therealljidol: week 1, "black rainbow"

Feb 04, 2022 17:01

We met at a bakery.

This is the easy version of the story, what I tell others while we're dating. I believe my own lie, ignore the earlier friendship that lapsed into quiet nothing after a misunderstanding, what should have been a warning, not even a red flag but a clear warning: this will not end the way you think it will.

Reinventing the story, devising a meet-cute.

We met at a bakery. The one downtown that I knew well and he did not know at all, somewhere easy and quiet enough to have a good conversation. I wore skinny jeans and an oversized shirt, trying to look effortless without looking sloppy.

He commented on how I had achieved the latter without hitting anywhere near the former, and I laughed as though he'd said something amusing.

He was serious, and he frowned at me, and I realized, in that moment, that I had made a mistake - had tried to step on the stair, only to miss and find nothing but air beneath my feet.

You have a choice in those moments. I know I had a choice. I thought of what to say, something cutting and sarcastic, how I could just leave.

And then I thought, but it's been so long since I met someone who interests me, and he was nice when we talked, earlier...

(Again: to say that there were red flags would be give the benefit of the doubt, to assume that it was somehow easy to overlook what was said. It was not, and I could not, but I somehow lied to myself that I could, that he had been trying to be funny, not hurtful, but had somehow missed the mark. I cannot lie to myself now.)

Revise, rewind. In the version I tell friends, later, we simply step up to the counter, we get - something. He comments on what I order (spanakopita? I want to say it was this, the last time I'd eat it, because he said something derisive, and ever after I could not bring myself to enjoy it), and I don't say anything about his, but carefully fill my water glass, find a table for us to sit at. A booth, too narrow, and I sit at it. After a moment, he comes over, too, and we talk about - something.

There's this temptation, of course, to rewrite the story, make myself look better. It must have been a great conversation, I want to say, because of everything that came afterward..., but it wasn't, and I can't. I can't invent anything, because I cannot remember what was talked about. You can't embroider what isn't there.

After the bakery, the bookstore. I bought a copy of Among Others. He said he'd been meaning to read it; I said, jokingly, that I'd give a book report.

That much, I do remember.

I left, and if it was a real meet-cute, if things had gone well, if it had been a good date, I would have said something about how we kissed at the end of it and there were fireworks and it felt lovely, wonderful, but they didn't, and it wasn't. I walked back to my car and sat behind the steering wheel for a few minutes, wondering why I felt so - nervous - and went home to find a message from him. Something about how he could tell I hadn't had a good time, I clearly didn't want to see him again, but he wanted to see me.

This is, I think, where the shift happened and I began to rewrite the story of everything.

I wanted so badly to feel wanted, after all.

Here is the unfortunate thing no one tells you about unhealthy relationships: they rarely look unhealthy right from the start.

The meeting at the bakery was rocky, but the bookstore was fine, and I was quick to forgive and forget. If you're a reasonable person, you likely are quick to do this too: someone can have a bad day, or say something that they don't mean, something that sounds more unkind than it is meant to be, they apologize, and you decide to move on.

There were ups and downs - mostly ups, as we talked further and got to know each other, got to enjoy one another's company. I got to know him better, found out about the anxiety he had (or so he said) that led to him acting a certain way, needing things a certain way, being a certain way.

(Unkind, mostly, as though anxiety was an excuse for that - but, you know.)

Ever an anxious person myself, I was quick to bend, to fold myself to fit into the box he wanted to put me. Ever pliant, ever willing, ever so quick to bend as far as instructed, to give on the things that were simply "minor". To understand. To be compassionate and caring while receiving stonewalling and the silent treatment in return, because anxiety.

I was understanding because I wanted to be understood.

I yielded and bent because I wanted to think that he would do the same thing for me.

He held out love and approval as the carrot before the stick, and whenever I got too close, he would push me back.

I saw this. My friends saw this. One of them warned me, gently, that things were perhaps not great between the two of us, that perhaps...

He didn't use the words, perhaps this isn't working. He was kind about it. He said: I think that while you care about this person, they are not ready to be in a relationship with anyone. Not just you - anyone.

I invented excuses, and my friends shook their heads and wisely didn't say anything further. They could see what I was unwilling to: that he would never love me the way I wanted him to; that I would never be right for someone who was so clearly not right, no matter how I sanded down the rough edges of myself, tried to fit into the box that he had put me into.

I wanted to believe it would work, and for a while, I thought that it would. I did what I could to smooth all of my rough edges, sand away the parts he found disagreeable, try to be more than the sad and hapless person he indicated I was. He did not, he implied, know how I had gotten into graduate school when my education was so clearly lacking. He mocked the classes I had taken, indicated that he had done similar work in high school, let alone college or a PhD program, and I simply listened and said that perhaps he was more naturally talented than me. I let him explain what it was that I did to me, let him tell me that I simply did not understand it.

I cringe when I think about this. When you are with someone like this, the temptation is always to blame yourself for what happens, as though they are not intimately familiar with the concept of intermittent reward and do not use it to thier own advantage.

I strove to make him happy, because when he was happy, I felt as though I was special. Chosen.

When he was unhappy, it was my fault.

This was, of course, by design.

I wanted to believe, so badly, that I was reading the signs wrong. That it would last forever. That I could somehow make myself fit into the fabric of his life.

I couldn't. I do not think, at this point, that anyone could - but I wanted to believe it anyway.

Before he broke up with me, he gave me a handmade gift, two tiles he'd made and glazed himself. Light is the left hand of darkness/and darkness is the right hand of light.

I was, he said, the light to his dark.

He gave me this, and then he broke up with me.

I was, I think, supposed to go back. I wasn't supposed to stay gone. In his mind, I would disappear for a while, simply retreat into the shadows, and then, when enough time had passed, I would come back and apologize to him and say I was sorry for whatever slight it was that I had caused, and he would be gracious and forgiving and allow me back into his orbit. I wasn't the light to his dark, after all - I was supposed to be the moon, reflecting back to him the light of his sun, caught in his trajectory with no agency of my own.

I did not go back.

I asked him politely, via email, the same way he'd contacted me, to place the few things he had left me on his front porch. I would, I said, pick them up that evening.

He wrote back and told me that as long as it was between six and seven PM, he would not be home, and I could take my things and leave. Again, with the wisdom of hindsight, I think I was supposed to fall down in front of his door at exactly 7:05 or something equally ridiculous, and beg for him to take me back - but I didn't.

I wrote him a letter in a firm hand, on the back of a love note he'd written me, thanking him for his time and telling him that his reasons for breaking up with me were ridiculous, but I respected them, and not to contact me going forward.

I left the letter, along with other things he'd given me or that I had borrowed from him, on his front porch, at 6:15 pm.

I gathered the few things of mine he had rounded up - books, mostly - and went back to my car to cry.

If there were justice in the world, that would be the end of the story.

He wrote to me five months later. He'd seen me, he said, at the library. He wanted to recommend a book to me.

When that didn't earn the response requested, he wrote again, something about how I'd been on his mind.

That too proved fruitless, and he wrote to me again, asking for music recommendations, something to start a conversation.

I responded to that and asked why it was that he continued reaching out. We agreed months ago that we can't be friends.

He wrote back: Do we want to remember that right now?

As if it was a decision that both of us had to have a say in making, as if he would simply choose to forget and let me back in, should I have said "no".

I can't remember what I said. It wasn't the expected answer, and I never heard from him again.

We met in a bakery. We dated for a few months after that. It was - fraught. I wanted to believe it would last, knew that it wouldn't keep.

He broke up with me, and then he tried to win me back, and that is where the story of him and I ends. No meet-cute, no happy ending.

He told me I was the light to his darkness, and I spend too long thinking about that, wondering - if I'd done something differently, would that have changed the ending?

The answer, I know now, is no.

--

For week 1, "black rainbow". Thanks for reading.
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