The torture of loving someone through difficult circumstances seemed so glamorous in music and on television. I knew I was in love, because opposite work schedules and organic chemistry were conspiring to keep the two of us apart. What cruel irony to meet the seven-foot-tall record-collecting beefcake of my dreams only to be prioritized somewhere between “get a root canal” and “study for the MCAT” on his to-do list! I spent years of my life romanticizing something that amounted to little more than the kind of relationship a person has with her high school boyfriend once they’ve gone away to separate colleges and he forgets there’s someone pining for him halfway across the country. The gut-wrenching pain of casual rejection was my oxygen as I waited for him to put his stethoscope down long enough to help me pick out a couch. At least I got a lot of shit done while waiting for him to finish school. I circled a lot of particleboard furniture in the IKEA catalog, fucked a couple of muscular jerks with fat fetishes I brought home from the gym, and read the entire Harry Potter series during the summer I unknowingly was waiting for him to dump me. God, I was dumb and cautiously optimistic for way longer than I should’ve been. I mean, “in love.”
How do I know I’m in love if I don’t want to kill myself all the time? Mavis is the nicest person I’ve ever met, and it was hard to recognize I was in love with her because she never let so much time elapse between “hey wats up winky-face emoji” texts that I had deleted her number and had to respond, “NEW PHONE WHO DIS.” She has never replied “…uh okay sure” when I tell her I love her. She’s never patted me on the back while telling me that she thinks of me as a really good friend despite our regular carnal relations; never said, “Nah, I don’t read your shit because you really aren’t that funny to me”; never disappeared for a month and then popped back up all nonchalant. She has never, not even once, made me miserable. How is it possible that what we have is even real?
You know how when you’re in your mid-to late thirties, and you’re dreaming about where you are going to live hopefully by age forty-two, and you’re picturing your reasonably affordable one-bedroom apartment in a moderately safe and attractive neighborhood: who is living there with you? Is it the withholder? The serial cheater? What about the commitment-phobe, or perhaps the grifter? Yeah, no. It’s none of those. It’s some mythical being you haven’t met yet, one who doesn’t have any suspicious Facebook activity that can trigger hours of pointless scrolling down strangers’ profiles, looking for infidelity clues.
I have developed a very special set of skills as a coping mechanism for falling in love with shitty people. I can go days at a time without so much as a smoke signal. I have no problem eating in a restaurant alone or living without physical contact for weeks or believing that a person who definitely was sleeping with several other women was also somehow devoted to me. That’s the deal, right, that it’s not real unless it feels like someone reached into your chest to pull your heart out while you stand by helplessly? I can work with that. I have not, however, figured out what to do when a person I am romantically involved with keeps her word and looks after my feelings. If Mavis showed up at a reading, drunk and inexplicably wet, and heckled me onstage, I would know how to handle that kind of love. I understand a love that argues with you in public and occasionally puts down your body and knocks on your door only at midnight.
I’ve never been loved like this before, and I resist it, every day, because I do not deserve it. Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, “Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and I got you some while I was out,” as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It’s not a game you don’t understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3:00 a.m. or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It’s fucking boring, dude. I don’t walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store; no checking her e-mails or calling her job to make sure she’s actually there; no sitting in my car outside her house at dawn to make sure she’s alone when she leaves. This feels safe and steadfast and predictable and secure. It’s boring as shit. And it’s easily the best thing I’ve ever felt.
Today is Zac’s forty-third birthday. We met on the eve of his thirty-second. That totally blows my mind. Like how can I be this old? How could this have all gone down a decade ago? And how are the scars lurking under the surface of my skin still so easy to find? I remember the first time I ran into him in public after we’d broken up: my friend Julia and I were at the Silver Room block party, withering under the blistering July sun, when I heard a familiar laugh behind me and my stomach fell right out of my butt. I turned around and made eye contact, then immediately started to cry, but all cool-like behind giant sunglasses. It felt like all the wind had been sucked out of my lungs, an acute pain that I could feel radiating through my whole body. I clutched Julia’s arm, tears streaming down my cheeks, and was like, “Yo, I gotta go. Right now.” And then we pushed our way through the crowd of sweaty, gyrating bodies to get a cab home. It had been, I don’t know, six or seven months? And I thought I was fine after we broke up. I didn’t fall apart like I thought I would.
But when I saw him again something cracked open inside me, and I went home to my new apartment (this time just one room, big enough for a full-size bed, a bookcase, a kitchen big enough to wedge a little writing desk under the window, and a bathroom the size of a closet, perfect for the three boxes I’d moved in with) and called a friend to say that I thought I might be dying for real and played Portishead records in the dark for the rest of the night. Reminded, again, that love feels like a fucking dumpster fire in the pit of your stomach.
I saw the little gift icon on my iPhone calendar this morning and immediately texted him, which I have not done in literal years. But this is a sign, right, randomly digging up all these fucking feelings on the anniversary of his birth without even having realized it? I have never written about him, and I never planned to. I like to make fun of people, especially myself, but I’ve always felt so protective of that twenty-five-year-old idiot moping around those barren rooms with her barren womb feeling so grateful for the hope that came attached to this person. I had no idea whether he had the same number, but I wrote “happy happy day, champ!” and pressed send. He wrote back within minutes, which never happened when we were together. How you doing blah blah what are you up to blah blah how is your family blah blah blah are you seeing anyone and then he said:
I regret how we ended our relationship, because I really thought something permanent would have come about with you, but I see now that it was bad timing. We had a lot of laughs together. Your soul is always with me and I always keep you close to me, and yes, I know it was hard as hell but one thing you should know is that I really loved you and I never stopped.