At the writing of this, the facts are these:
It is mid December 2017.
It has snowed twice here in Pennsylvania.
Blood boils at 100 degrees Celsius (centigrade) or 212 degrees Fahrenheit and LinkedIn is unaware that four whole months have passed since J*** decided he never wanted to hear from or speak to me again.
In the droll and tedious journey of moving through, on and past that relationship, I’ve been diligent about avoiding reminders, so when I carelessly opened an email notification listing a new potential connection I was surprised when the link took me directly to his LinkedIn profile.
A new reminder that there were new entities I had to inform that “we” had been relegated to the past tense.
There was no “us”.
We went from “are” to “were” within the span of 24 hrs.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A postmortem requires thorough documentation of the facts, even speculative ones.
Fastidious vivisection.
In reference to the aforementioned facts, one imagines blood as having a more viscous consistency than water and therefore probably requiring a higher temperature to go from liquid to gas.
The truth is blood is not that much thicker than water.
Blood boils at 100 degrees Celsius.
Considering the metaphorical implications, take from that what you will.
It is December 14th.
Of late, this is a very particular time to express yourself as a woman. Being heard was always important, but being heard free of judgement is a part of this particular watershed moment where women’s accounts of their relations with men is at once disturbing, but if the current exchange between men and women in this very specific moment belies anything… we don’t communicate well.
First, to clarify, this is not a #MeToo …… thing…
This is something else entirely and while probably in parts verbose and meandering I hope that whomever you are, you read it in its entirety as I hope to completely and explicitly articulate myself.
My writing this, I suppose, is out of some innate need to say the things I never got to say. Even if the words reverberate forever out into the ether…. just to say them.
Closure?
I’m not sure that’s a real thing.
We live.
We make decisions.
We act on them.
We live the consequences.
New experiences may help dull the memory of mistakes and emotions, bad or good, but it’s always there.
Make no mistake.
The 7% rule per professor Mehrabian tells us that 55% of what we communicate is via body language and 38% is tone, which means that 93% of what we’re saying is not coming out of our mouths.
But we are saying something.
The absence of words and actions say as much, if not more, than what deliberate words and actions do.
Despite being the minority, I lost J*** in the 7%.
It’s snowed twice so far this December. The significance of the snowfall is that, unlike any other seasonal change, a total whiteout distinctly marks the change of the season more so than even Autumn. J*** and I will soon have been apart longer than we were together and the stark difference between the warmer months here in the northeast and these bitterly cold winter months metaphorically parallel him and I present and past tense. Seeing as I can only explicitly speak for myself, I’ll start there.
First, breaking up can be especially hard to do because if you’re anything like me, you’ve given that person a part of you that’s precious. You’ve made plans with that person. Any thing as small as where you’re grabbing lunch to what you’re naming your unborn children. It means your heart has written a thousand love letters in those moments your heart was bursting at the seams with love. Letters you were hoping to one day show them. You’ve gone to places together that will now hold bittersweet memories. You’ll wonder if you’re worthy of love. This person met your family. You now have to explain to them why ‘The One’ isn’t the one anymore… I suppose it fitting that my final rebuke came from his family then…
There’s been a general misuse of the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ trope… and that shoe goes on the other foot.
‘Crazy’ is by definition, “not mentally sound. Marked by thought or action that lacks reason. Mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way”.
When someone refers to their crazy ex-boyfriend or crazy ex-girlfriend, they are citing the parameters of crazy’s definition literally. Pain, however will render sound thinking and action based on reason and logic, moot, if not impossible. We excuse these moments of pain brought on by tragedy, grief, loss, shock. Alternatively, someone’s behavior being dismissed as crazy or irrational may just be society decidedly alienating people from their true nature.
If this behavior was an outlier, it wouldn’t be the stereotype that it is.
I’ve always fought for the people I love to an excessive amount. I’ve always made it clear that when I truly care about someone, there is no limit. I’m dogged in a fight. Enough is never enough.
I had grievances against the claims lobbied against me. Let me be clear, he wasn’t lying. He had not lied, but like everything towards the end of our relationship, it was absolute miscommunication. Metaphorically speaking, The crime scene obviously told the story. There was a dead body (our relationship) laying on the ground. I was standing over it holding a gun. That’s the scene he had happened upon. It didn’t matter that it was already dead when I got there ( our current state was unsustainable, I readily yield that, the event that ended things assured that) or that I had picked the gun up from the ground.
I knew how it looked.
I needed to clear my good name.
That may be partly why I’m writing this. He shut me out. Decided I was untrustworthy and wouldn’t hear me out. But I suppose all perpetrators want their day in court to claim their innocence.
His opinion was the one I held in the highest regard. I even made the grand gesture. I went to his house. Had my ‘Say Anything’ moment to plead my case. But I couldn’t. If this was the last time I was ever going to be in the same space as him I needed to memorize the look of him, his gesticulation, the way he sounded. My mind got distracted with doing this and I couldn’t do it. I was memorizing the lines of his face. Where the concentration of freckles was highest on his temples. The exact shade of grey-Green his eyes were that day. The way he said my name, though he said it in anger now. And to see his opinion physically manifested now.
To see how he thought and felt about me now. And how he could have formed so inaccurate an opinion of me after this event was………
was…………
To lay down and let love die would’ve been a betrayal of what I meant when I first told him ‘ I love you. I am in love with you’. And some may argue that there is a quiet dignity in just walking away and letting things be…. turning off the machines fighting for existence and letting the life of the thing just slip away. Aside from my circumstances being a bit more complicated than that and being well acquainted with death in every form, I knew the unfortunate truth. Yes. I could have just said ‘ ok’ and walked away as he did. But that would have made me a liar, which bad enough, he now thought I was and I wanted to fight to dispel that mistruth, but and the unfortunate truth is, there is no dignity in death. It is always ugly. It’s always tragic. Even with the end of long suffering pain it diminishes the entirety of ones human experience.
My every attempt at breaching the void between us seemed to only drive him away though. Maybe he was never mine. Maybe I was foolishly trying to hold on to something, someone who saw no freedom in our union as I did. Something and someone who refused to be held. Maybe I was the only one in love or committed to the long haul. Maybe it had just been several months of….. I don’t know what it was to him. Maybe he wanted an easy relationship where everything was perfect. ‘ I’ve had successful relationships before S******. It shouldn’t be this much work’. He said that to me. In the letter. I remember sitting on the boardwalk on Coney Island stubbornly telling myself ‘smooth seas never made skilled sailors. All great things are worth fighting for’ and partially realizing that if that were true and he felt there was nothing worth trying for, then no.
We had not felt the same about one another.
I wanted to discard the past month and move forward with the knowledge I had acquired. Leave the dead behind and build something new.
Do better.
Be better.
I wanted things to get to a place where I would say ‘ Im 30 Days late’ and not wonder negatively the consequences of my pregnancy. I never got a chance to tell him though I tried. It was probably for the best then that I miscarried in September. It happened quietly. With no drama. I bled heavily on the pink carpet in the small room. What would have been his child unraveled and untangled itself from me as J*** had done: with no warning and in a matter of a few short hours. The cold of the vinyl tub I lay in as the blood and tissue curled down my legs was the only relief I felt that day. There has been no reprieve for me since.
He however, was done. I had stood with my hand out and he wouldn’t even let me explain myself. Maybe there was more he wanted to say but he didn’t want to be totally horrible and say it to my face. Here I was focusing on every moment I had felt happy with him and he was…. itemizing every wrong, every hurt, every mistake. My invoice was overwhelmed with ‘I love you’s and laughter and silliness and racing mobilized shopping carts in Walmart. And his was overflowing with accusations of manipulation, lies, untrustworthiness, emotional irrationality, poor character.
I never cared what anyone else thought of us… of me… I cared what he thought though… did he think us outwardly mismatched?
I wanted to throttle him with 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
Maybe my fear that I never intimately, emotionally or sexually, satisfied him was accurate. Maybe all the while I had been happily letting my inner Martha Stewart-stepford wife come All around New York broad run rampant, I hadn’t really been taking care of him.
Not in the way he needed.
Or as he kept saying to me the last time we spoke ‘ it didn’t matter’. He was currently more interested in his anger and his pain whereas I couldn’t wait to lay that down and move on and be better. Everything I did hurt him? Everything? How had we gotten here? Nothing had endeared me to him? Considering that this was a man who at one point promised me he wasn’t going anywhere, I don’t know how, at any time during the time we were together, I imagined myself so happy. I feel like I imagined the day we walked through Longwood gardens. I think I imagined that first kiss as I led us out of an empty movie theatre, unsure of whether he actually liked me or not, but self corrected when he grabbed the back of my coat and spun me around and planted one on me. Or the day we walked through the 9/11 memorial in New York City, a place I had visited a dozen times before, but saw anew through the eyes of an American whose emotions tied to the event did not mirror my own but felt foreign all the same because the world we lived in now felt so far from then.
Maybe we never made love in the remote quietude of Shunk, Pennsylvania.
I must have dreamt the swelling pride I felt when he was promoted at work and mused on other goals and ambitions he wanted to see to fruition.
Maybe I was crazy.
Maybe I imagined it all.
The delineation from February 26th 2017 when we allegedly first met to now, cold and weary Winter, would more support a claim of insanity. I made up the whole thing. It never happened. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Rationalizing what I believe to be the truth, what is documented in emails and text messages and photographs to have really transpired makes less sense for two people who claimed to have loved one another. But I worry that the truth actually is stranger than fiction. And it’s not that I can’t let go.
It’s not that I’m not strong enough to.
I’ve been doing the impossible thing my whole life.
I did it when I left home at 17 and moved to Maryland in the US.
I did it in 2010 when I moved to Miami, in 2014 when I moved to New York and in 2016 when I came here to Pennsylvania.
I have always known I could do the hard and impossible things on my own.
Leave everyone I know and love behind and pursue a goal, an ambition like a zealot till I saw it completed.
But I didn’t want to.
I felt this great capacity for love in me and I had put it off for all these years and didn’t want to anymore. I wanted a partner. I saw this next chapter of my life being decisive but genuine. No longer shouldering my life alone. Unwavering partnership. That should’ve been tell-tale. I don’t shirk my role in all this. In fact I welcome my responsibility in it because it means I become more self aware. I learn from this. I grow from it. I didn’t know how important forgiveness and patience was in relationships….. in communicating, hindsight being 20/20 and all.
I thought I was her.
I’m not sure I subscribe to the idea of ‘the One’ but I thought we were better than well matched. I thought we were happy more than we were not and that we were moving towards our goals in parallels and in support of one another not against one another. I thought we were friends and if things ended between us it would be amicable. We’d be friendly. It would be a natural unraveling. If I had any idea I would’ve been so wrong….. I would have stood him up that day in February.
I almost did. I was nearly an hour late to our first date because I was hesitant.
I thought he was going to Ghost me. Stand me up. I was several months late in that assumption. And strange as it is…. I’m hoping to be strong enough to forget how good it felt. How hopeful I was. How happy I was. I fought as hard as I could. I gave it my all. If my best wasn’t good enough I hope he finds her.
Someone better than me.
Seriously.
Someone who won’t make the mistakes I made.
Someone worth keeping promises for.
Someone always worth forgiving.
Someone with which he’d feel no need to keep count of everything wrong.
Someone with whom he’d be overwhelmed with all the things he wanted and needed.
I wanted to be her.
I wanted the honor.
“You’re not crazy. Crazy people lack the kind of self awareness and clarity and rationality of thought you’re displaying here. You’re dealing with a lot. There’s no playbook for this. No steps to follow. There are ways to deal with it but understand that you did not suffer a psychotic break and you are not crazy. Overwhelmed and crazy are two different things” the psychiatrist said as I sat across from him after telling him the entire tale, no detail spared.
I had to know for sure, so I sought the diagnosis of a professional since my own opinion could not be trusted. That was the professional opinion so….. I mean, I could get into the lurid details here. As a neophyte at romantic Love I’ve tied myself in knots over the fact that we had sex often but rarely made love and while I was obsessed with our love making, the rest made me feel disposable even though I enjoyed it. That’s on me I suppose. In fact it was the lynch pin that led me head first down the rabbit hole to our implosion. I felt like I couldn’t make him happy. I felt like if I had any decency, I would end things and let my burdens be my own. I kept trying to muster the strength to end things but those conversations, when it felt like my situation was ripping us apart would end in ‘I loves you’s’ like prayers to a God who wasn’t listening. I swear I tried to have those conversations with him.
I feel like everything that went wrong, went wrong ultimately because I wasn’t an American. Because the domino effect of the accident of where I was born spread like a cancer that I didn’t know how to deal with. And I handled it poorly.
My circumstances became a whetstone to the vorpal blade I eventually cut him with.
A letter filled with anger and lies… but what would it yield making public those most private things?
Right now I guess, I believe I should just put to paper all the things I really wanted to say in clarity that I never got a chance to. How the sight of him always made me warm. The very sight of him made me happy. Even the last few times that we saw each other…. even that day at 30th street when rage and pain clouded everything… when my anger was at its highest…. at its worst, all I could think of was how good it always felt to see him.
As a person who has never felt ‘at home’, being near him felt familiar in a way I’ve only ever felt with my mother and Sister.
That’s the truth.
I never had enough time with him.
It felt like we were always leaving one another when we just wanted to be together…. or at least when I just wanted to be with him.
I have never slept soundly but laying next to him while he slept I’d often stir awake at 3 or 4am and wait. I’d stare at the ceiling, or browse social media on my phone and I’d wait. I’d wait patiently for him to turn on his side from sleeping on his back. I’d then turn on my left side, so that when his arm unconsciously reached out for me, it would find me. Perfectly. Every time curling around my waist, pulling me close and then finally I could go back to sleep. It wasn’t so much the act of being spooned but the fact that though he was fast sleep, his subconscious mind could find me that I guess solidified what I thought was love?
Now I’m not so sure, except to say that I miss it every night, and on many of these cold nights of late, I lay on my left side and pretend my arms are his.
I loved kissing him. We didn’t kiss nearly enough. Halfway through our relationship I realized the act of kissing was like….a desert rose…rare … reserved for only the most special of occasions. I don’t mean the pleasant pecks on the lips that couples do. Those we did all the time but I mean the soul altering, life affirming, love solidifying physical connection, lips finding each other like oxygen starved things desperate for survival. The kind that when you saw imitated on TV your parents covered your eyes. Sometimes in the morning he’d try to kiss me properly when I was all morning breath and sleepy eyed….I was no Snow White.
I felt utterly unattractive at first light and would get annoyed when he tried to kiss me then. I regret that now.
I loved his enjoyment of the verdant beauty of Pennsylvania in the Spring and Summer. It made me want to take him home to Dominica.
It made me want to see his reaction to my country’s wildness.
That all seems so stupid now.
He might have hated my family, hated us speaking creole or patois. We might have seemed too foreign the lot of us.
He made me laugh like no other man did. I thought we’d at least always have that. His uncanny ability to make me laugh and my inadvertent ability to do the same for him. Whether it was falling down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night or my headlong fall into madness at the premiere of ‘Game of Thrones’…. or at Carnival. I thought he found me funny. Everything is up for interpretation now.
I loved letting my propensity for domestication run wild with him. I did. I don’t care what that says about my feminist self but I loved cooking for him. I loved loved loved doing his laundry and tidying up after him. I truly enjoyed learning to mow lawn with him.
Truly.
Quotidian routine was exciting with him.
The physical act of being a help and a support and a teammate made me happy. Human beings truly are happiest in the service of others.
I swear. It tickled me so, every time I heard ‘babe, help me with this nose strip thing’ from the bathroom as he attempted using Biore strips as part of a newly implemented skin care routine, I smiled. I probably nagged him too much about using sunscreen. It’s probably on a list of things he hates and are hard no’s for his next relationship.
I could be officious in some ways. I see how he could have felt that I was that way. Maybe he hated my cooking. I was always thinking of doing more for him. It always felt like I could be doing more. I wanted to be back in the game so I could support him the way he deserved. In the end it seemed he felt that way too. It seemed he wanted more ‘finished product’ than ‘ work in progress’.
Maybe to him I was just some impecunious woman.
Useless.
I felt so close to being finished though. I felt close to being whole again. Close to being able to be my truest self with him. And then it all fell away like trying to hold water in your hands. I could go on forever. I could detail the crookedness of his nose and how I loved it, or how the arch of his feet gave his body more beauty or character than I could bear at times. How I loved his singing and how I couldn’t bare to see him unhappy or frustrated or angry.
I could….. I could detail it all….. like an autopsy….
Fastidious vivisection…..
I wanted to be his Bonnie Elizabeth Parker.
I wanted to be the Pam to his Jim.
The milk in his coffee.
His June Cash.
His Claire Underwood
His Khaleesi
I wanted to bear witness to all things in this life of his. The good, the hard, the impossible.
I wanted him to see me. All of me. Even now I wish he’d see things from my perspective
I wanted more time with him
I wanted more time with him
I wanted forgiveness
I wanted more time
I wanted him to make me.
No words, no affection.
Come home one day and not even bother making it to the bedroom, tear my clothes away, pull my ass up to his hips, push my face to the floor and pin my wrists behind the small of my back. And not stop until I pass out.
So long I had waited to be loved by someone like him.
I knew I’d never be his first… anything, but I’d have like to have been his last
I wanted more of him because I am selfish.
I wasn’t done learning from him. Mining his intelligence… I’d never dated someone so smart
I wanted to be loved for exactly who I am, for who I was, for who I will be, for all of it
I close my eyes sometimes and breathe his skin though it’s been months now.
I can still taste him on my lips.
I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted, when all I wanted was for his hands to be pulling up my dress, pulling on my hair leaving his teeth marks on my skin, pinning me against the wall telling me to beg for it.
I suppose that makes me bad.
Craving him just makes me bad.
I wanted him to love me because of my imperfections and weaknesses not in spite of them.
I wanted to slay dragons together.
Build entire worlds together.
I wanted the coveted position of Queen. As a better writer than me once described, The position that placed me three steps behind him to his left. Should anything come at him from behind, I encounter it first. I easily see what advances to his right and left and my sights are dead on what approaches ahead. In other words, any foe would first have to come through me and it’s been well established that I
Just.
Won’t.
Die.
I wanted to Heckle Carson Wentz to his face ( that might have been grounds for ending our union)
I wanted to take a bath with him
I wanted to go to Burning Man with him
…………………
This is all very lopsided … ‘ I, I, I’ … but I never meant to be a hinderence to him, to hold him back and apparently I was.
But what would that life had looked like with me in it?
Rewind to that day…my heart breaking… my mind reeling…my train at Thorndale pulls up. He didn’t get into his car and drive to work. My legs became lead and I couldn’t board the train. The train comes and goes and I’m still on the platform crying my eyes out. He calls out of work. We sit there. He’s patient. I’m still finding my strength.
The nomenclature of Love suddenly becomes clear to the both of us.
The translation of what is actually said versus what is actually meant is instantaneous
‘I love you’ : I don’t want to hurt you
‘I love you’ : I’m really hurting right now and I don’t know what to do about it
‘I love you’ : I’m lost in this situation right now and I can’t find my way out
‘I love you’ : please don’t let me go
’I love you’: I’m here for you
‘I love you’ : I need you
‘I can’t do this anymore’ : tell me you love me
‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ : please be patient with me
‘I can’t live like this’ : the pain of this thing is more than I can bear
’Alright’: I love you
‘I love you’ : tell me I’m not crazy
‘I love you’ : I’m afraid
‘I love you’ : I’m afraid of losing you
‘I’m pregnant’
I say the words and he’s not mad. I explain that I have held back these past few weeks. My life at home has been unbearably hard and I don’t feel like I can turn to my friends and family.
I don’t feel like I can turn to him.
I feel like a burden to everyone.
I feel like a problem to everyone.
I feel like everyone would just be happier if I just went away.
If I just vanished into thin air like pink mist.
I don’t know how I got here. I’m lost and trying to find my way. He nods. He has questions. The obvious ‘how far along…. how….’ but at my pleading he agrees to stop. We sit in silence, the air heavy between us. Two more trains come and go. The sun changes position in the sky. I calm down. I take his hand. I find the strength to say the words “ please be patient with me while I figure this out. Everyone wants me to have the answers right now and I don’t have them.”
The pressure is real.
It may make diamonds yet.
He assures me I’m not a problem. I suggest we tear up the license. He agrees. I ask for a break like I had before back in June when things were already becoming convoluted for me personally.
We agree on 10 days just to breathe and regroup.
The time apart is crucial and hard but the answers lie there.
September comes and goes. I miscarry anyway. He comforts me through it. This is the first true test of our relationship.
Its easy to love someone when everything is great but when things are hard and impossible…when things are breaking and when a person is falling apart…when a person is unloveable, that’s loves truest test. Loving someone at their worst is actually loving them. There’s a lull between us but we get past it by the time the holidays come around. To upend my grief I focus on my writing and on publishing. It’s a few months on, but I finally move out to his side of Pennsylvania on my own so that seeing each other is easier. Some time after that I finally land a near dream job in NY. I relish the commute.
Our routine changes.
We move again when he starts grad school. I can live anywhere so this move isn’t problematic.
Life is sweet and easy for a while.
By some miracle both our careers land us back in NY.
I miscarry again.
I withdraw from him again.
I withdraw from the world but he’s patient with me. I make peace with my poly-cystic ovarian syndrome diagnosis. It’s been five years so we finally agree on a home, sitting on four happy acres in Pennsylvania. He has the privacy he always wanted in a home but we argue about the landscaping. Neither of us have time to tend the lawn. He feels it wasteful to spend so much on a landscaper. I grow tired of the arguments and buy a goat.
There.
A built in lawnmower that pays for itself.
like how we do back home in Dominica.
He makes me promise not to buy any more livestock without a discussion about it first.
I will agree to no such thing.
Within the next few months I stop working out as much, I’m not eating as much…it’s not until it’s plainly obvious and I’m about to enter my second trimester that he confronts me about being pregnant.
He’s angry. Extremely angry. But how could I put him through the hope and excitement again just to wade through another miscarriage if this one doesn’t take? His anger subsides.
This first kid is a junior. My family lineage is true and after a set of multiples and one other surprise, we decide enough for a NBA starting lineup is enough.
I’d come home one day to find that he’d cut off all his hair but the joke would be on him as my favorite physical features of his were always his hands and his insanely masculine, beautiful, Adonis like legs
“I go away for one week and now we have two sheep and a longhorn bull? I thought we agreed on no more livestock”
“ You agreed…. I made no such promise”
But bucolic life with Che the goat, Smith and Wesson the sheep and Fernando the bull suits us. Maybe we get a horse and name it Elmer’s
We’re happy.
More happy than unhappy.
Don’t get me wrong. We have our moments; years on I’ll look at him and think I never loved him or wanted him and feel trapped by our union. But then at night I’ll overhear him tucking in our daughter, explaining how he was an exceptionally rich man because in addition to a loving mother, he’d had two fathers who had loved him very much and that made him wealthy is ways innumerable and I’ll wonder how I could ever love another man.
The life that never was…
Hope
Hope…
That dog just won’t hunt.
At the end of the day, whether all of it matters or not, he won’t speak to me, he doesn’t trust or believe or want anything to do with me.
And as of writing this, I am glad to think of him less, as I know he does not think of me.
All the hallowed ‘I loves you’ mean nothing when they fall on the ears of a deaf God. At times there is such a vacancy in my heart. I miss him terribly and the feeling is not reciprocated.
No amount of time in the gym, no matter my progression in the Italian and Japanese languages, no matter how I’ve cut or styled my hair… no matter the time that has passed. No distraction is great enough to subvert the plain and simple truth of the fact that I was in love and I ruined it and I miss my friend and second chances are nothing more than a plot device.
I am reminded everywhere.
At a WaWa on Baltimore Avenue at 2am on a Friday morning where ‘You can call me Al’ by Paul Simon is playing and suddenly I’m back in his car driving in the summer heat, until a store attendant shakes me and says ‘honey are you alright?’ And the tears have only welled, not fallen so I can still leave that store with some dignity as the question was clearly rhetorical.
‘The Lake House’ ‘Micheal Clayton’ and ‘Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful eight’ all have male characters named J***. I didn’t know that until each time they were named on screen in the last three months, I’d practically jump out of my skin.
Walking home one night I came face to face with a Stag, taller than me, his antlers magnificent, both of us our breath misting in the cold October air….’J***’ ‘ I whispered, as it turned and stalked into the wood across the Cul-de-sac. I did what he asked.
I gave up. I went away.
Yet everywhere I turn……… I’m alone in it. Every Saturday night now instead of leaving to spend the weekend with him I make other plans. The Gym maybe. Though that’s a reminder too. I was spoiling his life. I had to learn to live with my despair and I am.
But that’s not all there is
There so much more.
So much more to the length and depth and breadth of me.
And time.
I think I might be a fifth dimensional being.
My love for him was real and for a time defined some of me and that’s over but that love still exists and I’m still me.
In all my gloriously, messy, powerful, curious, infantile, wise, forgiving, hopeful, insane, patient, madness, I remain irrevocably me.
And I’m enough.
More than enough.
I’ve never needed saving, but I’d like to be loved unconditionally.
Was that the lesson? Was that the point of this?
Getting lost like I did. Breaking like I did. Mental health is like having the cold. We all waver, some more outwardly than others.
I am choosing to understanding him cutting me out like he did. I’ve been trying to understand him in absentia. I’ve never understood why people ‘ghost’ people they once claimed to love. I was hoping I was worth more than that to him. Clearly I was not. I’m not even worthy of a conversation to him.
The price of anything is the amount of life you’ve exchanged for it and what I’ve gained is slowly tipping the scales to that lost.
Allow me then to reintroduce myself
My name is S****** U****** N****
Yes. My parents deliberately named me so the acronym of my name spelled SUN and they wonder why I love the heat and generally function like a sunflower
I suffer synesthesia
I know this because after my second car accident at age 13 I could see sounds.
J***’s Love-making was like crushed blue velvet.
The rhythm of his breathing, the physical strain of his restraint… the most brilliant shades of blue.
I often checked out under the weight of him and got lost in the colors of his sounds not that he wasn’t proficient as a lover, but I was seeing things I had never seen before
When he sang it was like white cumulus clouds in my peripheral vision. His laughter was like pink iridescent bubbles.
I’m ambidextrous though I favor my right hand.
I will sometimes unconsciously switch hands and to this day that freaks people out.
I spend most of winter hibernating and reading and writing. Winter makes me a voracious reader
I fancy myself a writer and therefore must actually be crazy as presently I strive to make money from being a fucking wordsmith.
William Yeats is my favorite poet. The first time I told J*** I loved him, ‘Cloths of Heaven’ was on repeat in my mind.
I never told him this.
Keats is a close second.
My qualities outweigh my weaknesses by far.
I am impossibly strong. Not just mentally and emotionally but physically. I’ve fallen from a second floor balcony, been in three very serious car accidents ( one so bad I suffered amnesia) was accidentally dragged by a truck ( my coat got stuck in the door) had a tree collapse on top of me ( too long a story for this) and I’ve never broken a bone. I barely have scars from any of it
I have mild vitiligo but I’m good at hiding it
I am determined to finish Pokemon Go
I’m one hell of a partner in crime and in life and in doubles matches if that’s what blows your hair back
I can forgive anything because above all I strive to be empathetic and it is true that once you know someone and understand them, it is impossible not to also love them.
Also forgiveness is about you and not your offender.
I’m trying to be a less competitive athelete
I can sing.
I make out like I can’t because I hate the reaction people have to my singing though it’s always positive. My rendition of ‘ my favorite things’ is pretty good
I’m a pretty good cook and a struggling baker…. I make decent cupcakes though
My favourite unit of measurement is ‘As Fuck’
I once refused a suitor sex and he punched me so hard on my left ear that I had tinnitus for three days.
No worries though.
I gave as good as I got and I doubt he’ll ever raise his hand to a woman again.
Yes to resistance bands, a hard no to foam rollers
I’ve long made peace with the fact that people will make mistakes and we must all decide if these mistakes are bigger than our love for them
Especially our parents
Of late I’m more concerned with self- compassion than self- confidence.
I’d rather binge watch South-Park or Rick& Morty than watch a romantic comedy
I’d rather play Call Of Duty than get my nails done.
Despite the previous statement I love wearing heels and figure flattering dresses
When I’m sick ‘Annie Hall’ is my go to movie
When I’m sad it’s ‘Top Gear/ The Grand Tour’
I prefer cats to dogs but love dogs just fine (let’s face it though, puppies are great but dogs….once the bloom is off that rose who are we kidding?)
I know that you can’t wash soap but just because a thing takes time and effort doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.
I know he wanted me to be an Angel. And I am an Angel. But do people really understand what Angels are? God ordained them to kill in his name. Micheal and Gabriel razed entire cities. Reigned fire and brimstone. If you can appreciate the balance, take the good with the bad, the awesome with the terrible then yes….I am an Angel.
I am worthy of all the things. Worthy of Love and respect and second and third and fourth chances because I’m a goddam living, breathing, walking miracle
I am more than enough
I overflow with abundance
It’s 2:34 am and my heart…my mind and my heart are searching for thoughts and feelings that do not hurt.
I find them
I had underwear cotton candy dance parties on the Saturday nights he came to pick me up.
I shit you not.
He’d be outside waiting and I’d get so excited I’d put on ‘The whole wide world’ by Wreckless Eric and dance around while packing my things I’d be so happy.
I never told him this.
A fistful of life has struck me in the throat more than once and I’m still here.
I prefer lovemaking to sex and sex to fucking.
I know that the best love, unconditional love, is about acceptance and growth, never about changing your partner.
I still believe sprinkles are for winners though second place sundaes are just fine.
I hope in the next life I come back as a Porg….or Luigi.
I’m excited to meet my partner.
The one who bothers truly getting to know me.
Eager to forgive me.
Unwilling to ever let me go.
But it’s still bizarre right now being hit on, being chatted up, wearing the red backless number I meant to wear for him.
But here we are
And this whole mess informed me of who I am and what I’m capable of and what I needed when I lost my way.
Sometimes, lately, it feels wrong to be happy without him. To have been so happy with someone and then to be happy without them feels like a betrayal but then I remember how I want for him to be happy too.
It’s all I ever wanted. For him to be happy.
well, I’m no saint. I wanted things of him. For him to bring me oatmeal raisin cookies and to kiss me and rub my back and finish explaining Naruto to me and for us to achieve all our goals together, to make him his coffee every morning just the way he liked. To help him prepare for certs by insisting he read his articles to me at night…..
but most of all…of all the things I’ve wanted for was to make him happy. Even if it means being happy without me
I made his blood boil.. I did. I saw it in his face.
I swear I didn’t mean to, but I think it means something that I did.
For all my questioning of whether we were ever really in love or not….
“ it can often be cathartic to put pen to paper and write what you would most want to say to someone even though you may never actually have that conversation” that’s what the good doctor said. Who am I to subvert the advise of a professional?
But before I wrap up this lengthy coroners report let me say that I’d relish a second chance.
I won’t lie.
Fantasies abound.
I let myself have them from time to time.
I’ve been assured by friends and therapist alike that this is fine and part of the grieving and healing process.
Mind you, 2017 revealed that water is in fact not wet, aliens are real and true love actually abounds. They remain just fantasies though.
If he and I were to ever talk again, he would have to talk first and I’ve let myself imagine what that impossible scenario would be like.
A text message that Nate had left this earthly world may God rest his doggy soul.
A four word letter at my doorstep “ I don’t hate you”
A friend request via social media
Those three scenarios would at the very least allow that one day, some day, I could have my friend back.
We could be friends again.
But none of those scenarios crack the top three fantasies that I’ve had.
Number one is the absolute least likely scenario. In that fantasy, I stumble upon a time machine and very selfishly, rather than go back in time and end Hitlers reign before his genocide, or warn New York of the 9/11 attacks, I simply dial back to July of 2017. This was the month where I had taken to hiding and concealing what I was going through and rather than trust him with it, I had taken to placing all my pain and despair solely on him. I go back to that time, I tear up the license and say what I would have said at Thorndale station in that alternative life
In the second scenario, also highly unlikely, he reaches out, either via email or mail or text message. “ I’m ready to talk about it”. As mentioned in our last conversation, I kept pushing and all he kept saying was ‘ I can’t talk about it’ and “I’m not ready to talk about it”. For all I know he’s had those conversations with friends and family and really has no need or desire to talk about any of it with me, my side of things probably means nothing to him but this is a fantasy and we finally talk about it openly and frankly and at some beats, painfully. I explain how I, someone who values honesty so highly, lied, just to hurt him just to hurt someone I love. I make it make sense not that either of us are any happier for it.
I don’t know what the outcome is of it. I cannot fathom or imagine it.
I’d like to imagine it’s positive, but deep in my heart I feel this particular scenario would just hurt him. Bring some definitive “closure” yes, but if there was a 0.0001% chance it would hurt him at all then, no. No amount of “closure” would be worth it.
Finally, scenario 3 is absolutely, deliciously crazy. I’ve listened to too many songs by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Read too much Austen and Bronte. Watched one too many films by Joe Wright and Nora Ephron.
In this dream, I come home and he’s there… on my front step, waiting.
We don’t say anything. We don’t need to.
I let us into the house and he sits on my bed as I change into my PJ’s and we go to sleep. Not a single word is exchanged. We simply try to fit our too large bodies ( at a recent doctors appointment I learned that I was closer to 5’11” than 5’10” than I previously thought) on my bed, holding one another and we fall asleep.
Me, tearfully and him quietly. I hold his heart more tenderly than my own.
In the course of that night the chasm between us would close. Every bad memory and feeling dispelled. In the morning when we awoke, we’d simply look at one another and he’d say something like ‘ Pineapple is not that great anyways’ and I’d know then. I’d know that his heart was open again.
There would be no guarantee for an ‘us’ again, but… but he’d be willing to let himself feel whatever it is time and space with me let him feel.
We’d Begin Again.
No pressure.
No anger. Start as friends and see if there was any truth to the love that was once before.
But I know better now than to hold on to someone and something that doesn’t want to be held. I suppose that’s the point at which I was meant to arrive; if it was meant to be, then we’d be. He’d have reached out by now. We’d have talked by now. No more complicated or simpler than that
There. I’ve spoken my peace.
To him, if I ever could speak to him again I’d say,
I apologize… for all of it
I pray Nate lives to be 100 years old.
I wish you every success in your career and in any academic or financial endeavor you undertake.
Get out of your head.
Let the world surprise you with its grace
I hope you’re consuming Pineapple to your hearts content
I hope you always do what you love and that you never weigh that against your checking account balance
Please watch ‘Hector and the search for happiness’ or better yet, read the book
I hope every time you see her she takes your breath away
I hope she never hurts you… that she’s a truly perfect woman.
But in the event that she turns out to be human, I hope the love you feel for her makes forgiving her for any slight or any mistake, a joy.
I hope that you keep choosing her again and again. No matter what.
That when the whole world goes mad around you that she remains your true north.
Some genuinely friendly advice: go to Italy in the summer.
Between July and August, go to Italy to the Amalfi coast.
The water there turns shades of blue that you can only ever see there at that time of year.
See it with her.
Fall into one another’s arms.
Do as the Romans do. Make love to each other passionately.
Eat gnocchi and drink wine till you’re both sick of it.
Take lots of photos. For posterity
Stateside, at least once spend all night walking through New York City with no schedule or timeline for the following day.
Wear comfortable shoes.
I know you hated it with me, but with the right person, it’s impossibly romantic I swear.
I swear on everything good.
Get lost in the city, in the centuries old Architecture, in the random crashing of cultures, in the beauty of the single most resilient city in the known universe.
Go to Raclette NYC. Trust me and you’re welcome.
At some point you should go to Chinatown and go to Great NY Noodletown.
It’s authentic. You will get absolutely no kind of customer service.
In fact the staff who probably speak no kind of discernible English, will throw you and your lady at some random table with 6 other strangers and serve you food that kinda looks like what you ordered but will be so damned delicious you won’t care if it isn’t what you thought you wanted.
At least a couple hours before dawn breaks please go to Miss Favela in Williamsburg. Again, there will be no English spoken but the drinks are amazing and if you’re lucky and I feel you will be, the in house band will break into a Brazilian flavored version of Miss Nina Simone’s ‘SinnerMan’ .
The staff is going to start moving chairs and tables out of the way as people start getting up to dance.
Be one of those people.
Grab your lady and rhythm or not, dance.
Fall out laughing together at the absurdity of it all.
That memory will become a tent pole when sad and upsetting things happen. It will hold up your confidence in your decisions. It will warm your heart when it’s broken. It will soothe your soul on the evening after you bury your parents. It’ll calm you the first night you spend in the hospital with your recovering child. You’ll laugh out loud randomly at the thought of those memories and people will think you’re crazy but, respectfully, fuck those people.
They can all go choke on a bag of dicks.
Have your joy and eat it too.
Read ‘Call me by your name’ by André Aciman
If one morning before you both wake, as sunlight starts bathing and warming your bodies, your lady, ever so quietly, so softly, starts singing ‘B-A-B-Y’ by Carla Thomas don’t let on.
Pretend to be asleep. Let her have her moment. Let her relish the joy of waking up next to you.
To again steal a line from a better writer than I, when you want to, your body beautifully and naturally expresses what’s in your heart. Do that more. As a lover be as tender as you are deliberate
I never expressed my gratitude for early morning shoulder kisses but that was just me.
Do it for your lady. Give her the chance to appreciate it. The chance I squandered.
If things get bad, if at some point you two are in a fight, remember all those good things, remind her of who she is, of who you fell in love with and please please please find it in your heart to be patient with her.
I hope your Christmases are littered with genuine kisses underneath the mistletoe.
It’s said that whatever you’re doing on New Years Eve is what you’ll be doing the rest of the year, so please spend it in the arms of someone you love.
If you need an escape go to Miami, to Nikki beach, go in the evening when the humidity rising off the sand and surf mixed with the ocean spray is as intoxicating as the rum you’ll drink…. if you go on a weekday, in the wee hours of the morning most of the cabanas will be deserted.
Find one and make love to your lady there. Bury your troubles in the sand beneath you.
Lose yourself in your love for her.
Get out of your head.
I really do hope you never think of me. Particularly if it just upsets you.
Should you think of me please don’t be angry.
Think of only the good things.
Please wish me no ill.
I hope you are happy.
I hope we’ve not been two stupid selfish people who’ve ruined a chance at something great.
I really do hope that.
otherwise what was the point of all this?
I hope the ancients aren’t looking down at us from the heavens, shaking their heads at how badly we’ve managed to cock-up the whole thing, me especially.
I hope this really went the way it should have.
That we really were just mismatched and not meant to be.
That you’re incandescently happy now that I’m no longer in your life.
I mean that with every bit of sincerity.
And I wish you every happiness in letting go, in moving on, and, if there was any question, you were greater than the man of my dreams, because unless I’m actually crazy, you were real.
We were real.
Justin Challenger 