lives thirty minutes away but hasn’t called in a week because he is so fucking busy. That inner cringe when a friend asks “Have you ever even been in his house?” is obviously what love feels like. I was in a pretty hopeless place: working too much, sick all the time, desperate to be loved in a real way. I needed an anchor, and into my lap one fell. He talked about helping me finish school and taking me on tropical vacations and didn’t care that I can’t have babies. How did I get so lucky?! And all I would have to do in return was wait, while trying not to drown.
I became pretty good at pretending to be a super-chill girlfriend, but sometimes I felt like I was really going to lose my shit pacing around that apartment waiting for updates: would he get out of class early enough to hang out tonight? Could he take Saturday night off from work to meet me out for a drink? What about if I drove to the hospital during his lunch break and just made googly eyes at him in the harshly lit cafeteria for a few minutes? Hours stretched to days, and days stretched to weeks, and there I was trying to be cool while pining for someone too unavailable to be my boyfriend, secretly delighting in the agony because it was proof that I was actually—no, fucking finally—in an adult romantic relationship. I would bore my increasingly irritated friends with melodramatic whining about how my one true love didn’t have time to hang out because of his chemistry final, then sit alone in this new apartment I’d rented so I could give him a key without being disrespectful to my now ex-roommate. A key he used maybe three times over the course of our entire relationship. Because he never found the time to come over.
I knew I was in love, because even though I spent my weekends locked in my crib organizing my ketchups and moping around to heartbreak music, it was worth it because I could finally relate to what the hell those bitches were singing about. I had mastered the unrequited crush early in life; every boy who leaned over to help me solve a geometry problem or who smacked a volleyball back over the net before it smashed into my face became the object of my never-ending devotion. Until he asked someone else to homecoming and I learned, again, that just because a dude runs across the whole school with the clarinet you left behind in the band room tucked under his arm to bring it to your Latin American history class doesn’t mean he’s in love with you. Sometimes people can be decent. So I gathered all the songs about loneliness and longing and made bleak mixtapes to listen to while ripping pictures of Christian Slater out of back issues of YM and Seventeen. And that was fine, but what I really wanted was a reason to sing all the tortured, love-gone-wrong songs. What I really wanted was to sing “Tear in Your Hand” at the top of my lungs and mean it.
I had sex one time in high school, but that was a joke. As soon as he squirted that thick ribbon of cum all over my pubes and inner thigh before I’d even begun to enjoy myself, I decided that I wouldn’t be doing that with a person I might have to do a group project on NAFTA with ever fucking again. In my later teens, I’d learn the hard way that sex doesn’t equal undying romantic feelings. But boy, those first few lessons were brutal. They resulted in many “Yo, I thought we were just homies who kicked it sometimes” conversations. So when I finally happened upon this handsome stranger, one who had all the hobbies and interests of the prototypical lovers I breathlessly detailed in my journals, one who took me on dates that he paid for, one who made actual love instead of trying to fuck me in the face, I thought it was kismet. It had to be. So what if he didn’t ever have time to have long philosophical talks with me or fit a quick lunch into his grad school schedule? He told me he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me, and he proved it by never ever calling or using the extra toothbrush I’d carefully arranged in the medicine cabinet in what should have been our bathroom. All I had when I moved was some pots and pans and the shit in my bedroom, so the dining room and living room and guest room sat cold and empty for the entire time I lived there letting the words to “Carrion” by Fiona Apple echo through the empty spaces, waiting for him to give me a reason to fill them up.