Category: Memory Lane

“It can’t last forever, but who made the rule that the best loves do?”
— Tracey, from Ally McBeal

I’ve been thinking about my last post for the two days since I posted it. I really agonized over whether to share that with you guys, once I remembered what had really happened. I was ashamed to tell you, and I worried that you’d judge me, mostly because I’m judging myself. Anyone who knows me knows I have very high expectations of people, but most of all of myself, and it’s very difficult for me to come to terms with not living up to them. I suppose that’s why I managed to “forget” what Spike (in the comments) quite rightly called “key details.” But I also suppose I come by them honestly, by learning from my mistakes and vowing not to make them again.

I texted Karen before I posted it, asking if she thought I should. She asked if I could tell the story without including the part where I cheated. I said, “Not without feeling like I’m being untruthful.” She replied, “Then you have to tell it. Is your blog to make you look good or to express yourself honestly?” I decided she was right, and I still think so, but I do feel the need to defend myself a little.

I was 18 and about to be a sophomore in college. In my journal I had written that I was sure that I wanted to marry D, but that I wasn’t ready to “give up” the next “4-7 years” (I don’t know how I came up with that number) and never experience whatever else was out there. God, I was naive. How can you say, in the same breath, that you want to marry someone, and then describe the time between now and marrying him as “giving up” other experiences that you could have? That’s so wrong. I thought if I just kept saying I was happy, that I wanted to marry him (both of which I was sure were true, even as I developed crushes on other people), that it wouldn’t matter what else I said or did. Like knowing I loved him was a free pass to do whatever I wanted. That’s a truly shitty thing to do to someone (and that is the first real curse word to appear here at HMITH – well deserved, I think). Ok, so that’s not so much a defense as a self-analysis, but who cares? I just needed to get some of this out.

I can’t remember if I ever told him I cheated – my journal doesn’t say because it picks up a couple weeks after our break up and is light on details. I do know that about 5 years ago, I was reading through old letters and came across his. I read every last one of them, and when I was done I felt two things: deep sadness and profound gratitude. The sadness was because of the letters he wrote me while we were broken up in February, and remembering how much I’d hurt him pained me so much. The gratitude was because he managed to love me at all, in spite of everything. He really was so good to me. I had his email address, though we weren’t regularly in touch, and I sent him an email (which I saved, of course):

I was doing some organizing tonight, and I came across some letters that you sent me throughout our relationship. I just wanted to say thank you. Reading them, I remembered just how good you were to me, and how patient. I know that I never did anything to deserve someone like you, so I feel very lucky that I had you in my life. I am not trying to rekindle anything, I just don’t believe in letting kind things go unsaid. I wanted you to know that I have always thought that, of any man I’ve ever known, you loved me the best, and reading your letters tonight only confirmed that.

He responded, and was kind enough to lie a little: he said that he hadn’t treated me any differently than I treated him, that the feelings he expressed in his letters were a reflection of me, that I’m a good person, and that he was glad we had our time together. I saved that, too.

I feel horrible now, after writing the last post and thinking about the end of our relationship and what I did, but the truth is, when we were together and we were happy, it was so good. I don’t have any illusions that if I hadn’t cheated and we hadn’t broken up at the beginning of sophomore year that we’d be married for years by now – we probably wouldn’t have even lasted through college. But we might still be friends who keep in touch now, and we would have avoided a particularly ugly post-breakup event (the details of which I won’t go into). I miss him. He is a good person, and I miss having him in my life.

The point of the Memory Lane series is to figure out what I learned from each relationship, so here’s what I learned from D: the grass is not always greener; you think it will be, but it’s not, and sometimes, once you cross the fence, you can’t get back to the other side.

Or, in the immortal words of the Rolling Stones:

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime
You might find you get what you need

I don’t care what they think
I don’t care what they say
What do they know about this love anyway?
— Melissa Etheridge, Come to My Window

What can I say about D? Well, we met the July before we started at our small, east coast college, at a weekend orientation for incoming freshman. He was tall and skinny – 6’4″, 180 pounds – which for a very long time was precisely my type. I don’t remember how we ended up on the quad til 2:30 in the morning the first night, kissing, but we did. It wasn’t a furious make out session, either, it was a “I kind of really connected with you and I think I might like you, so let’s talk and kiss and talk some more” kind of thing. I remember that we each shared our senior year heartbreaks with each other and talked for hours. And that he told me he’d never rolled down a hill before, which I couldn’t believe. There happened to be a small hill right off the quad, so I went first and convinced him to follow me. He thought I was nuts, but he did it, laughing the whole way down. Later, after we’d been together four or five months, I convinced him to dance with me in the rain. Those are two of my all-time favorite memories.

When we arrived on campus in the fall, we had been talking on the phone a couple times a week, and we found each other’s dorm rooms pretty quickly. We didn’t start dating right away, and he didn’t end up being my first, but like Felicity said about Noel, he should have been.

He was a basketball player, and at our small, D-III school, everyone knew him. He’s black, and when we started dating, he took a bit of flack from some people, because he never tried to hide it. We’d walk to class holding hands, and kiss when we parted, and we never made a secret of the fact that I spent most nights in his room. Once people saw we were serious, they backed off, and no one ever said anything to me directly, but I know that it cost him something in the black community at our school to be with me. If it bothered him, though, he never let on.

D was . . . I can’t say shy, because that’s not it, but reserved, I think. He was very observant and didn’t talk a lot in a crowd or in class. Once we started dating, people would ask me, “Does he ever talk?” I’d kind of smile and say, “Yeah. He talks to me all the time.” It made me feel special. I can’t call him shy, because one of his favorite things to do, when it was just us, was play air guitar to Purple Rain. I won’t do that alone in my own house, but he would just go to town; it was the best (or “de best,” as he liked to say in a funny accent sometimes). He loved Prince. And basketball. And me.

And that’s what I can tell you about D: that of all the men I’ve dated, seriously or otherwise, he is the only one who I know for sure was truly in love with me the way I was in love with him. J, sure, he liked me a whole lot, and he might have even loved me, but he was never in love with me. And I’ve come to realize that M, who you’ll meet in Part 3, was only ever in love with the idea of being in a relationship – he was with me because he wasn’t with anyone else. But D and I, we were in love with each other. We had a good run; we had a very hard thing to deal with in the middle of our relationship, but we got through it and never looked back.

When May rolled around and it was time to head to our respective homes for the summer, I was devastated. We weren’t sure how often we’d get to see each other, and I knew it was going to be hard. We said goodbye for a long time, and I cried and cried. He handed me a letter before he kissed me goodbye for the last time – it was all about how much the year had meant to him, how much his life had changed since meeting me, how much he loved me. At the end, I’ll never forget, he wrote: “Don’t forget to come back to me.” At the time I thought, “What in the world does that mean?”

We saw each other once that summer, wrote each other a million letters, and talked on the phone every other day. It was awful. I missed him terribly, and he missed me. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even talk for minutes at a time, we’d just sit there on the phone, knowing the other was on the other end, and it would be enough. I couldn’t wait to get back to school in August so I could be with him again.

And then, when I got back, I can’t even explain what happened. We were both on campus, and we each knew the other was on campus, but we never called each other. I’m thinking about it now, trying to understand, and I can’t. I don’t think we talked for an entire week, and we didn’t run into each other in that whole time, either. When we did, we both just understood that it was over. I hadn’t forgotten to come back to him, I just couldn’t.

***** ~squealing brakes~ *****

Ok, have you ever remembered something one way only to hear the other person tell it and it’s completely different? That just happened to me, except it was my 17- and 18-year-old self who remembers correctly what happened between me and D. I wrote everything above and then went to re-read my journal from college because I wanted to see how I explained the not talking to each other when we got back to school. It turns out that the truth is, I was a terrible, fickle person who did not deserve him.

When I started this blog, I determined that I had only one rule for myself: no lying (apropos of nothing, and to maybe make you laugh one last time before I come clean, this is also the only rule of I Never, my favorite drinking game). So I’m going to tell you now what I had somehow managed to convince myself wasn’t true or had conveniently forgotten:

I cheated on him. At the end of the summer, just before it was time to head back to school. Oh, and once, I think, the first night back at school with an old friend (I was definitely the girl looking for love in all the wrong places. It apparently was not enough that I’d already found it, and in someone who wanted to love me back, no less, unlike the others.).

And that explains why I didn’t call D or seek him out; I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to tell him or if I should tell him. My journal says that prior to cheating and getting back to school, I had already been feeling like I wanted to break up with him, I was just waiting to be “sure,” because I’d already hurt him before and didn’t think he’d be as inclined to forgive me this time if I changed my mind again. (Something else I’d forgotten was that we’d broken up twice in February – shortly after the “very hard thing” alluded to above – because I’d decided I wanted to see other people, and he took me back when I realized I’d made a huge mistake. He knew I’d been struggling with that for a while, and when I crawled into his bed the night we go back together, crying and apologetic, he whispered in my ear, “I’ll never give up on you.”)

I should change the opening quote to Fiona Apple:

I’ve been a bad, bad girl
I’ve been careless with a delicate man.