Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.
I had a game I would play with myself to test whether I was truthfully over my ex. The game was this: I would force myself to imagine that he came back to me, asking me to be with him, to forget everything sad and difficult which had taken place between us. Would I say yes, would I be with him again? Would I instantly swallow my pride which had been so eviscerated during our time together? Would I accept whatever thing he said to mitigate his preference for other women—not only accept it but accept it with joy, relief, wild welcome?
For months the answer kept on being “Yes,” and then the months turned into years. I can tell you exactly how long it took for the answer to honestly be “No”: it was five years. Five years during which I would never have admitted this to anyone, not anywhere except in the deep recesses of myself in certain stark moments. Five years to metabolize a relationship that was never officially a relationship, which lasted barely nine scrappy months but changed the course of my life forever.
E and I met on Halloween night when I was 24. I was dressed as a Manson girl and still lived with my boyfriend, from whom I had become steadily alienated in recent months. For two weeks until I worked up the courage to break up fully and move out, I behaved and felt like a wayward teenager, fully delirious and engorged on my crush like a bug fattening up on blood. We went for a fancy dinner in the seaside town he was from, both of us young and shabby and broke enough that such things still seemed like a funny shared joke. Afterward we climbed around slippery rocks and crouched among them near the spittle of the waves to share a flask of Jameson and make out furiously.
Soon enough—straight away, really—I was in love in a way I had never been before and will never be again, which is both sad and completely necessary and welcome. Sometimes I wonder what it was that made this love the singular one for me, the one that obliterated me and made me scrap myself and have to start from zero, invent a new person to be. Was it who he was, or who I was? Was it just a particular time and place? If it wasn’t him, would it have been someone else who came along and burst my life open, filling it with new, unfamiliar pain and endless unimagined possibilities?
E is an artist and bristled with energy and ambition, which was incredibly attractive and invigorating. I was then an administrative assistant in a medical institution, most of my ambition having been flattened in the five years since I had dropped out of college and struggled to survive, both materially and mentally. There had been a time so unspeakably abject for me that being physically well, having a salaried job, and a relationship—even if the relationship made me unhappy—seemed the absolute most I could ever expect from life. This is what I had accepted for myself before I fell in love with him. I wasn’t miserable when we met, but I was keeping the wildest most essential parts of myself at bay, and meeting him forced me to question why. He forced me to question why. He told me I was a writer and to identify that way. He encouraged me to think outside of my immediate circles, to be aware of art in the broader world, to believe I could be a part of it.