I can’t tell you how it is that I became the
way I am now. I know that sometimes people say that certain events and emotions
have brought them to the place that they are currently in and maybe that much
is true. I would like to say that the majority of my romantic experiences have
been good ones; that they have taught me how to engage appropriately with my
proverbial partner, that they have given me the confidence to carry on
regardless of my relationship status, and that they have harbored in me less
bad than good. I would like to say that like all romantic comedies, whatever
relationships I was once involved in have caused only good things to happen;
that I have sat in eclectic coffee shops over the years and happily pondered
what my life would be like if I had ended up with this person or that, that all
of my passionate experiences, good or bad, have instilled a warmth inside of
me, and that I hold no ill will towards those poor, tortured men who had once
hurt or betrayed me.
The reality is that while a lot of these experiences were
sometimes difficult to bear, they all taught me something, whether they were
good or bad. And it is also true that they weren’t all bad, despite what I might have
previously projected. One relationship, in particular, even led me to the one
that I’m currently in now. In fact, if it wasn’t for that
aforementioned relationship, I may not have ever met my husband. But it’s
like they always say, nobody ever remembers the good things. The more
noteworthy things are those that are terrible.
The truth is that I was probably always this crazy; I think
I just never realized it. I was always possessive and insecure, worrying about
whether or not I was as pretty as the girl in the next room or the next bar.
(This is probably because I was always everybody’s second pick but I’ll
save that for another day.) Long before I even got with my abuser, I was always
wondering whether or not the man I was with really needed me. I was always
praying that he wouldn’t wake up one day, see how attractive he
was, how great an asset he could be to someone better than me, and realize that
I was probably wasting his time. To this day, I lie in bed in moments of total
weakness and think that one day my husband will look at me and come to his
senses. I very seriously worry about the proverbial moment when it finally hits
him that I’m a goddamn lunatic and aside from taking relatively good care
of him, I’m a total mess. But for the moment, I think I’m
safe. We’re in love and it’s bliss.
But I still fear that day will come. I mean, most of you
have met me, right?
Once you had put the
pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the
same as you’d been before
the fall. –Jodi Picoult
But there was once a time when I was a little girl, believe
it or not, and I had met this boy about my age that was equally as innocent as
I was. He wasn’t trying to see through me or figure out how to get horizontal
refreshments out of me. He wasn’t brazen but rather innocent and
unoffending. He hadn’t yet grown up to be a man and so he
looked at me and purely saw me. We quickly became friends because our mothers
had worked together and we were both shamelessly obsessed with dark, gritty cop
movies. We were probably more mature for our age, having grown up conversations
that centered around life and movies. We talked about books we had read that
were probably too advanced for our thirteen year old minds to fully comprehend.
We exchanged little love notes back and forth and I can fondly remember how he
had always drawn little pictures on his that were scribbled on the edges of his
fairly poetic words. Grainy, beautifully dead looking trees decorated his
letters and I remember, as the years went by, I started to really appreciate
him. I appreciated the effort and time he had taken to communicate with me.
But the reality was we were just children. And when I really
sit down and think about it, we had grown up together. He was a staple in my
upbringing and I can’t recall very many memories that he wasn’t
a part of. I remember once I had been out of school with a really bad case of
strep throat. It was a sickness that I had seemed to endure every year when the
weather turned warm again. He had been worried about me and before the days of
cell phones for every rabid teenager, he had no way of seeing if I was okay. He
had no way of knowing why I had even missed school.
He eventually had his mother contact mine and guess who soon
showed up on my doorstep with a flood of Get Well Soon gifts? I opened the door
to a petite, swarthy soon-to-be man, still untainted by the wrinkles of
heartbreak and god-awful women. He had appeared at my double French front doors
wielding all of my favorite things: the original Helter Skelter movie, released
in 1976, an obsession of mine that began when I was probably way too young. A
giant bag of gummy Life Savers, because I preferred those to the hard kind
because to this day, they make my teeth hurt. And of course, for my sore and
aching throat, strawberry flavored Halls throat lozenges, because strawberry
was far favorable than the menthol flavor.
It was incredibly thoughtful, one of my first interpersonal
experiences with a person of the opposite sex, and something that I will always
remember. And because I was on the Z pack and no longer contagious, my mom let
him come inside and watch the aforementioned Helter Skelter with me. We weren’t
cuddling on the couch or locking lips instead of watching the movie in the dim
light because we hadn’t yet reached that stage. We were
children and it was innocent.
When the movie was over and we waited for his mom to pick
him up, he gave me this silly smirk that I can see so clearly in my head. Even
as an adult, he smirked at me like that when he was nervous. I think he is one
of the few men to this day that I left rapt just by being myself; and that
smirk would always give him away. I think the only other man that I’ve
ever had that affect on from the very beginning was my sweet, handsome husband
and you know how that one turned out.
Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a
privilege to have my heart broken by you. –John Green, The Fault in
Our Stars
We never contemplated our future because as young teens, as
children, we were never worried about such things. He had planned to leave for
NYU, to learn how to direct movies and experiment in the indie film world. He
was very arty and creative and I don’t think for a moment he had ever
pictured a life outside of what he was passionate about. I was fantacizing
about moving to Chicago, about getting into a lease I couldn’t
afford and writing for a nonsense newspaper like my grandmother did. I wanted
to be Carrie Bradshaw and he wanted to be M. Night Shyamalan. We were on
completely different planes of existence but there was just something about all
of it that made me drawn to him.
But as we got older, as we began to develop more as
individuals, the dynamic of our relationship began to change. It didn’t
take long for the realness of a romantic relationship to take over and soon he
started dictating all of my free time. It was true, at the time he was
intoxicating and I felt like I was literally living in a romantic comedy but
soon I grew sick of being caged. I felt stifled, like he didn’t
want me to go any further. Soon it seemed like the only thing in his life that
really mattered was me and he felt like he was losing his grasp on what we had.
But it wasn’t that; he was losing his grasp on me.
When I started to really grow, when I began to morph into
this person I have since become, things started to change between us. I was a
few months older than him and had my driver’s license. In a small town like the one
I grew up in, there wasn’t much to do outside of Books-A-Million
and people watching at Walmart. To be truthful, I grew tired of all of it. I
wanted to be adventurous, I wanted to leave town and see what the world had to
offer. And while he claimed he wanted the same thing, I knew it was all just
lip service. He was always saying things to spite me and pique my interest
like, “I’m going to Colorado to live in a cabin
for six months” or “I’m going to North Carolina to be a
firefighter” but it always became clear; he was never going anywhere.
Suddenly it felt like we were incessantly bickering, like he
was pitting everything against me and starved for my attention. He soon had
made this new, arty group of friends; they were people who hung in the shadows,
who shared his love of art and culture, and who thought I was just using him.
They were gnarly and edgy, relentlessly teasing me for showing him affection
but rambling on behind my back when I would go out and do my own thing. It
seemed as though all that innocence, all that sweet, baby-faced, puppy love had
long since come and gone. We were different people. And while we had grown up
together, had faced adulthood holding each other’s hands, it seemed that we no longer fit
together anymore.
Moral of the Crazy: I
can’t lie to you and say that it was all bad, that the breakup was
dreadful, painful and time consuming because that’s not the case. Sure, it taxed me but I’m
sure he was hurt more than I was, since I had initiated it. But the reality is
that we weren’t the same two children that had locked eyes and fell in love.
I will always, always, hold a special place in my heart for him but the simple
matter is that while we had grown up, we had also grown apart.
I had somehow turned him into this jealous man child that to
this day, I truly believe, still struggles with all of this. After our breakup,
I have to admit that things were just never really the same between us. I think
that in the beginning, it was really difficult for him because I had
essentially left him for someone else. And as we sort of always ran in the same
circles, we had all bumped into each other from time to time. It was awkward,
to say the least, but eventually we got through it.
When I finally decided to cut ties with my abuser, it was
him who I had run to. And although he had nothing to offer me besides emotional
support, at the time, that was more than enough. At that time, I think he was
under the misconception that we would get back together but it was just a
pretty strange time for me. All I had ever wanted was to get out from the noose
around my neck; I just needed a chance to breathe and I appreciated him for
what he had given me, but I was ready to move forward. I wanted to get away
from all those people I had always known. In a place like the town I grew up
in, everyone knew everyone; you couldn’t go to the local Publix without bumping
into someone who had heard you had gotten a domestic violence injunction; in
that town, it seemed like gossip never slept and while I’m usually all
for that, I just needed a place where no one knew me. I needed to leave town,
dye my hair and start over. And unfortunately, just knowing how well he knew
me, and fully aware of the alleged scars I had left on his heart that I would
always be punished for, he would always unintentionally inhibit me. With him,
it was impossible to obtain a fresh start.
It definitely took some time but we were able to once again
get past all of that. We never mentioned my abuser or the things he had
witnessed, we never talked about that time that I waited around all night for
him and he never showed (he was at another girl’s birthday party; he was punishing me),
we never again mentioned the time that we had come back from Naples and my
abuser had completely vandalized my car in an outrage. We never spoke of any of
that ever again.
He was seeing people, I was seeing people but the ultimate
reality was that we were each other’s number one. And it wasn’t
in a romantic sense, per se. We were sort of like Johnny Castle and Penny
Johnson from Dirty Dancing; we would
always love each other, we would always be there for each other but it would
probably never go any further than that. Because for whatever reason, neither
one of us could seem to handle it.
So we maintained this awesome friendship for a really long
time. We would go bar hopping together, getting really inebriated and then
sleep in our clothes in my twin bed. We were private about our romantic
ventures because we never wanted to hurt the other one’s feelings and
we couldn’t risk losing each other as drinking partners. Sometimes he
would fall asleep in my lap while I was driving us home and he would say, “K,
I really love the shit out of you,” and then he would fall into an eight
hour drunken coma.
I just feel like sometimes I harp so horribly on people, on
men in particular, and I feel like I should shed some light. I feel like it
would serve everyone well if I shared some secrets, if I let them know that not
every encounter was horrible. Sometimes friends, sometimes people are just
genuinely good. But that doesn’t mean everything will work out.
This man and I, we don’t communicate anymore. It’s
really kind of sad to me too because I feel like we’ve just been
through so much together. He introduced me to my husband (to which I
immediately joked: “If he’s your
friend and a firefighter, I’m
definitely not going to like him…”) and encouraged us to get together. He
kept telling me in the beginning how amazing my future husband was, how he was
older and more mature than any of the guys we knew, how he wasn’t
your average firefighter and how he was nothing like my abuser. “You’ll
like him,” he kept telling me, taking a sip out of the roadie we were
sharing, “I promise.”
And he was right. I obviously did see something great in
that friend of his and I ended up with him. But what happened between then and
now is strange. When he realized that the guy he purposely set me up with was
going to stick around forever, he sort of got annoyed by it.
I guess I could understand because after all, we had dated
in the past. We had been intimate, we had shared secrets; I understand all of
it. So I let him go for awhile. I wasn’t going to chase after him if he was
punishing me for being happy. I knew that eventually we would find each other
again because that’s what had always happened with us.
And I was right; he did
come back around. But it was a weird, kind of altered version of
friendship. He wasn’t particularly trustworthy anymore and
he kept running back and forth between me and my husband, trying to cause
problems. We eventually had one last falling out and basically ended it on
decent terms. No one had apologized but we had both spoken our piece. We had
come so far to just curse each other out and never speak again. We owed each
other more than that.
To this day, I haven’t talked to him. And to be honest, I don’t know that I ever will. I do know that despite all the years since we’ve
seen each other and all that’s happened since, I really only remember
the good things. Of course, if I were to really sit down and think about
everything I have ever encountered in my entire life, I would remember all the
times he acted like an idiot man child but with him, the good definitely
outweighed the bad. And because of him, I met the man who quite literally saved
my life. If I were to see him again, I would tell him how thankful I was for
our friendship. I would tell him that I owe my happiness to him.
I guess that sometimes, we have to remember why it is we’ve
become who we are. And in this case, I feel like his haphazard consistency
reminded me that not all men are terrible. His habit to come around just when I
needed him helped me to realize that sometimes you just need people. And his
ability to spot redeeming qualities in the man who would later become my husband
is something that I will always be thankful for. And quite frankly, if we never
meet again, I will be okay with it because I know that our relationship, our
friendship was one that was genuine. There are no hard feelings and there are
no terrible things that I wish I could take back.
We were just children, counting shooting stars on my back
porch. And now, and everyday after, we are all good.
Everything is going to be alright.
Alex Romero: You look
beautiful. I thought you wouldn’t
come.
Norma Bates: … I heard there was funnel cake.
-Bates Motel
Norma Bates: … I heard there was funnel cake.
-Bates Motel
Comments
Post a Comment