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.

Joe’s Big Secret

Joe successfully kept a secret from me for almost the entire time we were dating: Joe was a smoker.

joesecret

Ok, not a big deal in the adult grand scheme of things, but I was an innocent, church-going 14-year-old. It was a big deal to me, and I can see why Joe didn’t want me to find out.

But how did he do it? You’d think I would have noticed at some point, you know, because he smoked at school and in his car and pretty much everywhere, I guess.

His alibi was always that his dad was a smoker, which is why his car smelled like smoke and his letter jacket smelled like smoke and his hair smelled like smoke. Not sure why I didn’t put together that his mouth shouldn’t taste like smoke just because his dad was a smoker. (Ew.)

He told me the truth maybe a month before he left for college. I was a little bit angry that he’d lied to me, but more angry that I’d been stupid. I should have known he was lying, somehow. Why had I trusted him completely? Why had I defended him without a shadow of a doubt when my brother said he saw him smoking between classes? I’d been had, and that was on me, not so much on him.

It made me question a lot of things for a long time. Had Joe really only been “just talking” to Bianca when she dragged him away from the rest of the group for her bitch sessions? Maybe, maybe not. Did he really want to stay in a relationship when he left for school, or was he stringing me along so he’d have someone to come back to next summer? I assumed the worst of him on that one and gave back his “going steady” bracelet when he came home.

The lesson that people don’t always tell the truth hit home for me that summer, and I spent the next, like, seriously, ten years of my life second-guessing everyone. Part of that is because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager. Part of that is also probably that teenagers are shitty little back-biters in general, and I was right to second-guess them more often than not. But part of it was that I was trying to make up for being so stupid about Joe’s secret.

The good news? I got over it… eventually. In my adult life, I’m a pretty trusting person. I mostly take people at their word — but I’ll admit that a portion of that is self-preservation. (If you don’t take people at their word, you have to use up all your brain-power trying to figure out what they really meant. I am much too lazy for that.)

So Joe’s big secret didn’t permanently scar me… Ten years later I was totally over it. Heh.

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.

The Tickle Fight

tickle-fightShane and I only ever met twice in person– once while we were “dating,” and once after we’d broken up.

It was the height of summer when we met in person for the first time. He came to my house and hung out with me for the day, then spent the night on the pull-out couch. Read More

Matt Meets The Parents

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.

Matt’s Break-up Story (Or: Teeny Weenie)

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.

What If Shane…

I am, perhaps, the only human being on the face of the earth who tortures myself so thoroughly with what-ifs. I’ve always done it, from the very earliest times I can remember.

Not always bad what-ifs, necessarily. Some were lovely what-ifs. What if I had a unicorn and we could fly away at night, and touch the moon, and then make it back before dawn so no one would ever know we’d gone? What if I had the power of healing touch, and could take away pain and suffering with a hug or a pat? What if I wished so hard for a little black puppy that it just suddenly materialized in front of me, wiggling and yipping?

See? Good what-ifs. (There were bad ones, too, but I’m making a point, here.)

In my adulthood, sometimes I still get the what-ifs…

What if one of my exes showed up randomly on my doorstep one day?

whatifshane

What if I opened the door and Shane was standing there in his black fedora, staring at me, all gray-eyed intensity? And then he smiled and asked if he could come in and chat.

“Well, uh, sure, I guess,” I’d say, and I’d make tea while I made sense of my spinning brains.

What would I need to say to him? What would I ask him?

I think I’d start with, “I can’t believe it’s been… gosh… probably fifteen years, I guess, since we’ve talked.”

“Long time, huh, doll?” And he’d wink and I’d smile because he always called me “doll” even though I never gave him permission and I pretended to hate it.

We’d catch up on all the small talk things like what we’re up to and who we married and how life is. He’d tell me about his students (because of course he’s a high school teacher now– and somehow that just makes total sense). I’d tell him about my writing– and maybe he’d be jealous of that because we were both writers, once, before we knew you could be a writer for a living.

And then we’d probably get stuck because he’s a Bible teacher and I’m a bawdy humorist. He teaches young “ladies and gents” (that’s what he’d call them) how to live a pious life, and I teach 30-year-old women new and interesting swear words. He kept the faith. I fell away.

Things would get quiet and weird, and he wouldn’t know what to say anymore because all we had left, in his mind, was being brother and sister in Christ, and I’m not really in Christ anymore, am I? No, now I’m in gin and f-bombs and liberal-leaning politics. We’re unrelated. And I’m un-relatable.

I probably wouldn’t tell him that I’d love to hear one of his lectures, and I’d love to see how he gives his students room to try out their voices and their opinions. I probably wouldn’t tell him that I think what he’s doing matters and is important and is good, because I’m not sure he’d take the compliment. After all, we disagree on so much now.

But I would tell him that I’ve missed him and that I’m proud of him and that the time we had together changed me forever, for the better, and that I think about him. I would tell him I’m sorry for hurting him– that I was young, and, as far as excuses go, I guess that’s a pretty good one, but I’m still sorry.

And then he’d say goodbye, probably forever… and probably with a smile and a hug and a wink, because he’s polite and just a little suave, and that– I bet– will always be true.

Embarrassing

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.

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.

Anonymity

I’ve been struggling lately with whether or not I should “out” this blog. I’ve been using pseudonyms for myself and the characters herein, and not sharing any of these posts under my real name.

The thing is, though, the good reason I don’t want to share this under my real name is that I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the exes. There are very few other people who play significant roles herein and/or would be offended by anything I’m saying.

And if I go public, there’s no way to guarantee that the exes won’t see it.

Really, there’s no way to guarantee it right now, either, but I doubt any of the four are going around Googling phrases about past relationships to see if any of their old girlfriends are blogging about them. If they are, though, and they happened to come across this blog, there’s no way they wouldn’t figure out who I am and who I’m talking about immediately.

So I’m a little stuck. I’d love to get traffic and readership up here, because I think this has some value. But I don’t know how to do that without outing myself, and maybe the exes… which could be messy.

Brilliant ideas, anyone?

Touch

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.

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.

Three Small Words

I’ve said, “I love you,” to the four exes in my life. I didn’t always say it first, and I didn’t always say it a lot, but I said it to them.

With Shane in particular it was… different. We were long-distance before the Internet really made long-distance normal. We were on the cutting edge of Internet long-distance, let’s say. (Yeah, let’s say that, because the alternate explanation is that we were totally weird.)

We did say “I love you,” which, in itself, is kind of a thing. But we were also fifteen years old and long distance. It’s kind of a big thing when you add in those factors.

So I think I sort of understand why Shane often qualified his I-love-yous with a little dig or a joke.

I love you… more or less.

I love you, or at least strongly like.

Well, I guess I love ya, when it comes to that.

It never registered as hurt, exactly, when I was in the moment, but when I read those letters back, it causes a little stab of… something. We were cutting edge (or weird, or brave, or whatever) in a lot of ways, but I guess you can’t be great at everything. We shared a lot of words between us– poetry, compliments, adorations– but those three small ones seemed to give us some trouble.

Maybe it gives me that little stab now because I know that years after we broke up, we talked and the infamous, “I don’t really think what we had counts as real love anyway,” thing happened.

But it was real to me. And that little stab reminds me just how real.