Matt sort of gets the short end of the stick on this blog because he broke my heart, but it’s not that there aren’t good things about what we had.

I remember particularly when I first brought Matt to visit my parents. He was nervous. He was convinced that my parents would hate him for “corrupting” their daughter (although I tried to reassure him that I had been corrupted long before he showed up). Really, he had more going for him than some of my boyfriends. He was military, for one thing (my mom was an Army brat). And he drove a cool car (in like Flynn with my dad and one of my brothers).

But he was still nervous.

Instead of just shutting down and refusing to talk to my parents, though, he decided he was going to do his best to impress them. He’d been stationed overseas for a while and had learned a local tea custom. He knew my mom liked tea, so he gathered the supplies and then offered to make tea the traditional way for her.

I think my mom was a little taken aback by it, but she agreed and watched quietly while he did the whole ritual or whatever it was.

And then she said, “Oh, that’s nice,” as she drank her tea.

Matt was crushed. He thought it meant that she was not impressed and she hated his guts, even when I tried to explain to him about Midwesterners and how, “That’s nice,” is about as enthusiastic as they ever get. He did not believe me.

The point here, though, is that he went to a whole bunch of effort to impress my parents, and even if all he got was a, “That’s nice,” from my mom, I was impressed as all hell.

This story has a subtitle. (See above.) I felt like it needed one.

We’ll get to that part, though. Let’s start with the other stuff.

Matt and I dated for about a year and a half. It was a whirlwind from the start, and by that I mean I fell fast and hard for Matt, and he never let me forget it. We spent the night together on the floor of my dorm room, just talking, on our first date. He told me everything. I told him more than I’d ever told anyone (which was still less than everything, but dude, I’m mysterious like that).

Later I found out that Matt did this fast-and-hard bit with everyone. He told everyone everything. He was best friends with everyone. He butted into everyone’s lives, whether they wanted him to or not. But at the time, I thought I was pretty damn special.

Because I was so crazy in love with this kid, the red flags that should have sent me running for the hills failed to give me the flight option. It was always option B: Fight.

When he picked fights about stupid shit, I engaged in screaming matches until I was too exhausted to make sense of anything. When he pushed me, I pushed back harder, until I ran out of strength and just collapsed and gave in to whatever. (That was a metaphor. There was no literal pushing.)

I would have married him if he’d asked. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I knew he wasn’t going to ask. I think I knew he’d figured out we weren’t meant to be. I think I had even figured out our incompatibility, or at least almost, but I didn’t want any part of that reality. I wanted him.

He broke up with me after we had a fight about seatbelts. We were driving in his car and he said he needed a pen, so I unbuckled my seatbelt and rummaged around in the back seat for my purse (which contained a pen), and he flipped out that I had unbuckled my seatbelt while he was driving over a hill and I could have died if another car had come over the hill, driving in the wrong lane, and hit us in a head-on collision. Because, you know, that’s a distinct possibility. What? (You wanna talk about what-ifs? Matt lived in what-ifs.)

I got ready to push back. I told him he was crazy and that I was a grown-ass woman and I could unbuckle my seatbelt if I damn well pleased, and somehow that led us to breaking up. I’m pretty sure he was just waiting until the next fight to let me have it. He’d already decided.

I got out of his car in the parking lot across from my dorm, sort of dazed. I remember a vague buzzing in my ears. It was raining pretty hard, so I ran to my dorm. I didn’t even look back to watch him drive away. I know it’s horribly cliché, but by the time I got to the building, I couldn’t tell what was rain and what was tears. I think I cried for days.

I don’t know how the stages of grief go for everyone else, but for me, it goes crippling, horrible sadness, then red-hot flashes of rage rage RAGE.

I was at the rage part when I boxed up all Matt’s stuff to give back to him. It was normal stuff: CDs, a pair of shoes he’d left in my dorm room, some photos. (This was back before the days of ubiquitous digital cameras.)

I also had a Rolling Stones magazine I thought had an article in it that I had meant to show him before the incident. I was disinclined to search it out for him, but I sort of grudgingly picked up the magazine and thumbed through it. It was then that I happened upon what I didn’t know I’d been looking for: a glorious, full-page, text-heavy ad for a penis enlargement supplement.

Should I? Could I? Oh yes. I grinned. Yes I could.

I carefully tore out the ad so as not to destroy any of the beautiful text. I may have actually giggled as I unpacked the box of stuff and carefully tucked it in the bottom before putting everything else back in.

He met me for dinner at some horrible seafood place and we did the I-wish-you-well thing and the awkward let’s-still-be-friends thing (and I somehow managed not to cry or vomit).

And then I handed him his box of stuff and I left. He couldn’t really see my face as I was walking away, but I was smiling. It was like a Mission: Impossible movie or something. I was striding purposefully, not even looking back, but I knew that behind me, there was going to be a giant, destructive explosion framing me in slow motion.

I got in my car and drove away and I never saw him again.

Maybe it was childish of me to get in that one last dig, but I figure a little wiener joke in the grand scheme of things probably didn’t hurt my karma too much.

The exes did their share of things to embarrass me. Joe regularly stole my scrunchies  (for the younger among you, we used to put our hair up with those) and stuck them in his pocket, then dared me to retrieve them. (I refused.) Shane didn’t really embarrass me until we broke up. Luke was just full of loud and weird, but, in his defense, if he realized he was embarrassing me, he would immediately stop.

And, in all of their defenses, I was (still am) easily embarrassed.

But Matt brought things to a whole new level. We couldn’t even go on a trip to the store without him climbing something or singing a dumb song at the top of his lungs or picking a loud, dramatic fight with me.

Herein I shall share one instance of this– the one that sticks in my mind the most.

The singing group I was in during college had gotten on the schedule to sing the national anthem at a local small potatoes minor league baseball game. I think it was a Saturday night and Matt was in town visiting. (He lived a couple of hours away and came up most weekends.) So he decided to come along.

Matt didn’t tend to get along with my friends. (Red flag, I know.) My singing group friends were no exception. He judged them (and me) for being young, nice, and in college. Matt was, off course, old (a full two years older, Jesus you guys), wise, worldly, and educated by the far superior School of Hard Knocks.

So no one was very comfortable that he was hanging out. To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled about it either. I tended to keep Matt and friends separated fairly successfully: Friends all week, Matt on weekends.

After the national anthem, we all stayed for the game, and it didn’t take long until Matt decided he’d had enough amiable and slightly nerdy chit-chat and he needed a drink, so he went and bought a Big Gulp-sized beer. I was nineteen years old (and so were most of the other people with me), so I declined. He drank that one and got another. And maybe another. I lost count.

By the time he was on his last one, he was rowdy and loud, and he offered me some of his beer (loudly). I quietly refused, and he offered again, this time with a “bock bock chicken” implication. Mostly to shut him up, I accepted the beer, took a tiny sip, and handed it back.

“You like it?” he demanded on a bellow.

“No. It’s warm. It sort of reminds me of piss.” (I was getting grouchy by this point.)

His mouth dropped open, his eyes lit up, and he took a giant inhale that I knew meant he was going to embarrass the living shit out of me. The inhale was interminable. It was slow motion, like in a movie when the kid in the lunchroom trips and his entire tray full of nothing but ketchup flies toward the most popular girl in school and you just know it’s going to land all over her blouse and everyone screams, “noooooooooooooo,” and you get a good long look at all of the kids’ horrified faces because everyone else knows what’s going to happen, too. It was like that.

“How do you know it tastes like piss? Have you tasted piss? You’ve tasted piss! EVERYONE! Ramona has TASTED PISS!”

And I died a thousand deaths because everyone— even the drunker man in front of us, who’d had the mascot sign his bald head earlier– turned around and looked at me, all judgey-faced.

Then we had to carpool back with my friends and he alternately passed out and moaned the entire way, and I died some more.

He later swore he did not remember doing this to me. I guess it’s possible, although I personally have only been drunk enough once in my life to not remember portions of time. I think it’s more likely that he was covering his ass. And his ass, in this case, was the whole of him, because he was a giant ass that night.

My good memories of Matt largely reside in my sense of touch. Part of that is because all the other memories are… problematic. We had strife.

I sort of want to sit here and rewrite this until I don’t actually have to come out and say that Matt was the first person I slept with, but there it is. And despite the fact that I maintain sex is not the most important part of a relationship, it’s still a big one. (… if you’re lucky– ha… Yes, that was a penis joke. Sorry.)

He was gentle and patient with me, but he never hesitated to let me know how much he wanted to touch me, and that was intoxicating– like, make-you-dizzy-and-stupid intoxicating. The desire, the power, the tension, the insecurities all mixed together until I was this hurricane of breathless weird.

Some of that wore off eventually. I guess that’s normal. But the physical, visceral sensation of having my body cherished by another person is something I’ll always remember fondly.

I showed a friend this blog last week and she laughed and said she’d never do something like this because she does all she can to forget her last relationship.

And I totally get that.

In fact, it’s much harder for me to write about Matt than the other guys because Matt is the most recent. Doesn’t matter that it’s been almost eleven years since I’ve seen him.

Of course, it matters less now. I can think about him without slamming into a wordless purple rage, which makes the writing part easier. I can even remember the good times without feeling like someone is driving an ice pick right through my chest. But that wasn’t the case even a couple of years after we broke up.

So I guess this post is less about Matt and more about you. If you have some exes in your life that still cause hot rage and heart palpitations, don’t feel too alone. I’ve been there, and I’m willing to bet lots of people have.

And that thing about time healing all wounds? Super cheesy, but totally true. Someday, you’ll probably be able to say your ex’s name without spitting afterwards.

I was never really a fighter until Matt. I guess I didn’t need to be. Joe and I just kind of really didn’t see each other enough. Same with Shane. And Luke would have let me win any fight ever, even if we’d ever had any.

But Matt? He wasn’t afraid to throw down… about pretty much anything.

Usually it was about how I was being “unsupportive” by explaining why maybe his point of view wasn’t the only one.

“Why can’t you just support me?” he’d bellow.

“I am supporting you,” I’d shout back, but then I’d tell him why he was wrong.

(Fine, maybe we both had room for improvement.)

The rest of the time it was usually some imagined slight done to him by me. I hadn’t paid him enough attention. I had given him a “look.” I hadn’t been appropriately pleased about something.

Once, he stormed out of a bar that we’d carpooled to with my friends, because I was talking to them too much and not enough to him. (As I recall, it was so rank with the noise of karaoke and drunk people that there wasn’t much talking to be had anyway.)

Stupidly, I followed him to try to work things out. Had I the chance to do it over, I would have stayed in the bar and karaoked my ass off, and let him walk himself all over town by his own damn self.

But I didn’t.

I followed him and we walked and fought for a few miles before we made up and he decided we should call a cab.

Guess who paid for the cab.

(He didn’t have any cash.)