A Sweetness/ A Break-up

I thought I had posted this back in 2015 when it happened. I’m going over some material to put together a new story for a show coming up in a few weeks and thought the best way to start my day would be to lick an old wound and contemplate deep pains I haven’t gotten over. Enjoy. 🙂

**********
Dear Jeff,

It started with the sunflowers and the card. Well, really, it started when I saw him standing tall as a tree at Pride. He was wearing a sleeveless hoodie, leopard print on the front and mesh in the back, and he had a nautical necklace and sunglasses. He had leopard print duct tape on his boots—his favorite color was leopard print, he told me—; he was the coolest person I’d ever seen. 



I wouldn’t have pursued him, but I’d been drinking, and the excitement of the sunny morning’s march through the streets of Fort Wayne and rainbows everywhere and the glittering Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and even the fever pitch of the fire-and-brimstone street preachers made me think things were possible. I stumbled through some heavy flirting, telling him I loved his shirt and he looked amazing: “You’re like my viking savior from heaven!” I found out I knew his roommates, one whom told me he wanted to be courted. He was so tired of just hanging out with people. 



I decided to court him.



I stalked him on Facebook as we do in 2015 and learned that his interests were as colorful as his personality. He liked strange new music I’d never heard of, artists with names like Major Lazer and Glass Animals. He was Space Age-y and electric. I wrote him a message and said it was great meeting him at Pride. He said that was sweet. I told him I knew his roommates, and he said, yeah, they’re good girls. I couldn’t think of anything witty to say and erased a few message attempts before finally coming out with it: “I think you’re really cool and interesting. Would you be interested in going on a date?” 



He was. 



We met at a mutually favorite bar a few days later and hit it off over his IPAs and my gin-and-tonics. We laughed and told stories and took a walk through the historic neighborhood he lived in. He took me across the train tracks that divide downtown from the Wells Street Corridor and showed me a herd of horses keeping a quiet vigil in the dark, silently coming to see us through the fence and munching grass. He showed me his apartment, the third floor of a nineteenth-century mansion, and I met his cats. I wanted to score points; I sat on the ground to introduce myself to them. 



He came back from the bathroom and I stumbled through an explanation of why “Sex and the City 2” had failed where the first movie had succeeded. We kissed and he told me he didn’t want to do anything else on a first date. We went back outside and he walked me to my car. I found the place on his ear that makes him lightly stomp like one of those horses. 



We had more dates, sometimes at our favorite bar. Once I surprised him with a picnic—I wanted to romance him!—and another time we watched one of his favorite local bands, a psychedelic rock outfit twisting tambourines and guitar riffs in front of explosions of color from an overhead projector. We talked about exes and I knew I wanted to make it official. He was kind and funny, devoted to his friends, a hard worker. Each time I left his house, he remained on the porch watching me leave. I’d blow him a kiss as my car passed his house.



He invited me to the lake with his friends. Late in the afternoon, I stepped off of an inner tube that had been pulled by the boat, and he held me as I shivered. The rain began to pour down; we were soaked. On our way back to town, I cradled his head in my lap in the back seat of his friend’s truck.



So, the sunflowers. He had a patch of them near the porch that couldn’t seem to bloom. One had done so, and he found its severed head on the railing one morning, its stem pulled apart, suggesting it had been a human who’d pulled it from the rest of the stalk and not a small animal. I went to a grocery store after work and bought sunflowers for him, and a silly card with a picture of crying toast. “Without you,” it said on the front, and “I’m toast!” on the inside. I wrote, “Will you be my boyfriend? Circle Y or N” on the inside, and when I gave it to him, I presented him with a pen to make his choice clear. He circled Y, and we went to the restaurant where he works and he treated me to martinis, oysters, and a meat plate. He told me that night when he thought I was asleep that he was going to make me so, so happy. 



I thought often about songs, and when specifically it’s safe to assign a song to a relationship. I would hate to lose one over a break-up. One came on the radio, “Hold Each Other,” that says: “Something happens when I hold him/ He keeps my heart from getting broken/ When the days get short and the nights get a little bit frozen/ We hold each other.” I kept it close to me, wondering when we could share it. 



Shortly after all that, he got an opportunity to cook in the kitchen of an expensive restaurant in town. He loved the work. This would take up four mornings of his week, added to the six days he was already putting in at his original job. I began to wonder how much time we’d get together and railed privately against this thing that he loved so much. We lost hours together here and there. 



One night, I went to see him at his house before heading home. We sat together on his porch as we’d done many nights and mornings before. He was tired from work all day. He leaned his head on my shoulder and I thought about the short cropped hair on the sides and the spike on top. “Um,” he said, like a statement. I pushed him on it, and he told me I wouldn’t like what he had to say. I told him I’d stay up all night wondering if he didn’t tell me, so he told me.



“I don’t think we can date anymore,” he said. “I thought I was ready, but I’m not. I’m not totally over my ex“ and “I think this job in the kitchen could really be it for me” and “we’re different people. I like to go out on the weekends and get crazy, and you don’t, and I’m looking for a partner in crime.” 



I looked at the hospital parking lot across the street while he spoke. Really, though, he’s never kept interest in someone like he has with me, and clearly I’m attractive—I guffawed at that—no, don’t do that, you really are. And I’m hoping we can still get lunch together sometimes and catch up. And when he finished with, “I’m sorry,” I thought of what I wanted to say. I started by saying that I don’t have a lot of experience with dating—you should date more! You should date around, he said. 



“I don’t like anyone,” I told him. 



There were more words. I don’t remember them. But it was silent for a bit, and I stood up and said, “Well, have a good one.” I walked down the sidewalk a bit and he called me back. He hugged me with two arms and I held onto him with one, looking over his shoulder, waiting for him to be okay with what he had just said to me. I pulled away and kissed him on the forehead.



“You’re doing this work because it makes you happy,” I said. We shared a light, last kiss and I walked to my car. I didn’t look to see him watch me leave as I passed. The next morning he sent me a message and said it would be strange not to wake up to a “good morning” text from me, and again he’s sorry, and I should take care of myself. I didn’t say anything back. I won’t until I’m done being mad at him. He’s doing what he needs to do, and I’m glad he’s so happy with his work. But still.

The saying comes to mind: “It’s not about the destination, but the journey.” I’ve traveled from disappointment to disappointment, sometimes stopping with someone who couldn’t love me in the first place, not the way I’ve wanted, and sometimes stopping with someone who just wasn’t right. I don’t have much experience with dating, but I do have a lot of experience with disappointment. I think about all the sweetness: his arms around mine to keep me warm in the rain, kayaks and ice cream on Labor Day, and you know sometimes he even told me his face hurt from smiling too much? We wanted to go to a corn maze in the fall, and take a bike trip on the Rivergreenway before the weather got too chilly. There might have been the zombie walk and then Halloween parties; I wanted to impress him with my own flair for fashion and show him one of my cloth wigs. I had more to show him: that I can be large and loud and colorful, that there’s more I want to do in my life to shock people and make them pause. I have more to give. And I do hope it’s true what he’d said when he came to see my play at Fringe Festival, that he didn’t know me well yet but he was proud of me in some way. I hope he meant it when he said I’m amazing. Some day when I feel better, I hope we’ll still be friends, and that it won’t bother me that he has his life to live. 



There’s the lesson: we all have our lives to live, and no one is owed anyone else’s life.