Category Archives: Luke

1998, third boyfriend, more friend than boyfriend

The Love We Deserve

When I was in high school, I didn’t much like coming of age stories. They seemed overly dramatic to me and I always wanted to respond, “Oh quit your whining. If you think that’s bad, you should see my angst.” So I guess it’s sort of hard to relate to someone else’s coming of age drama when you’re in the middle of your own.

I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower the other day. Turns out I don’t mind coming of age stories as much anymore, I guess because I came out of my own story relatively unscathed, and now I can see the commonalities of experience. I haven’t read the book (and I probably won’t because 2 hours is about all I can give to a coming of age story without getting sympathy angst, even still), but the quote that stuck with me is in the book, too:

We accept the love we think we deserve.

It’s not an easy concept, but I wish someone had tried to explain it to me during my coming of age story.

lovedeserve

My freshman year of college was one of the worst years of my life… actually, I’ll go ahead and give it the distinction: the worst year of my life, thus far. I had made good grades and been in the top 15 or 20 percent of my graduating class in high school because I studied hard, did all my homework, never skipped class, blah blah. I thought that meant I was smart. I felt invincible, like I could conquer the world, and I went after a full ROTC scholarship for college and won it.

And then I started college and everything was shit. I hated living in the dorm and having a roommate and sharing a bathroom with 20 other girls. ROTC beat the living hell out of me– I was abysmally bad at everything. The memorizing, the marching, certainly the physical tests. My grades were mediocre at best, and my second semester, I flunked the first (and only) class I ever flunked in my life (Chem 2, in case you wanted to know). At the end of the year, I quit ROTC and applied for a position as an RA for the next year to replace my ROTC scholarship. I didn’t get the job. They put me in the “alternate pool.”

Sometime around then, I broke up with Luke. My whole life felt so rotten, and that was one thing I could change. I couldn’t make myself smarter, or a faster runner, or a better job applicant, but I could break up with my high school boyfriend. It sounds mean, but I wasn’t really thinking it consciously. I just knew I wasn’t happy, something was wrong, and Luke was part of that wrongness.

When I met Matt, I was still broken. It was my second semester of sophomore year, so I’d picked up some of the pieces. I’d gotten selected out of the alternate pool and actually got to be an RA. I’d managed to claw my way back to a decent GPA. ROTC was a thing of the past (although I still had nightmares about 5 a.m. battalion runs). But I was a little fish in a big pond– insignificant in all the ways that mattered, and so much less “gifted” than I always secretly thought I was in high school.

And I wonder, in hindsight, about what kind of love I thought I deserved. Was part of why I broke up with Luke because I didn’t deserve to have someone love me when I felt like a sorry sack of shit all the time? Did I start a relationship with Matt because he saw me the way I saw myself (sort of dumb, immature, gullible)? Did I stay with Matt, even after the worst thing he ever said, because I sort of believed him?

Maybe. Maybe. And I wish I’d been able to figure that out then, but maybe you have to have the vision of hindsight to make a leap like that, or maybe you have to– you know– actually like coming of age stories to glean the lessons from them when you need them.

Or, maybe, you just have to be an adult before you can tell a really good coming of age story.

Things I Loved About Them

iloved

Joe:

  • His hair — that beautiful, beautiful curly blonde hair
  • His lovely smile
  • His shoulder rubs
  • The way he kissed the back of my neck so very softly

Shane:

  • His love letters
  • His love poems (He wrote really good ones. I’m picky about love poems.)
  • His slightly bawdy sense of humor
  • His stories (fiction and non-fiction)

Luke:

  • His reactions to everything — I always knew just how he felt
  • His floppy hair
  • His love notes, always featuring cartoons
  • That he was friends with all of my friends

Matt:

  • His openness
  • His concern for his family
  • His car (shallow, but true)
  • The way he held me, like I was cherished

Meeting Luke

I met Luke for the first time at a baseball game. We were both in an organization on our high school campus that did fundraising by selling popcorn at the local minor league games.

My sister and I had signed up to be on a shift together, and Luke was on that shift, too. My sister already knew him from somewhere, but I didn’t know him at all at that point, and she introduced us.

meetingluke

I was drawn to him immediately. He sort of reminded me of a rubber band: Bendy and bouncy, but sometimes he moved so fast you’d lose him. We immediately fell into a personable back-and-forth, trying to one-up each other’s jokes and quips.

I think I may have mentioned before that my main desire in high school was to blend in. Carrying a tray of popcorn and screaming, “Popcorn! Get your popcorn!” at baseball games did not qualify. And you have to think big minor league here — like the dudes one level down from the majors. It was a big stadium with a lot of people. I would almost rather have died than done it, but it was a fundraiser. I couldn’t complain too loud.

Instead, I went out and screamed at people to buy my damn popcorn and when I was just about comatose from the embarrassment, I would head back in to the staging area and wait for Luke to come back and cheer me up. Eventually, we sort of synced up our trips back to popcorn staging. Ah, me. L’Amour among bags of fake butter.

Except it wasn’t really that — but it was something. I think I knew we’d make excuses to see each other again after that. We didn’t have any of the same classes (giant high school), but we’d run into each other, on purpose if necessary.

I think here is about the point where I made a half-hearted attempt to set him up with my sister (which only consisted of teasing my sister that she must like him). I didn’t really understand why she didn’t seem drawn to him like I was. Surely she must see what a cool dude he was, and if he was her boyfriend, we’d have an excuse to hang out more. Yeah, dummy me, but that was totally my thought process.

Of course, you know how this story ends. After a summer of puppy-dog eyes and devoted following, I finally figured out that Luke was interested in me. Why my white-knight slaying the dragon of screaming embarrassment never entered my mind as a possibility for dating, I can’t say. I guess I just wasn’t on that wavelength. I blame the fake butter fumes.

Luke’s Good Heart

Luke, of all the boys I’ve known — hell, of all the men I’ve known — may have had the best heart. He was just… good, down to his core.

heart

This manifested in a lot of ways. Sometimes it was making someone laugh who was having a bad day. Sometimes it was making friends with a lonely kid. Sometimes it was forgiving his assy girlfriend for saying something mean, again.

Sometimes it was falling into a depression over the things he could not change, or the parts of life that were not good.

Luke was in the storms in Oklahoma today. I heard through the grapevine that he helped rescue efforts, searching through the rubble for survivors. I wasn’t surprised. It was the sort of thing Luke would just do. Of course he would.

Whenever something bad happens in the world, people post that quote from Mr. Rogers about looking for the helpers. Luke is one of those helpers. Luke is one of the people who makes me believe in the goodness of humanity — and that is not being melodramatic. That is just the truth.

I probably won’t be in touch with Luke, really. He has his family now, and his assy highschool ex-girlfriend should keep her nose out of things, but I’ll be remembering his good heart, and I’ll be sending him the closest thing to prayers I can muster in my agnostic little soul, because he’ll be thinking about the people who were lost, too, and wishing he could have done more.

Because that’s Luke’s heart.

Lonely

The loneliest I’ve ever been was actually when I was still dating Luke.

It’s not that Luke ever did anything wrong. He didn’t. If I had gone to him, he would have hugged me and made sympathy noises and then tried to make me laugh. He was better at sympathy than a lot of guys I’ve met since then.

But I didn’t want him.

I didn’t want him to give me sympathy, or hang out with me, or even be with me at all. I didn’t want to be with him. The reason I was still with him at all was because I was so lonely already, and it logically made sense that if I were to break up with my boyfriend, it could only get worse.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes being with someone you don’t want to be with can be lonelier than actually being alone. Maybe it’s because you know you don’t have to be lonely. If you would just pick up the phone, you could have contact with another human being, guaranteed. But you don’t because you don’t want contact with that human being, and then you are lonely by choice, which is way worse than just having no friends or being too busy to hang out.

And so I was lonely by choice, plus a side of guilt. Just one of the many reasons my freshman year of college sucked so very, very much.

The Movies

There are so many memories to pick from with these guys. Let’s hit some movie memories today, because I’m in a movie sort of mood.

Joe’s movie is not a movie, really. It’s a show: Beavis and Butt-head. I never even watched the show, but it’s the only movie-ish thing I can associate with Joe. That is not a compliment. (Joe was Beavis. That is also not a compliment.)

Shane’s movie is definitely the original Indiana Jones trilogy. (The fourth one I just like to pretend doesn’t exist.) I hadn’t ever seen them before I knew him, and I watched them because of him. As I watched each one, he gave me commentary on them (over email– we were long distance) and lamented that he couldn’t be there with me to see me see them for the first time. He had a little bit of an Indiana Jones complex, I guess. He wore a fedora, as we discussed previously. I think, though, that he always had the heart of a scholar. Maybe that’s why he liked The Last Crusade best– I think it’s the most scholarly of the three.

Luke’s movie is Monty Python and The Holy Grail. For some reason, our entire band of high school friends were fixated on that movie. We watched it over and over and quoted it even more. We thought it was the height of hilarity. Luke usually instigated the Monty Python shenanigans. No one could ever do anything without him piping up with, “I’m not quite dead!” or, “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!” or the classic, “I fart in your general direction.” Yeah, we were some classy kids.

Matt’s movie is Rudy because he made me watch it with him and proceeded to cry unmanly tears through pretty much the whole thing. I sort of just sat, perplexed, because it was the dumbest movie I’d ever seen. I did not cry. I barely managed not to gag and roll my eyes. This, perhaps, should have given me a clue that our temperaments were not suited.

What Makes an Ex?

The question of what qualifies a boy as an “ex” has come up in my mind lately. For me, it’s easy to choose which four boys from my past are exes and which of the rest of them were flirtations or flings or nothing at all, really.

But to the outside world, I don’t think it would make any sense at all. The relationships I had with them ranged from ten months to three years. The physical aspects differed from literally nothing to… well, practically everything. I barely talked to some of them. I rarely was in the same room with some of them (which is probably a good thing, in some cases). I spent every waking moment with a couple of them. I poured my heart and my soul and my everything out to some… but not all.

All of them, though, are exes, and none a “more important” ex than the others. Why?

I was fourteen when I dated Joe, and I had no idea what dating was about. Most of the time, I sort of didn’t really believe any of it was happening anyway, and one day I’d wake up and this beautiful Adonis-boy would be gone, like a dream you can’t quite remember. I don’t think I ever really let myself get close to him, because I didn’t believe he was real.

Shane is the obvious example of what doesn’t make sense. My friends referred to him as my “internet lover,” and it wasn’t that far off, I guess. We never made out. We never cuddled. We never held hands. But we wrote each other long emails every day. When I went to summer camp, we wrote long letters by hand every day. We shared our secrets and our passions and our stories (real and fiction). In many ways, he seems more real to me than any of the other exes. But then, so do characters from romance novels, sometimes, so…

I don’t even know what to say about Luke. I guess you can’t spend three years of your life “with” someone and not include them on your exes list. And we were certainly more than friends. But all the moments I love and cherish about Luke are moments when we were friends doing friend things.

Matt qualifies by default because he utterly destroyed me, and you can’t do that without attaining ex status, I think.

So why? Why have these four made the cut?

Maybe it was longevity. If ten months is the magic number to make you boyfriend/girlfriend, all of them qualify. Maybe it was warm, squishy feelings, because I had the feels for all of them at some point. Maybe it’s the amount of heartbreak, because even the smallest heartbreak still hurts.

Maybe it’s just that I’m still thinking of them, all these years later.

Bartholomew

The fall semester after I broke up with Luke, I met Bartholomew. Not Bart. Never Bart. Bartholomew.

We both had a campus job that required us to show up before classes began for training. And it was one of those “trainings” that require lots of group work and getting-to-know you icebreakers and stuff.

I hate icebreakers. I hate group work. I hate anything that makes me reveal stuff about myself before I am absolutely ready to do so of my own accord. Icebreakers make my palms sweat and my stomach twist. And so when it was time to partner, I looked around the room for the most miserable person, because at least then I would be sharing in my misery with someone else. I found Bartholomew.

We were pretty awesome at sharing our misery. The rest of the morning, we two sought each other out for every group activity. We sat by each other at lunch. And then I cordially bid him adieu, explaining that I needed to go brush my teeth before afternoon training.

This amiable misery-sharing continued. We chatted during breaks. We subtly sent eye-rolls across the room about stupid shit. By about the third day of training, we said goodbye after lunch and it went:

“Well, see ya later Bartholomew.”

“Later, Ramona. Got to go brush your teeth, right?”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Kinda.”

“Great.”

“Want to come watch a movie with me on afternoon break? I have a really big DVD collection.”

“Um… sure.”

And I had the first inkling that my read on the whole situation was wrong. Amiable misery-sharing just-friends did not watch movies together on afternoon break, did they?

Then again, maybe they did. How was I supposed to know? I’d been dating Luke for three years. I wasn’t sure how to be friends with a boy without pausing to make out at least a few times. So, I told myself to calm down and just go with the flow. Just watch a movie with the guy. He’s just being nice.

On afternoon break, I went up to his dorm room, which was pretty sparse except for a really big couch and the biggest TV I’d ever seen in my life, let alone in a tiny top-floor dorm room with barely enough headroom to walk. And he was not lying about his DVD collection. It was big. He was a movie buff, he explained. He wanted to get into filmmaking.

He let me choose because he said he’d seen them all anyway, but he made me promise to pick one I hadn’t seen before.

Shane told me once that he wished he could have been with me when I saw Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark the first time, because it was his favorite movie ever in the world and he just loved to relive the first time he ever saw it by watching other people see it for the first time. So I guess maybe that’s what Bartholomew was thinking.

Or, possibly, he just wanted an excuse to cop a feel, because his collection consisted mostly of horror movies, and I am a well-known big crybaby about scary movies.

I picked Scream.

I tried to enjoy the movie, except that Bartholomew kept saying weird stuff like, “Why don’t you take your shoes off?” and, “Are you scared?” and, “Why are you all the way over there? I won’t bite.”

And honestly I was coiled so tight with so many scareds that I just mumbled responses and sat up stock-straight with my shoes on, thank you, on the opposite end of the couch from him.

I was scared of the movie. I was scared that my feet might smell bad if I took my shoes off. I was scared that if I got closer to Bartholomew, he would do something distinctly un-buddy-like, like put his arm around me. I was scared to be in this stupid situation at all because I didn’t know what to do with this boy, who I thought was a lot like me and therefore scared of any social interaction that is not completely clearly laid out, and he was hitting on me and holy shit I was not ready for this yet, and I just wanted to be frie-e-e-e-ends, Christ, why does life suck so much?

And I made it through the movie and I escaped with my shoes and the remains of my social dignity as quickly as I could.

After that, Bartholomew was not interested in amiable misery-sharing. He was content to be miserable by himself whilst sending me the occasional dark glare. I must have hurt his feelings when I ran out on him without any indication that I wanted him to make a move. But I didn’t. I wanted… well, I wanted amiable misery-sharing.

One weekend in the not-distant future, I went home and told my mom about how I’d made friends with this nice boy, but then he wanted to make a move and I wasn’t interested, and then he didn’t want to be my friend anymore, and in her motherly wisdom, she said, “Boys are stupid.”

Anyway, Bartholomew and I weren’t friends after that. We were still in the same circles with our jobs and stuff, and we were never openly hostile to one another, but he wasn’t interested in what I had to give, which was friendship, the end. I was mad at him for a while about that, but you know, at least he was honest. Stupid, maybe, because I am pretty awesome to have as a friend, but honest.

And, by the way, he’s a producer on a super popular show now. And I chat with him occasionally on Facebook– sometimes about our shared misery. We’re still really good at that.

The Nice Guy

That whole “nice guys finish last” thing makes me want to vomit, just so you know. If any of you dudes say that, you need to stop it right now. You are not “finishing last” because you are nice. You are blaming it on “nice,” when really it’s probably because the girls you are going after are too polite to tell you that they are just not into you for myriad other reasons.

Also, we need to talk about your definition of “nice.” “Nice” does not mean “pursues relentlessly even though the girl has made it abundantly clear she’s not interested in being more than friends.” For some reason, guys think that’s acceptable, and even romantic. It’s not. It’s creepy and manipulative.

All this is coming out now because I recently listened to a podcast about the dreaded “friendzone.” And the whole thing resonated for me because I’ve been the pursued.

I’m not going to say that Luke was being manipulative on purpose. We were very young, for one thing, and when you’re 16, you kind of get a pass if you are manipulative, because you probably don’t realize you’re doing it.

But I was not really interested in him like that. In fact, I made a half-hearted attempt to set him up with my sister. (And by “half-hearted attempt,” I mean I lightly teased both of them about liking each other. Hey, it’s what you do when you’re 16.)

I honestly, sincerely thought we were just friends at first and there was nothing more to it than that, and I was wrong (and probably stupid) because he was pining the entire duration of our friendship.

I guess I never really felt weird about that before now, but you know what? That means our friendship was a lie. That means that the boy who was my best friend was not really my best friend. He was some-guy-who-wanted-to-date-me. If I’m being honest, that sort of pisses me off.

What I Did For Love

Over the years, I’ve done many things in the name of love…

  • Took an astronomy class just for an excuse to be on the football field in the dark with the boy I liked
  • Grew out my hair
  • Dyed my hair
  • Cut my hair
  • Permed my hair
  • Hung out the passenger side of a pick-up truck shouting non-sensical phrases about chickens in Spanish
  • Bestowed sexual favors outdoors in plain sight of a military helicopter (In my defense, I didn’t actually know we were in plain sight of the helicopter until it buzzed us at low altitude with its spotlight turned on. Oops.)
  • Gotten piercings
  • Listened to many hours of crappy 80s rock, crappy Irish rock, and ska
  • Made friends with many a mother, younger sibling, and cat
  • Written copious amounts of letters and emails
  • Cancelled plans with friends so I could wait by the phone
  • Cried myself to sleep
  • Learned a strip tease routine
  • “Forgot” my underwear
  • Prayed so hard my whole body shook with the effort
  • Forgave embarrassing public drunkenness (not mine)
  • Forgave embarrassing public weirdness (also not mine)
  • Forgave back-handed compliments
  • Went on road trips
  • Made mixed tapes
  • Wrote terrible poetry
  • Yearned
  • Pined
  • Moved on

My Four Avengers

I do have other loves besides revisiting past relationships over and over again, and one of those loves is the movie The Avengers. There’s a lot to love about it, particularly that it features like eleventy hot super heroes. I mean, come on.

So, I thought I’d combine these two loves and tell you who my exes would be, if they were one of the Avengers.

Joe would be Thor. No question. In fact, the minute I saw Thor, I thought about Joe. It’s the hair mostly. And the biceps. And, truthfully, the fact that he seems a little dumb. But hey– sometimes great hair and some muscle are really all you need to get the job done.

Thor

Shane is Hawkeye. There’s really no other place to put him, either. Here’s my caveat: I don’t read comic books, so I don’t know anything about these guys outside of the movies… but Hawkeye seems like the strong, silent type to me. Shane wasn’t exactly silent, but he was definitely deep.

poster-of-hawkeye-in-the-avengers-2012

Luke has got to be Agent Coulson. I really wanted to assign him a superhero, but the things that made Luke himself also make Agent Coulson himself: genuinely a nice person, and funny. Also, he’s a hero in his own way, so there’s that.

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Matt’s a toughie, but I think he’d be The Hulk. Mostly because he was moody. I’m sure he’d protest and want to be Captain America. Sorry, Matt. I calls ’em like I sees ’em.

markruffalo5

Easier

Mental Floss put out a list of their favorite words from the happiest words in the English language. I love this– lots of the words bring out good memories for me.

The top word, “easier,” makes me think about Luke.

Now don’t be like that. I don’t mean “easy” in a sex way. I mean it like Sunday morning. Luke was always easy like that.

And he was certainly “easier” in the sense that it was much easier to have a boyfriend who actually, you know, lived in my town after the weirdness of the long-distance thing with Shane.

Luke was definitely a people-pleaser. He wanted everyone to like him, and most people did. He was a pleasant guy, if a little goofy.

He was never cross with me, even if I snapped at him or said something mean. He agreed with me on every opinion I ever had. He would sometimes admit that he didn’t like someone, but only well out of earshot of that someone, and only if no one else in the room liked that someone either.

Getting toward the end of our long relationship (we dated for three years), this started to annoy me about him. I think, subconsciously, I was looking for a reason to justify breaking up with him, and he never would give me one, and it pissed me right off.

I couldn’t even pick a fight with the guy. He’d just back off and apologize.

In the end, Luke’s being “easier” made it way harder for me to break up with him. I hung on to the relationship probably nearly a year longer than I should have because he was a good guy. I knew he wasn’t the one for me, but I couldn’t make myself break the heart of a boy who had only ever been good and easy… until I did.

He made no secret of his devastation when I did the deed, but he still never got angry with me– just pitifully, woefully sad. I know the dumper always claims that her heart is breaking, too, and most of the time that’s bullshit, but when Luke and I broke up, my heart did break too, because I knew I’d dealt a blow to a boy who deserved more– someone easier than me.

I hope he’s still easy, and I hope his “easier” makes him think of someone, too– maybe just not me.

Worlds Collide

When you’re a serial monogamist like I was, sometimes your exes meet your currents, and world collide. I have never had one of these meetings go well.

When Shane and I broke up, we were still long distance. We’d only met once during our courtship, and then only for a couple of days.

A few months after we broke up, I started dating Luke. We’d started off as friends and we weren’t much further along in our dating relationship than burping contests and one-armed hugs when Shane came by during a college visit. Shane and I were still friends, so we ended up hanging out… all of us.

It was me, Luke, Shane, and a few of my other high school girl friends, and we were pretty much doing nothing in the basement/den of the house, as teenagers are wont to do. Shane and Luke both felt awkward, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more awkward in my life, so there was plenty of awkward to go around.

Apparently Shane’s way of dealing with awkward was to make marginally inappropriate jokes.

“So what’s new with you?” I asked, nearly choking on awkward.

He responded, “Why don’t you come sit in my lap and we’ll talk about the first thing that comes up?”

And the awkward spread like an airborne virus. Nervous giggles all around. (From Luke, too.)

There may have been more penis jokes, but I’ve blocked them from my memory. These were traumatic innuendos for a 16-year-old girl desperately trying not to think about penises, especially the penises of ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend both in the same room, but not being able to not think about ex-boyfriend’s penis (or imagining it, as I never did see it) and wishing I could flirt with ex-boyfriend, but feeling horribly guilty at even the thought. It’s a distinct possibility that the portion of my brain that was hearing penis jokes literally exploded, which is why I can’t remember any more of them.

I do remember that eventually we ordered a pizza and went to go get it. I was driving, and Shane called shotgun, which caused a pained expression from Luke. Shane gracefully (I thought) gave in and decided Luke should sit shotgun, but as we were pulling out of the driveway, he let loose with more awkward.

“Thanks for letting me sit shotgun,” said Luke, who was always nice to a fault.

“No problem,” Shane returned. “I figured you’d want to sit up there and fondle Ramona’s leg.”

Fondle. He said fondle.

And then Luke did the “hurr hurr hurr” dude laugh and reached over and fondled my leg.

I slapped his hand so hard the entire car went silent.

I have never before or since wished to die instantly in a car crash.

Later, it was time for me to drive Shane back to the hotel where he was staying with his folks. And, of course, everyone in the basement got up and wanted to ride along.

“No,” I snarled. “I’m taking him myself. I’ll be right back.”

Luke backed off, hang-dog. I fumed. How dare he fondle my leg in front of my ex-boyfriend? How dare he make me feel guilty for wanting to flirt with my ex-boyfriend? How dare he be less sexy than my ex-boyfriend? Argh.

And, in hindsight, the weird part was that I was not mad at Shane at all for making things more awkward. He didn’t have to make penis jokes. He didn’t have to say the word “fondle” in front of God and everyone. But he did, and damn my messed up psyche, I totally liked it.

Nothing happened on the ride to his hotel. In fact, nothing ever happened with Shane again.

And probably no one remembers the penis jokes and fondling but me… at least I hope that’s the case.

Summer and the Water

There’s something magical about water in the summer– something that makes teenagers fall in love, I think.

Joe

My curiosity about Joe turned into a full-fledged crush on a summer camping trip to the lake with the youth group.

Of course, I figured it was all still going to be from afar, because there is no way to look cute when you’ve showered in a public bathroom with your eyes open in case a roach came at you. Or when you’ve taken a ride in a speedboat without a hair band. Or when you’ve decided that being barefooted is the new cool thing and you end up cutting your foot on a sharp rock and limping back to your shoes, defeated.

But something about that water made him see past all that stuff I guess, because he flirted with me the whole weekend, and then asked me out a few weeks later.

Luke

Years later, Luke and I hiked out to a river behind his house. We were just friends at that point, still, even though I was being a complete dumbass about it and he was following me around like a lovesick puppy.

When we got out to our destination, the rain that had been threatening suddenly let loose in a downpour like I’ve never seen before or since. We were immediately soaked completely through with nowhere to take shelter, and we laughed and screamed and hid under a pine tree that offered almost no protection.

And I was not such a dumbass that I didn’t feel an electric pull between us– like a premonition that this “just friends” thing was not going to work, and I should just give in and kiss him while he was drenched with his soggy hair in his eyes.

I didn’t kiss him.

Somehow I missed the whole memo that getting caught in the rain with someone is incredibly romantic and you are supposed to suddenly realize that you are madly in love, and share your first movie-worthy kiss, sopping and steamy.

In the end, we just trudged back to his house, squelching in our ruined shoes… which is not really that romantic.

But the tug of that electricity in the rain never left, and you know how we ended up, so maybe it was romantic, in a way. I guess that’s the magic of summer and the water.

Runaway Girlfriend

You’ve seen that movie Runaway Bride, right? Julia Roberts plays an adorable, but damaged woman who keeps getting engaged to “the perfect guy” and then leaving him at the altar. This is all supposedly because she morphs herself into what she thinks the guy wants her to be, but in the end, she (somewhere in her psyche) realizes she’s not being true to herself, and runs away.

I sort of wonder if that plot sounds far-fetched to some people. It doesn’t to me. Because I’ve done the same thing, many times. And it went beyond how I liked my eggs.

The Joe Me

Before I met Joe, I had consciously decided to re-invent myself. I was fourteen years old, just about to start high school, and had just moved across the country with my family. To cope with the potentially crushing change, I decided that this was my chance for a clean slate. I could be beautiful, and popular, and desired. I practiced my smile in the mirror. I convinced my mom to let me wear this pair of ridiculously tiny white shorts. I experimented with make-up.

And then Joe appeared, just at the height of my confidence in my new identity. I was coy, not shy. I was mysterious, not quiet. I was classically pretty, not frumpy. He bought it. I almost died of shock.

So, really, The Joe Me was more my construct than his, but he helped perpetuate it for the ten months we were together before he went off to college.

The Shane Me

I sort of created a construct for myself on purpose with Shane, too. Before we knew each other, really, we played a role playing game together (ugh, I know) where he was this badass Indiana Jones type and I was an even badder-ass lady smuggler with red hair and an attitude problem.

The thing is, it turned out that Shane really was kind of a badass Indiana Jones type– I mean, as much as a 15-year-old can be. I guess he just assumed that I was more like my character than not, too, so he treated me that way. He sent me a card once that he said made him think of me:

I want a sensitive man… One who’ll cry when I hit him.

This was about the time in my life, too, when I decided that most emotion was unnecessary. I stopped crying over sentimental things– and, truthfully, mostly openly scoffed at them. “Nice” became the most hated label anyone could apply to me (although it was still applied often). I desperately tried to be the badass Shane thought I was.

The Luke Me

Luke and I were best friends for a long time– like months (that is a long time in high school)– before we started dating, and I was drawn to him because he was wide-open funny. You know the type: They’ll do anything for a laugh. He was perfectly willing to make a complete fool of himself just to make you smile. He memorized full scenes of funny movies and could repeat them back verbatim, with voices. Everyone absolutely loved him.

When we started dating, I knee-jerk resisted being labeled “Luke’s girlfriend.” No. I would not be nameless girlfriend. I would be funny in my own right. So I developed my own brand of humor. Sure, I’d indulge in silly costumes and general tom-foolery with him from time to time, but my style was understated and acerbic, compared to his wild shenanigans. But I was funny. And as far as I know, I managed to avoid the “Luke’s girlfriend” label fairly successfully.

The Matt Me

Oh, dear Lord. The Matt Me is probably the me I wish I could have avoided being. By then, I was this weird mix of leftovers from the other mes (a little coy, a little badass, and a little funny) plus the real me, which was a huge dollop of awkward and insecure and a whole lot of sensitive, squishy mess. When Matt swooped in, he brought with him the drama of growing up in a dysfunctional family, where you yell and shout and call names and say horrible things to each other, all in the name of love.

In order to defend myself, I yelled back. The drama swallowed me whole. I got moody and mopey and angry, with not a small amount of argumentative thrown in for good measure. I snarled at everyone for even the smallest infractions. Imagined slights became gaping wounds that had to be avenged.

So who did I end up being?

In the movie, Julia Roberts takes a break from relationships and figures out who she really is. It’s all very neat and clean. She likes the kind of eggs she likes, and she hates all the other kinds. The end.

In real life, it’s not quite that simple, I think. Because there are parts of those versions of me that will always be me. I will always default to mysterious when I want to be desirable. I will always swing toward badass if you cross me. I will always crack a joke to try to make myself memorable. And, though I hate to admit it, I will probably always snarl defensively if you hurt my feelings, even slightly or by accident.

Does that make me Not Me? No, but I think it makes all my exes part of me– and that will never really go away.