While reading a recent post from Drunken American, I got to thinking about a story that I’ve never written about publicly online. While I’ve managed to have a few different blogs in the last three years, there are some aspects of my life I’ve never shared due mainly to the audience that I had invited to read the blog (or had stumbled upon it). I suppose I feel a bit freer to express not only sexual whims and opinions, but also the sadness as well.
During my last semester of college, I started dating someone who had been a friend for a couple of years. He was a known player, and I was the girl who was so busy preparing for her future that she never dated anyone seriously in college. Anyway, we started dating around the time of my 21st birthday and because I had made plans to get a job in Washington, D.C. after graduation, we both knew and agreed that the relationship would end before my departure. I already had a horribly failed long-distance relationship under my belt from earlier in the year, and wasn’t willing to take that on again, and so we agreed things would remain casual (no “I love yous” was one rule) and that we’d part amicably as friends at the end of the semester.
About a month before graduation, he decided to break it off. To say it came as a surprise would be an understatement. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t prepared myself for it to come to an end, but I have to admit that my opinion on long-distance relationships had started to change somewhat, but I just hadn’t verbalized it to him. Then again, I wasn’t really permitted to verbalize many emotions of this nature during our short, two-month relationship. Once we separated, I figured that whatever I had been feeling – and whatever I thought he had been feeling – was really nothing at all.
What he didn’t know – and doesn’t know to this day – is that despite receiving all A’s in my classes that final semester, I also failed calculus. I didn’t fail it because I got dumped; I literally didn’t even have enough kiss-ass points to bring an F up a D. So I was then faced with two options: give up the job I had taken in Washington and stay in town to take the course over and graduate in the spring, or walk during graduation in December and attempt to take the course via correspondence. I had about 24 hours to decide which road I would take, though it felt like 5 minutes.
While I was excited about the prospect of taking the job in Washington, and beginning grad school the following fall, I have to admit that I considered sticking around re-taking calculus in the spring. I even wondered if I could get the boyfriend back, even if it meant I’d be leaving that following May (he was a year behind, so it’s not as if we could graduate together). But, the specter of failure was too much for me; I had made grandiose plans and everyone knew about them. To fail a course in my last semester of school would be to admit that I wasn’t everything I said I was, that I was still that timid, Midwestern girl who had arrived 3 years earlier with no friends and no hope. Besides, as cruel as the break-up had been, why would he want me back? Why would he agree to just prolong the stupidity for another 5 months? Wouldn’t he eventually just break it off when he headed into the Navy? Blah, blah, blah.
So, I told no one – not even my two sisters who drove all the way from Michigan for the graduation ceremony – and played the part of the happy graduate. As I endured my final days with my friends – lying through my teeth – it killed me to walk away. What was worse, when I got back to my parent’s house to pack and prepare to move to the D.C. area, we were hit with an awful ice storm that nearly forced us to stay home. Then, I had insane problems trying to find an apartment, and my Dad almost high-tailed it back to Tennessee because of the variety of nastyness that we visited in the hopes of landing me a decent place to live. Again, I wondered if I should abandon the D.C.-dream and just go back to what I knew and loved.
In the end though, I found a place to stay, and ended up starting my new life here. I tried staying in contact with the now ex-boyfriend during the next new semester, but eventually, he stopped writing back. I later learned that he started dating a close friend of mine, who had been a confidant while he and I had dated. I was bruised by it, but I was determined to move on, sure as sh*t that our months together meant nothing, and that I was simply another notch on the proverbial extra-long twin-sized bedpost.
I would love to say that the story ended there, but I grew stupid as I got older. While I won’t go into specifics regarding my shaky psychological state after the attacks of 9/11, I will say that I was desperate to reconnect with friends from my past. Since I knew it was his desire to enter the Navy following graduation, I was concerned that he was in harm’s way, and contacted our university’s alumni office and they said they would pass along any messages that I wanted to send. So I prepared a short message and sent with it a treasured item that he had given me before the break-up. I only wanted him to know that I had thought of him and his safety following 9/11 and that I hoped he was doing what he had always wanted to do. I never really expected to hear from him again.
But I still talk to him to this day. Through a mutual friend after I had contacted him post-9/11, I learned that he had always loved me, and that the early break-up came because it had become too painful to face my imminent departure. He told this friend a number of other things: that we were too young to get married (married!) and that he thought we made love more than just having sex. This was all news – of the breaking variety – to me.
I don’t hold many regrets, but I do regret opening the door to the past. While the truth may set some people free, I have felt emprisoned by knowing the real depth of his emotion. While I followed the rules he set forth in the early days of our relationship, he obviously didn’t. Why would he talk about marriage when I was told we weren’t even ‘allowed’ to fall in love? Obviously, when you put limitations on a person and what they’re permitted to feel or experience, you’re going to set yourself up for failure. Still, I believe that in the long run, I would’ve been better off not knowing his truth. And I’ve yet to share mine with him in return.
Yes, I got married in the years between the break-up, the move, and contacting him post-9/11. Yes, I’ve accomplished all I said I would do (and more, I suppose). There still lingers that other road in the wood that went untraveled. We have an uneasy friendship now; we argue a lot over email, and it’s apparent there are still deep-seeded feelings there on both sides. Talking to him on the phone is the worst. I’ve tried not speaking to him, to end the friendship entirely. It hasn’t worked. Much of my association with him is pure agony, and he knows it. I’ve come to see it’s fairly mutual. When I think of how his life has turned out, the challenges he has faced between his unstable family existence and that of his professional life, I feel badly. I was never given the opportunity to love him completely, and I have always felt that if given the chance, I could’ve changed things. If anything, I could’ve provided him with stability, and with love.
But it was not to be. So I linger in solitude and the quiet suffering that comes from questioning one’s past. I do not hate my life now, I merely wonder ‘what if.’ Probably too much, too often. It was the shortest relationship I had ever been a part of, and it’s the one that tortures me these nine years later. I’ve seen him only once, and I doubt I’ll ever see him again. Anyone who tells you that time heals all wounds is lying, and the truth doesn’t always set a person free; sometimes it leads to personal and psychological mutilation, and oftentimes it traps a person in a portion of reality relegated to the lost and broken-hearted. Still, he’s what I think about when I reflect on my time in college. I smile when I think of campus, of my friends, and my experiences there, and I connect him with nearly all of that. Even when I return home for holidays or to visit my parents, as we drive through town, I see him there. At the stadium, at the fountain, in the cafeteria with his friends at dinner (6 p.m. sharp every evening). Some habits die hard.
“Maybe I was much too selfish, but baby, you’re still on my mind / Now I’m grown, and all alone and wishing I was with you tonight / ‘Cuz I can guarantee, things are sweeter in Tennessee.” – The Wreckers, “Tennessee”
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