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Cover Girls

In July of 1999 I was 21 years old and living in Manhattan with my boyfriend Matt*.

I don’t remember how we heard about Woodstock ’99. Social media didn’t exist. Maybe it was the radio or TV. But somehow, we discovered the iconic music festival from the ‘60s was back, and the lineup seemed incredible. I was a huge fan of nearly every band on the list, from Metallica to Jewel. It was an eclectic mix but fitting for an outdoor festival originating from the peaceful and loving hippies of the ‘60s.

Or so it seemed.

The venue was Rome, New York: approximately a five-hour drive from Manhattan. Being from Texas, Matt and I were used to long road trips, even though we didn’t take them anymore. Hell, we didn’t even have cars anymore.

The $150 ticket price was excruciating for me. Fresh out of college, I made $25,000 a year and lived in a shoebox with Matt. (At one point, I counted up the square footage of our apartment and was astonished at how little space we had compared to our astronomical rent.) Obviously, I was determined, and I scraped together the money for my ticket. My brother Joe hopped a flight from Austin to join us.

Obviously, the details are fuzzy now (Did we go buy a tent for the three of us? Where does one get camping supplies in Manhattan? Did we stock up on anything practical?), but there are a couple of things I recall in vivid detail. One was the Metallica show Saturday night, sitting on Matt’s shoulders, at what felt like miles from the stage. I remember thinking, “Man, they love what they’re doing.” They were performers.

The second memory is jarring. Sunday night during Red Hot Chili Peppers’ set: small clusters of people gathered around what looked like campfires but weren’t. Earlier in the day, a non-profit group handed out candles to honor the Columbine shooting victims. Instead of a reverent vigil, concert attendees were lighting anything and everything on fire. The fires were still small, but as I watched a guy take a running leap over one, I said to Matt and Joe: “Let’s go. Now. This is about to be very, very bad.” I don’t know when we had planned to leave, how long it took us to pack up or if we just left everything behind. But by the time we returned to Manhattan in the middle of the night, we turned on the TV news and saw that my prediction had been correct, except it was even worse than I had imagined.

Watching the HBO documentary recently, these atrocious details were revisited in living color. Poor planning, unhygienic conditions, angry young white men, trash being thrown at the stage while these young men chanted “show us your tits!” at every turn. I’m stunned that I don’t recall the last part. I wonder now if I tuned it out at the time, or if I’ve blocked the memory, or some combination of both. Was I somehow protected because I was with my boyfriend and my brother? As I watched the documentary, the tales of sexual assault and rape at the festival horrified me and gave me a very real sense of survivor’s guilt.

The documentary not only recapped the festival itself but put it in context of the period. I had never considered how truly odd the nineties were, and when I did speak up about it, I was told, like most women, that I was being rather stupid.

In Manhattan, I walked from my apartment each day to the subway. I haven’t visited in years so I don’t know if this is still the case, but a newsstand sat on practically every corner. Those newsstands were plastered in magazines and newspapers, but what stood out to me were the magazine covers featuring women. FHM, Maxim, Rolling Stone—they all seemed to feature a half-naked woman who looked impossibly young, impossibly sexy, impossibly perfect. I felt assaulted each single day by what I was supposed to be. Meeting up with my boyfriend and his colleagues one night at a bar, the topic came up after a few cocktails. Embarrassingly, I started sobbing about how ugly I felt; how it was a double standard because nothing like that happened to them. They stared at me incredulously and told me I was being silly and too sensitive. Matt wasn’t even kind enough lie that I was just as gorgeous and perfect as the girl on every cover.

Things like this would happen repeatedly to me over the course of my life and my relationships. One night soon after my experience in New York, at my birthday party, a different boyfriend and his friends were passing around a Rolling Stone magazine with Britney Spears on the cover, ogling her. My birthday party, my boyfriend, and I felt like an ugly duckling. My boyfriend couldn’t stand up to his friends, couldn’t tell them to lay off and put the magazine away. Humiliated yet again.

Another boyfriend a couple years later went to a strip club when he said he was elsewhere. He knew it upset me, so he lied. And if there was a lap dance, I also knew touching was likely despite his claims it wasn’t allowed. Again, a double standard: I definitely wasn’t doing anything similar with my girlfriends on a Friday night. I certainly wouldn’t have done it and lied to him.

All of this happened a long time ago. Perhaps I should attribute it to guys who were just jerks. But as the documentary pointed out, this was a unique flashpoint in culture where misogyny was celebrated and expected. In fact, when reflecting on this time, I took part in the misogyny as well. I blamed the women for stealing attention. I called them slutty, or stupid, or vapid when I really had no idea who they were as people.

We shouldn’t have been surprised that the majority of the male Woodstock attendees apparently considered it their right to see women’s naked breasts or entire naked bodies. They thought it was acceptable to touch them, to violate them without consent or permission. And society found it acceptable. Women being confronted at every moment with a barrage of images that pummeled our self-esteem, and guys “just being guys.”

Some twenty years later, we’ve made some progress in our reckoning, but we still have a long way to go.

*names have been changed

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Being Latina In America

It was a cold, clear night in November 2000. We were driving home from the bar, even though none of us should have been. We’d had too much to drink. April was behind the wheel of her red 1974 Volkswagen Bug, I rode shotgun and Ginny might have been sleeping in the backseat.

The presidential election was still undecided. Florida’s electoral votes were still hanging – literally. Our route home took us past the Governor’s Mansion, where almost-President George W. Bush resided. Full of piss and vinegar, I stuck my hand out of the open passenger side window and flipped the bird.

Almost immediately, the lights of a police cruiser appeared in the rearview.

April pulled the car over. Ginny sat up from her semi-drunken slumber.

“I’m sorry, ladies, that was stupid,” I muttered. “It’s my fault, I’ll talk to the officer.”

There were two police officers. Instead of approaching the driver’s side, one of them came up to my window.

“Evening. Do you understand that you just threatened the President of the United States?” He loomed in the window, looking grim, hands resting lightly on his utility belt, ready to—what? Taze me? A twenty-something girl, 115 pounds soaking wet? Even in my slightly inebriated state, I sensed a good cop-bad cop routine going on here: his partner hung back near the cruiser, almost as if he didn’t agree with the traffic stop.

He’s not actually the President, I thought. Then: DO NOT say that out loud.

I spoke up, since as I had told my friends, this was entirely my fault. “I apologize, sir, I didn’t realize it was a problem. I just don’t like Bush.”

He was unmoved. “I’m going to need all of you to get out of the car.”

We were momentarily stunned. Get out of the car? I couldn’t just apologize, tell him I meant no harm, and be on our merry way?

We clambered out of the red VW, shivering in the November cold. We were dressed for the bar, tight shiny pants and spaghetti straps, not for an autumn evening stroll. The three of us huddled together in front of the open car door, and Bad Cop collected our licenses; he gave them to Good Cop, who took them back to the cruiser to run them.

Bad Cop stared us down. “You got any weapons in the car?”

This was insanity. I stared back incredulously. “No, of course not!”

“Yeah? What am I gonna find if I search it?”

“Nothing, go ahead,” I said, crossing my arms. April looked panicked. Unbeknownst to me, she had drugs in her glove box. Not just a little weed, either. Meth, most likely.

I decided to try again. “Look, Officer, sir, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m just a bleeding heart liberal. My friends didn’t do anything. Please leave them out of this.”

He regarded me like something he’d found on the bottom of his shoe. I hoped and prayed for Good Cop to return with a clean record for each of us. After Bad Cop ran through what April and Ginny did for a living (he didn’t seem to care about me – perhaps thought I wasn’t gainfully employed), Good Cop returned with the licenses and ostensibly those clean records.

Good Cop handed licenses back to April and Ginny, both blond and obviously White. He looked at me, though, and didn’t hand mine back.

“You know what your problem is? You got a real chip on your shoulder. You know why?”

I stared at the sidewalk, biting my tongue, swallowing my retorts. Trying, as I had been through the entire interaction, to be unfailingly polite. “No sir,” I said slowly. “What’s my problem?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, as if in slow motion, he handed the license to me, but didn’t let go. We stood there, each holding on to one side of it, almost playing a surreal game of tug-of-war.

“It’s your last name,” he said, sneering at me.

I said nothing. I swallowed hard. I thought about how quickly he would slap cuffs on my wrists and take me to jail had I breathed a word. I gave him a curt nod, palmed the license and got into the car.

Bad Cop had decreed Ginny was the most sober of the group, and therefore should drive, though she had no idea how to drive a standard shift car, much less a 1974 Bug. After a couple of stalls, we haltingly pulled into a gas station about six blocks away and switched drivers.

I cycled wildly through emotions – terror, relief, anger, incredulity – had that just happened to me? Had a police officer, whose job it was to serve and protect, told me that because I was Latina, I was somehow deficient, that I was somehow less than?

Ginny and I were roommates, and April had planned to stay over that night. But she pulled up in our driveway a few minutes later, gravel spraying, and effectively told us to get out. She sat there, not opening her door, fuming. “They were just doing their job!” she spit.

I could hardly believe my ears. My childhood friend was defending Bad Cop’s actions. Sure, I had screwed up by making a rude gesture, but to a building. It didn’t matter to her that the officer had discriminated against me, and that stung. Ginny and I were shocked, silent, as we climbed out of the car and then the stairs to our duplex.

I curled in the fetal position later that night, grateful to be in my own bed, knowing how close I’d come to lying on a cot in a jail cell instead. At 22 years old, I’d had my heart broken a couple of times. It felt like it was breaking all over again, and this time it was different. I wasn’t sure it would heal.

I wasn’t imagining what happened. Though I wasn’t driving that night, a Stanford University study called the Open Policing Project (OPP) found that police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers with less basis of evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items. It was April who was carrying drugs in her glove box that night. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t search the car—it was hers, not mine. He gave her a break.

I imagine, in his mind, Bad Cop gave me a break too. He told me what my problem was, and he restrained himself from taking me too jail.

What a magnanimous gesture.

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In Memoriam: Silver Snarfer Robinson the First

I met Silver Robinson when he was three years old. He belonged to my new boyfriend Sterling. I had seen pictures of Silver – it was, after all, the background on Sterling’s phone – this beautiful, square headed yellow Labrador Retriever. In the photo, he looked regal, proud, strong.

Sterling got Silver from a breeder in Oklahoma after his mom commandeered his chihuahua. When Sterling arrived to choose a dog, he saw puppies roughhousing in a pen. But there was one puppy alone in a pen by himself. When he asked, he learned that the Lone Puppy had been adopted, but then returned when his new parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make the payments. Thus, instead of costing $600, he was just $300, the remainder of his payments. He was also a little bit older than the other puppies. 

One Saturday afternoon, I recounted this story to Silver, ending with, “…and that’s why you’re a Discount Dog” – right as Sterling entered the room. 

“What did you just say?!” Sterling asked. “You can’t tell him he’s a Discount Dog!”

“But he is. And that’s okay. I’m simply telling him his origin story,” I said. “He needs to know where he comes from.”

In 2011, after just six months of dating, Sterling and I moved in together to his (and Silver’s) home. I brought with me a crotchedy old cat named Buttercup. Cuppie was nonplussed. Silver was thrilled. He thought she was a toy we’d brought home just for him. A few episodes of Cuppie smacking him on the nose conveyed to Silver that she was boss, she most certainly did not want to play, and she did not like having her rear end sniffed. Silver grudgingly accepted that he should give her a wide berth if he walked by.

Silver came to know our schedules and our habits: he knew that we’d probably go out on a Friday or Saturday night, come home late, and I’d wind up on the floor with him, imitating the way he was lying down showing us his belly, feet up in the air. He was smart: he knew what time he got fed, he knew what time we went for walks, he knew where his food and his treats were. He knew when I was sad, he knew when I was happy. 

In 2012, Sterling proposed to me in the living room of our rented condo in Utah, where we’d been skiing with my parents and some friends. Our friend Mohammed came to pick us up to go to the airport, and when we told him we were engaged, he said, “Silver is like, ‘I finally have a mommy!’” I’ll never forget that moment. Because though we were making our relationship “official,” I had become Silver’s mom long before.

Buttercup passed away in 2014. We adopted a cat a couple months later from the local animal shelter and named him Batman for the mask on his face. He’s a tough tuxedo cat who stalks around the house like he’s master of the jungle. After an introductory period during which neither Batman nor Silver was sure about this other new creature, Batman decided that he and Silver were going to be best friends. He’d snuggle him, bat his nose or bite his hindquarters in an invitation to play. 

Silver turned 13 in November of 2020. We knew we were on borrowed time. He was having trouble navigating the stairs, but I called him my Timex: he kept taking a licking but would keep on ticking. One of the most recent times he hurt himself meant that we put up a baby gate and kept him downstairs, even when we’d go to bed. For that week, Batman didn’t come to bed with us either. He stayed and kept watch on his big brother. Each and every night.

Batman would help him sometimes, sitting on one of the lower steps and meowing to alert us to the fact Silver was having trouble.

“We know, Batty, thank you – now get out of his way.” 

As if he understood, Batty would scamper up the stairs, and after a few stops and starts, a few confused sniffs at the steps and debating where to put his paws, Silver would follow.

In March 2020, when the pandemic shut everything down and I started working from home, I decided that the whole family needed a walk each day. The downstairs robot vacuum was scheduled to run each day at 3 p.m., which became our walk time. It seemed like a no brainer: the vacuum was loud, Silver loved getting a walk, I needed to get away from my desk for both mental and physical health. I blocked my Outlook calendar for a half hour each weekday at 3, and Silver and I would walk. His dad didn’t always come with us, depending on his work schedule. 

But Silver and I walked nearly every day without fail. If it rained, I waited until it stopped, and patiently explained to Silver that we’d go once it cleared up. If someone scheduled a meeting in Outlook during my allotted walk time, I’d move the walk, again necessitating an explanation that our schedule would be somewhat different that day. 

Not just because of our walks, Silver became my buddy. Sterling was back in the office most days during the week, so it was me and Silver most of the day. During my workouts, he thought we were playing, even though I’d been doing these workouts for the better part of a year. He’d try to pick up dumbbells in his mouth, or drop his tennis ball next to me, hoping I’d throw it back in the middle of doing lunges or squats. While he was lying in his bed, watching me pace the room during a conference call or just trying to get my steps in for the hour, I’d lean down and give him a quick scratch between the ears. I’d tell him, “You’re so cute!” or “I love your face!” even though his hearing had gotten so bad he couldn’t hear anything but the loudest noises. I read that even if a dog’s hearing wasn’t great, he could still tell if you were interacting with him, or whether you were being kind or harsh.

Because we were walking each day, and it was summertime in Houston, I got Silver some booties so he wouldn’t burn his paw pads. I should have trained him to wear them long before, because it turns out maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. He would walk around as if his paws were stuck to the ground, looking as if he were drunk. They must have really confused him. So we put the booties away and figured that some day there would be another dog who might wear them.

In April of this year, Silver hurt himself again on the stairs. We were out of town, and our pet sitter called Sterling to tell him Silver couldn’t walk. Sterling and I looked at each other, and we knew: this time wasn’t like the others. We came home from our trip, picked him up from the emergency vet and my heart broke when I saw him being supported by two vet techs in a sling. I started sobbing and I told Sterling, “I’m not ready, I’m not ready to let him go.”

But it was time. We took him to our regular vet, and while Sterling went to get him a cheeseburger from Whataburger for his final meal, I lay on the floor of the exam room with him. I told him how much I loved him, how much I would miss him, and that he had been the best dog. He relaxed with a long sigh as he left us.

He will forever be the best dog.

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The Furry Little Love Thief

(This blog entry first appeared December 1, 2014, after the passing of Buttercup.)

My cat Buttercup, like so many pets, had many names. Most often we’d call her Cuppie, but Cuppilicious, Licious-Face, Smoocher and Ms. Cup, among others, were in the rotation.

Cuppie was already 12 years old when she came to live with me. My mother had two cats—Cuppie and her sister Anastasia—and they didn’t get along. They also drove her nuts with their eating habits. If my mother left food out, Cuppie would eat so much she might explode. If she only fed them once or twice a day, Anastasia would meow, scratch the door and generally annoy my mother until she fed her. Poor Cuppie ballooned to 22 pounds and lived under the guest bed. My theory: she was ashamed.

I think back now to how my mom tried to give her away on Craigslist and it breaks my heart a little. Mom was frustrated—“No one wants an old, fat cat.” I said, “I’ll take her.” I had just finished law school and the bar exam, I lived alone, and I hadn’t had a pet for nearly 10 years. Mom cried when she put the cat carrier in my car for the trip from Austin to Houston.

Cuppie hid from me for the first few days, but around day three, she turned over on her back and showed me her belly. My mother was ecstatic.

Thus began my love affair with an old, fat cat named Buttercup. I didn’t expect her to be around too much longer—after all, she was already 12, and had had weight problems. I didn’t expect to get attached.

She was affectionate, climbing in my lap during my dinners in front of the TV. Insistent that I pet her while eating. One night she was so insistent, in fact, she managed to turn over the TV tray, along with everything on it. Then she looked at me with eyes wide, frightened, as if to ask, “Why would you do that?”

I met my husband Sterling a few months later. Cuppie did not like men, and Sterling was no exception. But he met her level of doggedness for affection—I would often walk in my bedroom and find Sterling halfway in the closet, trying to coax her out of her hiding spot.

When Sterling and I moved in together, Cuppie came too. Along with Sterling, Cuppie got another roommate—a huge yellow Labrador retriever named Silver. Cuppie was nonplussed. Silver was thrilled. He thought she was a toy we’d brought home just for him. A few episodes of Cuppie smacking him on the nose conveyed to Silver that she was boss, she most certainly did not want to play, and she did not like having her rear end sniffed. Silver grudgingly accepted that he should give her a wide berth if he walked by.

Cuppie lived upstairs for a few months. Sterling didn’t give up on her. Sometimes we’d go up and visit her, and she would acquiesce to his affections. She came downstairs after we strategically moved her food to the ledge next to the master bathroom’s tub. That way she could eat, be away from the dog, and happily clean herself after breakfast.

Most recently, she regularly slept next to us in the bed. Nearly every night around 9 p.m., she would saunter in, hop up and climb on me, no matter what I was doing. Typing on the computer, trying to read a book, or snuggle up next to Sterling, Cuppie would insert herself and start purring. Sometimes she would just sit and stare at me.

“She loves you,” Sterling would chuckle.

Cuppie even snuggled Sterling. Those two came a long way.

She and I were together for four years. She was an old cat, but she had such a good checkup in July I believed I had more time with her. But the day before Thanksgiving, she fell and hurt herself, resulting in some neurological condition that meant her head and her legs weren’t communicating right. Her back legs wouldn’t cooperate, and Cuppie lurched around like a drunk.

The vet explained our limited options. We decided to try a shot of cortisone to see if it would help, and if not, we knew the next day we’d have to put her down. So we brought her home, put her in a little bed, and took her all over the house with us that night. We watched a movie, had drinks on the patio, took pictures with Silver, and fed her cat treats.

That night I had to put her in the bed with us, because she couldn’t jump up on her own. I curled my body around hers like a question mark.

The next morning, I put her next to her feeder for her last meal. I told her she was a furry little love thief.

I never expected to love her so much. I never expected her absence to be so palpable. I never expected my heart to be broken.

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Love, Part 1

03.14.2017

I met my first husband in line for the bathroom at a St. Patrick’s Day themed frat party twenty five years ago this month.  With such an auspicious beginning, who would have guessed that it wouldn’t last?  I nearly didn’t meet him at all, as I was about to leave the party because some drunk frat boy had just smacked me on the butt.  I realized my cup was empty when I went to throw my green beer on him.  I ended up shaking my cup at him and yelling, “Not nice!”  while he laughed and shrugged like, “Whoops, my bad!”  It was time to go. 

I didn’t want to ride the subway with a bladder full of green beer, so I got in the long bathroom line and the guy in front of me turned around, smiled and said hi. I was going to smile vacantly and look through him, but I noticed that he looked kind of like Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, which is a stupid reason to fall for someone, but I was 20 and it was a good time to fall.  I opened my mouth and something super sexy came out, “I really have to pee, so don’t stink up the bathroom or use up all the toilet paper.”  I was a sweet talking devil.  How could he resist?  He laughed and was waiting for me when I came out, so we sat on a couch and started talking.  I found out that he was not one of the frat boys, but was home on spring break from his college, which was four hours away.  Frankly, this made him even more attractive to me, as I tended to be far more enthusiastic about romances that seemed like they would be excitingly short-lived.  It soon became clear to the fratties that Lloyd (not his real name, but let’s just go with it) was not one of them, and they not-so subtly asked him to leave.  He and I, along with my sweet roommate, who had been waiting while I chatted up Mr. Say Anything, got in a cab headed back to our dorm.  My roommate was heading to bed and Lloyd asked me if I wanted to get coffee.  I always say yes to coffee. 

It was a magical night, lightly snowing and cold with a big bright moon giving off a glow that gave the trees and sidewalks a sparkly luminescence.  I am not made of stone.  How was I not going to fall in love with him?  We walked to Harvard Square together and sat at the counter of a diner called The Tasty and had coffee and talked more.  Elton John’s Rocket Man started playing and he said his dad used to call him the Rocket Man and made him a t-shirt with the nickname emblazoned on it that he wore all the time when he was a little boy.  After our coffee we went into the Store 24 and bought gummy worms and other candy that you can eat at 2 AM when you are 20, yet still avoid heartburn and belly fat.  I saw a card that had a picture of a chubby guy sitting at a diner counter and inside it said, “missing you” and I told him he should buy it and send it to me and he bought it.  Then we walked back to my dorm and sat in the lounge watching MTV and eating gummy worms and milk duds, and we talked on and on all night.  When it was light out, we wrote our phone numbers on the back of a jello box (I seriously had eaten jello for dinner that night.  How was I even alive with that kind of diet?) and then I walked him out.  At the door he leaned in and kissed me and I remember it being this monumental thing, where I thought, “Whoa….something big is happening.”  Maybe it was lack of sleep and too much sugar, but that was the first kiss I’d ever had where I saw fireworks.

We spent nearly every day and night of the next week together and then he had to go back to school.  I was sad that he was leaving, but it didn’t seem sensible to try a long distance relationship.  The morning he left, we said that maybe we’d get together next time he was in town and kissed goodbye.  I was a little relieved that it was over, because the week with him had been way more intense than anything I’d ever experienced romance-wise and I felt like I needed to catch my breath.  I was watching tv with my friends that night, when the phone rang and it was Lloyd, drinking at a bar near his school.  He said, “I was wrong, I think we should give a long distance thing a try.  I don’t want to wait and see.” I was surprised, but thrilled.  I threw caution to the wind and said yes.

Everything about love was so new to me.  I’d had a couple of boyfriends before, but it had never been like this.  It all seemed like magic.  He wrote me letters from school and would draw me funny cartoons and write silly poems.  He took a train and a bus and traveled a ridiculous amount of hours just to come see me every couple of weeks.  We were crazy about each other and never seemed to run out of things to talk about.  We came up with silly ideas and stories and laughed like maniacs.  We made each other mix-tapes.  Plus, we were both young and adorable and having the type of sex that young people with endless energy, are limber and need very little sleep have.  Lots and varied.  Ah youth.  I found a way to stay in Boston for the summer while he was home from school (four part-time jobs!) and we spent all of our non-work time together.  We loved taking long ambling walks through the city.  Sometimes we’d ride the subway to a stop we’d never been to, then get out and walk around for hours. The first time he asked me to marry him, we were on a late night walk,  just four months after we met.  Our summer together was ending in a matter of weeks and we were both starting to get anxious. “We should get married!” he said and I just laughed.  But he stopped and spun me around so that he was looking in my eyes and said, “I’m totally serious.  Let’s get married.” 

“But we can’t!  We’re too young!”  I said.  I adored him more than I’d ever adored anyone in my life, but I had no interest in being a wife.  I still had two more years of college.  He said we could do it and still finish school.  Maybe we could just secretly get married,  and we wouldn’t even have to tell anyone? That idea actually appealed to me.  I like secrets and I am prone to doing ridiculous things on a whim.  We didn’t do it, though.  Before he left to go back to school he bought me a gold ring with a little heart-shaped amethyst stone in the center.  “Will you wear it on your left hand?” he asked.  “I want everyone to know you are mine.”  That sounded like passionate adoration to me back then. I was all in.

We should have done it.  We should have made that spectacular mistake early.  Gotten it out of the way and been divorced before we could do any major damage to each other.  Instead we had a long distance relationship while we were in college, then moved to Texas together so that he could go to graduate school.  He asked me to marry him again when we’d been together 6 years.  This time it wasn’t romantic.  We’d been growing apart and fighting more and more.  And then he had a health scare, something minor that seemed major, and when we got back from the doctor he said, “Maybe we should get married?”  And I said, “Sure, why not?”  And we tried to plan a wedding, but neither of us was really interested, so we flew to Vegas and got hitched in the Chapel of Love.  Maybe it was an attempt to get back to the days when we were younger and frivolous and did wild things together.  Eloping in Vegas is some wild and crazy fun. 

Sadly, I’d say that was the last time we ever had crazy fun together.  Things quickly went to shit after that.  The jealousy and possessiveness I’d mistaken for passionate love in him was starting to smother me.  He seemed to disapprove of everyone in my life: friends, family, anyone that took my focus off of him.  I somehow thought that marriage would make this better, that he would feel more secure and loosen up a bit, but it seemed to make it worse.  Two months after we married, we had a huge fight where he was angry at me for talking on the phone with my sister when he wanted me to watch tv with him.  He yelled at me and punched a wall, and I grabbed our car keys and took off.  I drove around aimlessly thinking, “I’ve made a huge mistake and I am going to need to get out of this marriage.”  But I stuck it out for two more years.  I always loved him and I kept hoping that the stress of both of us being in graduate school was our biggest problem.  We still seemed really compatible, as long as I didn’t spend too much time away from him.  And working full-time while going to grad school didn’t give me much opportunity for a social life, so things just went along for a while. 

He was at the point in his academic career where he was teaching his own classes, while working on his dissertation.  He seemed restless and unhappy.  He began telling me salacious stories about a colleague who was having an affair with a student and I was fascinated and repelled.  Somewhere in the back of my mind it began to dawn on me that he knew way too many details about this affair.  One day I came home from class and he smelled like a fruity shampoo that we didn’t own.  He left to go play basketball that evening and without thinking, I logged into his email.  I’m not sure what drove me to do it.  I’d never done anything like that before, but it was easy because his password was my name.  I found a chain of his emails with a college friend of his, whom he was supposed to be meeting in New Orleans that weekend.  It was all about keeping a secret from me.  It said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her I’m with you if she calls.”  And it ended with “Fuck your brains out this weekend!”  So then I knew.

I’m not saying I was perfect.  I know I can be petty and mean.  Conveniently, I can only rememer two instances of my egregiously bad behavior towards him.  One was in college when we’d had a fight and I hung up on him, then got all dressed up and went to a party.  I met a guy and ended up making out with him in a bathroom stall, standing on a toilet.  I thought it was hot at the time and now I can’t believe I didn’t get flesh eating bacteria.  The other thing is shitty, but not nearly as gross.  Once he was sitting on our bed, shirtless and I went over and poked him in the belly and made that “hee-hee” sound like he was the Pillsbury Dough Boy.  This seems way meaner to me now that my stomach will never be flat again, due to having three babies.  These days, I’d cut somebody who poked me and made the Doughboy sound.  Then I would cry.  But at the time I laughed maniacally at him while he stared at me in horror.   

Also, that amethyst heart ring he bought me?  I lost it.  He had another one made for me a few years later and I lost that one too.  I was appallingly careless back then.  But it may have been symbolic.  That ring and that relationship sometimes made me feel smothered and I would take it off for a while to breathe and be myself again.  I think I knew it wouldn’t last, but I still hoped it would.  Maybe he felt the same way.  

When I found out he was cheating, I was devastated and furious.  I kicked him out of our apartment and proceeded to cut all of the crotches out of his pants and underwear, then folded them up in a box for him to take with him.  Surprise, asshole!  I threw out all of the love letters he’d written me in college, including the “missing you” card from the night we met.  I gave him back my wedding ring and told him it didn’t mean anything to me and I never wanted to see it again.  I held on to being angry, because when I wasn’t angry I felt more lost and desolate than I ever had in my life.  I divorced him, even though I still loved him, because I thought that he’d end up ruining me if I let him stay.  I don’t think it was the wrong decision, but it was one of the hardest things I ever did.  

I wish I hadn’t thrown out all of our love letters.  I wish I hadn’t let my second husband convince me to throw out the three wedding pictures that I had from my time with Lloyd.  I wish I hadn’t lost the heart rings.  I have no physical evidence left of that relationship and sometimes it feels like it never really happened.  I’m writing it down now, while I still have the memory to do so.  It’s already flawed and missing pieces, but I can still remember that feeling of first real love, long before things got so sad and ugly between us.  It was a pure and beautiful thing.  He and I aren’t in touch today.  I once ran into him at the gym a few years after we split and we had a nice conversation.  I haven’t seen him since then, 12 or 13 years ago.  I’m not really interested in knowing him now and I don’t want him to know me.  But I am glad that he was my first real love and also that he was my first real heartbreak.  The love we shared opened me up to so many good things.  When you’re in love, I think you learn to be generous, kind and vulnerable in ways that you never have before.  Maybe that’s why we keep doing it, taking the leap even though it can turn on you.  It makes all good things even better.  But the heartbreak from that relationship taught me that I was strong, brave and resilient and that I was capable of picking myself up and moving forward on my own.  It has been immensely helpful to know that in my life.  I am grateful for all of it.

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Haunting

Every time it happens, it takes me by surprise.  I catch a glimpse of a man and he is familiar, sending a zing of recognition through me.  Is it his height or the way he carries himself?  His walk?  His thick hair ruffling in the breeze? I don’t know for sure, because I can’t remember any of those things clearly anymore.  But occasionally I happen upon a man who reminds me of my father and for a moment I can’t help but suspend disbelief.  I’ll pretend he isn’t dead, after all. And he’s here, in my city, to finally reunite with me. I know it’s not true, of course. I’m not crazy.  And I’m not a child – in fact I’m a year older than he was when he died.  But I always let myself believe for just a moment and I feel a tiny flutter of childlike expectancy in my heart.  Does everyone who loses a parent when they were young do this?  See them in places where they cannot be and get foolishly hopeful, just for a few seconds? We never stop wanting our parents to see us, after all. I once read that children need to see their parents’ faces light up when they walk into a room. I always make sure that my kids see me seeing them and loving them from afar.  It’s not hard to do.  They are my favorite faces to see. 


I don’t think of my dad very often anymore.  It’s much too hard to picture him, as he’s been gone 32 years this month.  He was tall and smart.  He was quiet, an introvert.  He had a very dark sense of humor.  He had demons that killed him.  I too am an introvert with a dark sense of humor.  I think I’ve made friends with my demons and I don’t think they’ll kill me.  Well, maybe we’re not friends. My demons and I hold each other at arm’s length, regarding each other warily, to be sure, but we’ve developed a mutual respect.  I’ve become a remarkably productive citizen and a responsible and loving parent.  I feel like I’m faltering sometimes, but still I avoid most of the self destructive bullshit that attracted me when I was younger.  I’m also honest with myself, for the most part.  I don’t know if my dad was aware that his demons were starting to win.  Or if he cared.  But I know that losing him to them was my first and biggest heartbreak.  And the one I never got over. 


My kids ask me what he was like and I’m never sure what to say. The thing I remember most vividly about him is how he could be right next to you in a room, but it would feel like he wasn’t there at all. He was already a ghost to me before he was actually gone.  I fear I’ve inherited this tendency as well.  I’ve been asked where I was, when I was right next to someone, more times than I can count.  I think it’s partly an introvert thing, the need for time and space to process things alone, but it’s also…more than that.  I am working on finding a balance.  I think I still have time.


I dream of him sometimes.  He just appears in my sleep and hangs out with me, like no time at all has passed.  He never says anything profound, but there’s always a point when I tell him that I thought he was dead and we laugh and laugh. Then I wake up and I’m strangely happy.  It would be just like him to haunt me in this way. 

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Unrequited Love: A Head Case

This is part 3 in a series about my great loves aka fuckups in terms of relationships.

I met Pierce after I’d been back in Austin for a couple of months. He was one of Dean’s colleagues. I had been on a dating whirlwind and was lamenting the fact that I didn’t really have a connection with any of the guys. I had random, intermittent communications from both Billy and Jay. I think at the beginning Billy regretted breaking it off. And Jay ran hot and cold with me, as usual.

Dean and I went to the Bob Marley festival together in April, and he brought along some friends — one of whom was Pierce. He completely captivated me that afternoon. He was tall — nearly 6’5” — we must have looked ridiculous next to each other, as I’m just over 5 feet tall. He had a shock of curly light brown hair, hazel eyes, a goatee. I described him in my journal at the time: “cute, funny, educated, intelligent, he’s AMAZING.” The group of us lounged in the sunshine, drank beer, listened to music. Pierce had a date that night with some girl he met at a coffee shop. But I didn’t let that deter me. As we all walked back to our cars, I boldly told him we should go out next Saturday. Obviously I knew he was already booked that night. He said that his parents would be in town the following weekend because it was his birthday, but maybe after that?

“That’s too long,” I simpered.

“I’ll get your number from Dean.” He grinned at me. “Until then?” And he leaned down to give me a quick peck on the side of my mouth.

I was the one to ask him out, and then I was the one who got his email address from Dean and emailed him two days later. I thought I was just being proactive and going after what I wanted, but I probably should have listened to my mother when she told me that I shouldn’t chase boys. He emailed me back, to my delight, and we made plans for Saturday.

I spent that Saturday at the lake with my friends, anticipating seeing him again with a flutter of nervous excitement in my belly. I was living with my parents at the time, and we were far north of town, so I didn’t want him to come pick me up. Similarly, since he had recently moved to Austin, he was living with his brother and sister-in-law. So I met him there, and we got in his 4Runner. He had suggested a party being thrown by another colleague.

We stayed at the party for half a beer. We were too into our date to hang out longer: people were annoying us simply by distracting us from each other. I hadn’t eaten much that day — too nervous — and he took me out for pizza at his favorite neighborhood place. We couldn’t stop talking. From dinner, we went downtown to the Elephant Room and listened to jazz. I’m not sure I had ever been on a date like that. My dates up till that point had been things like keg parties and Taco Bell at 2 a.m. And Billy hardly took me out at all. Dinner and then listening to jazz seemed so sophisticated to me.

We left Elephant Room and strolled down Sixth Street, people watching talking and laughing. At some point he took my hand. Then he was beaming at me and saying, “Wow, you’re fun.” I felt as light as air. I thought he was the fun one — can you imagine the difference between him and Billy? And he liked me? We wound up outside the Driskill Hotel, gazing up at its imposing outer walls, and Pierce suggested a nightcap. I agreed enthusiastically, telling him how much I loved the hotel. I had never stayed there, but the sweeping grandeur of the architecture, the marble floors, and the Texas-themed bar were all so classy and cool.

“Why don’t we get a room here?” he said then, and I might have swooned. We certainly couldn’t spend the night together at either of our respective homes, and neither of us wanted the night to end. In the hotel room, I was all nervous and fidgety again. I was bouncing around the room, acting silly, pulling books off the shelves, checking out the view while Pierce lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette.

“I’ve been dying to ask you this all night,” he said.

I paused, looked over at him warily. “What?”

“Can I kiss you?”

I was floored. No one had ever asked me that before, and something about it struck me as incredibly romantic.

And so the Pierce chapter began. In the beginning, our honeymoon stage, we were electric. We went on dates to restaurants, bars, parties, concerts. Again, it was something I had never known with Billy, who was absorbed in his world of computers. Pierce could dance, and would spin me around the floor, everyone watching. I think I fell in love with him after a week. I wanted to say it but I couldn’t — I knew that was crazy, and I didn’t want to be the first one. One weekend we drove to Shiner for a picnic. Inside the picnic basket, Pierce had three roses for me. That night he hesitantly asked if I would be his girlfriend. I was ecstatic. Of course I wanted to be his girlfriend. I couldn’t get the guy out of my head.

He also warned me he had issues. He didn’t tell me what they were, but he said that his heart wanted to be with me but his head was trying to deal with the unresolved things that happened in his past. I told him I would help him, even thought I had no idea what I was signing up for. I loved him so much that I was willing to do anything for the relationship. And I think he truly loved me, but true to his word — the issues in the end were just too much for him.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Something about his issues and his past — there was a weird religious cult thing that he would occasionally bring up, usually after many drinks, but I never really got the full story — made it hard for him to say those three little words, “I love you.” He said that he really didn’t know what love was. He slipped, though, and after we had been dating about a month, he said it while he was spinning me around the dance floor at the Continental Club on South Congress: “I love you girl!” I didn’t say anything. I pretended I didn’t hear him. I didn’t want to be mistaken. It was loud, crazy, the band was pumped and there were throngs of sweaty dancers. We were practically screaming to be heard. But then he pulled me close and said it again, in my ear — “I love you!” I was so relieved, because I was besotted with this man and beginning to fear I was in it all alone, afraid of what that meant and what would happen to us and to me.

But as Pierce said, he was weird about it, so after that night, he stopped telling me. It was like he jumped the gun, said it too early and wanted to take it back. I became obsessed with it. My friends and I called it “The Phrase.” No matter what he did or said that showed me how much he obviously loved me, I needed to hear those words. Nothing else would do. It took nearly eight months for him to say The Phrase again, and this time he kept telling me.

We were still far from perfect.

Pierce’s mother Pam came to visit when Pierce and I had been dating for about six months. I played the situation all wrong. I made jokes she didn’t like, a curse word or two likely slipped out, and I’m sure I was dressed inappropriately. It simply didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to act a different way in front of her than I would otherwise. We had an awkward dinner — Pierce, me, his mother, his brother and his wife — and then we went back to Pierce’s house so she could evaluate it. I didn’t realize at the time that Pam felt she should be involved in all aspects of her youngest son’s life, even though he was 24. She needed to determine what furnishings he needed — no matter what Pierce thought. At some point it dawned on me that I should go home, when on a normal evening I would spend the night with Pierce.

Pierce walked me to my car and we had a heated discussion. His mother had gone home a half hour ago, but he was actually afraid she would drive back by and see my car there. And then he would be in deep trouble with her. I couldn’t wrap my head around the situation. This man seemed so smart and in control, yet he was terrified of his parents. He was so terrified that he would alter his behavior to suit them. I took the situation harshly and personally, as always. Pierce wouldn’t have been able to spend the night with anyone — this was not about me, but about propriety — but I didn’t see that. I was laser-focused on what I saw as her rejection of me, and his inability to stand up for me and for us.

The weekend was awful. Because Pam was around, we couldn’t have a “normal” weekend — and he was at her beck and call. Our phone calls were short and clipped, and later Pierce would tell me how awkward he felt talking to me while Pam was standing there listening. We went out Saturday night and he allowed me to spend the night. (How did I manage that? He must have felt bad for me, or maybe I wore him down.) Sunday afternoon his mother called after her return from antique-hunting with his sister-in-law, demanding he come to their house immediately. I was pointedly not invited. The afternoon was bleak, spitting rain from low gray clouds. Pierce drove me back to my apartment and I remember staring out the window of the 4Runner, feeling like a tramp.

Though that first night was not about me, I had already made the terrible impression that would ultimately spell the end for us. His mother didn’t like me. She had not chosen him for me. It was as simple as that. A couple months later, we went to Lubbock for a concert. As we drew near, Pierce detailed all the things I should keep in mind: don’t talk about religion, don’t say curse words — in other words, don’t be yourself. I drew inward and stopped talking. In the silence of the car ride, he took my hand and asked me what was wrong. “I get it,” I spit at him. “I’m not a dumbass.” But I clearly was — because I had already screwed up so badly it could never be repaired.

We had been dating for about a year when Pierce broke my heart for the first time. I was so happy that night — we had just come home from a party and I was thinking that he was such a good boyfriend. I felt pretty too. My hair was curly and wild and Pierce kept telling me how much le loved it.

In his kitchen, we started discussing music and I drunkenly maintained that he needed to hear Rod Stewart’s cover of a particular song. He thought Everything But the Girl had done it better.

“I’ll download the Rod Stewart version,” I said to him, sure I could prove my point. In his office, I fired up his computer. His ICQ list flashed to life in the bottom right corner of the screen. I glanced at it — honestly, my intent was just to download the song, not invade his privacy like past boyfriends had done to me — and saw several names of girls whom I didn’t recognize. Frowning, I clicked on one of the conversations with a girl named Maple Sugar.

The screen swam before my eyes and I felt sick to my stomach. I thought, “This can’t really be happening.” He was having cybersex with her. Sometimes begging her to get him off quickly as he was on his lunch break. It was disgusting. I stalked into the kitchen, tears blurring my vision.

“Who the hell is Maple Sugar?” I was hollow.

Pierce looked trapped and confused, and tried to explain it away.

“No,” I said, trembling. “No. Read the fucking conversation, Pierce. You’re fucking her.” I started sobbing, and sank to the floor in the hallway. I screamed at him that he had betrayed me and I couldn’t forgive him for hurting me like that. My heard was absolutely breaking.

He was looking at me like he didn’t know what the hell hit him.

We talked for a long time. He said he didn’t realize what he was doing and it was no big deal and he would never do it again. He insisted it was just another persona and not really him. I told him it was completely unacceptable and I didn’t know what to do. I sat in the hallway, leaning against the doorjamb of his bedroom. I felt deflated. I felt like I wanted to die.

He asked if I wanted him to take me home. I was living with Dean at the time, and I couldn’t face him. Dean didn’t like me dating his friends, and he didn’t like that I was dating Pierce. Going home and admitting that he was right — that Pierce and I were wrong for each other, and I was an idiot for jumping in wholeheartedly, with both feet — I just couldn’t do it.

Finally we went to bed. I lay fully dressed on my side of the bed, refusing to touch him. I tried to sleep, hoping when I woke up it would all be a dream. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Suddenly, manically, I was shaking him, waking him, saying “I want to read it.” Groggily, he stumbled out of bed and sat in his desk chair while I peered over his shoulder. We scrolled through every last conversation, every single word typed and exchanged. Two things stood out to me: he called her “lover” and he also said that I was an “on-again, off-again girlfriend.” He fairly sank into the chair as he kept reading further.

“Do you feel pretty awful now?” I whispered. “I hope so.” I went to bed.

He uninstalled ICQ and swore he would never use it again.

That morning, I woke up before he did and watched a movie, still unable to go home and face Dean. Pierce got up and sat across the room from me and made me some food. We hardly spoke. Coldplay was the soundtrack for that awful weekend — it was on repeat. To this day, when I hear a song from the Parachutes album, I remember sitting in the shadows at Pierce’s house, feeling broken, unable to walk away, yet again. Again. At some point, he sat next to me on the couch and asked how I was doing. We talked some more about what had happened and how deeply he had hurt me. I was tired — I had hardly slept the night before — and wanted to nap. He came with me to bed and held me. I let him.

He started crying then, and he said that he knew how badly he had messed up. When I saw those tears, I felt so hopeless and so convinced that he didn’t intentionally hurt me. I tried to believe that he hadn’t realized what he was doing to me and to us.

“I didn’t expect you to be lying next to me this morning. I don’t deserve for you to be here.” His voice broke.

The next day at work I wrote him a long letter. I was alone, again. I didn’t want to tell anyone what he had done. I was so confused about it. Was there something really wrong with him, or me? Was it okay that I considered it real cheating? My heart certainly couldn’t tell the difference. He said he would be lost without me and wanted to get past this somehow.

I should have left him, and that’s why I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. I was sure my friends, my mom, everyone would say that I should leave him. But I couldn’t. How could I leave this man, who made me Portobello mushrooms cut into hearts for Valentine’s Day? This man who wrote me sweet emails, who called me sexy, smart and amazing? This man who took me out, showed me off? He said that I was too good for him. He told me all the guys at work were jealous because I was so awesome. He loved me enough to do all the stupid things I wanted him to do, like call me each day at work, and make plans each weekend because I needed them, even though he wasn’t a planner. This man who told me he thought about me all day, from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep. He had broken my heart into smithereens, but I couldn’t leave. I didn’t know how to breathe without him.

So we stayed together. But it was never quite right. I kept trying to make him into someone he wasn’t. I made up rules to satisfy my own insecurity, and then I got angry and hurt when he broke them. He didn’t want to call me every day — I insisted. He didn’t want to spend every night together — I did. He felt backed into a corner constantly. Pierce didn’t want to be controlled. And as soon as he started to pull against my needs and desires, I would back down for fear of losing him. It dovetailed nicely.

I didn’t want to love him anymore. I knew he was going to hurt me again. But I couldn’t pull away from him.

In October, after we had been dating for two and a half years, we went to Lubbock for his dad’s birthday. Things had been tense with me and Pierce for a while. He kept chafing against committing to me in some way; I kept looking for ways to be more secure in the relationship. The weekend was awkward, weird. His family, as usual, didn’t talk to me very much. Saturday night Pierce retreated to his bedroom to watch TV. I lay on the bed next to him and tried to touch him but he shied away. He was being cold and indifferent. I chalked it up to being around his parents, which always freaked him out to some extent. I gave up and went to my own bedroom. Surprisingly, he followed.

“I got the job with Tom,” he said. He was sitting at the foot of the bed; I was leaning against the pillows. Pierce had quit his job earlier that year, and tried his own thing. Several of his “own things” actually — nothing was working out, he had moved back in with his brother, and things weren’t looking great for his career.

“But the job’s here in Lubbock,” I said dully. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. This was why things had been so weird lately. Somewhere in my mind I knew he was preparing to end the relationship and I was panicked, reacting.

“And you don’t want to do long distance, so…” Pierce looked everywhere, all around the room, anywhere but at me.

It was Maple Sugar all over again. The world was swimming. This couldn’t be happening. Pierce was leaving me. The thing I had been worried about, fighting against — it was happening. My entire life I had worried how men would leave me, starting with my dad. And it was happening again.

We had another long talk. He kept clinging to the fact that I didn’t want to do a long-distance relationship and I had previously made that clear.

“I don’t prefer it,” I said slowly, “but I would be willing to work it out if you’re sure that’s what you want.” I paused, and looked at him. “You are sure about us, aren’t you?”

He hesitated, finally meeting my eyes. “I don’t know. I know what you want from this.”

“What is that?”

“You want to spend the rest of your life with me.”

“And you?” I waited, holding my breath.

“I just don’t know.” Pierce shook his head, staring at the coverlet. “I think maybe I don’t know what love is. I mean, I don’t think I ever really loved you.”

I’ll never forget those words. They fell between us with a thud. I don’t think I ever really loved you. How can you say that to someone? It had been two and a half years. We had our ups and downs, and I needed a lot of reassurance, but this? This was brutal. This was savage. I was absolutely stunned.

He left my room and I cried myself to sleep. In the morning, he asked if I wanted to come to breakfast with the family. “Are you kidding?” I asked. “Why would I want to come?”

“What should I tell them?” he asked. Since our talk, he had assumed a hangdog look that made me want to scream at him.

“Tell them whatever you want,” I snarled. “Tell them you just dumped me and it might be a bit awkward.”

While the family was gone, I called my mother and told her the story between sobs. She offered to fly me home — Lubbock was a six hour drive from Austin — but I declined. I wanted Pierce to feel as awful as I did for that long drive.

“You don’t want to be in this car with me, do you?” he said, somewhere around Sweetwater, Texas.

“No. You fucking broke my heart. What do you expect?”

As we drew closer to my apartment, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to give him the stuff he had left there because he was between places.

“Do you want any of it?” he asked.

“No, I don’t want anything that reminds me of you.”

He seemed surprised. He kept saying “This isn’t how it was supposed to go.” I was so confused. You tell your girlfriend you can’t picture a future with her, that you think you were lying about loving her and you don’t expect her to end that farce of a relationship?

“I hadn’t gotten that far,” he managed.

“How far have you gotten?” I asked.

“This conversation right now.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. He was clueless.

After we arrived at the apartment, I started throwing all of his stuff in bags. I slammed cabinet doors. I heard him sniffle and I realized he was crying. Let him cry, I thought. This is his mess.

He took all the bags to the car. The final item was, strangely enough, a vacuum cleaner. I set it down in front of him in the door way.

“Is this it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He just stood there, with that stupid look on his face and his hands in his pockets. And he cried.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” I said quietly, breaking finally in the presence of his tears, his real emotion.

He said he was sorry. He hugged me and I didn’t hug him back. He kissed the top of my head and said that he wished me the best. I remember thinking how lame that was. That’s the way you’re going to end our relationship?

I closed the door and sank to the floor, head in my hands, sobbing once again over this man who had completely wrecked me.

The next few months were some of the hardest of my life: I dated. I drank. I cried. I thought about him constantly. I compared everyone I met to him. I was alternately sad and angry. I wrote emails and letters that I didn’t send. I was depressed. A not insignificant amount of men told me that man must have been crazy to leave me. It almost made things worse. It just didn’t make sense to me.

In February, I heard through the grapevine that he would be in town for a wedding. I broke down and called him that Friday night. He didn’t answer, and didn’t return my call. The following day, I was eating lunch at our old favorite restaurant with my mom when he walked in. It felt like my heart stopped.

He walked up to our table; I rose to meet him. He hugged me, and I drank him in. He was wearing my favorite sweater, this cable knit forest green v-neck. He was so tall. He had a fresh haircut He told me he had gotten my message and was planning to call me that afternoon, so he would talk to me soon. After he walked away to get a table outside, I promptly burst into tears.

“I’m still in love with him,” I said to my mother.

“Maybe you should tell him that,” she said gently.

I was so nervous that afternoon that he wouldn’t call. But he did call. We met at a bar down the street from my apartment. We sat at a picnic table drinking beers and grinning at each other. He played with the label on his bottle. He confessed that he missed me, that he loved me still, thought about me twenty times a day. Lubbock was making him miserable.

“I go to sleep hugging three pillows each night,” he said. “I always wish they were you.”

The wedding he was attending started at 5 p.m., so he walked me to my car and we stood next to it, fingers entwined. I wanted so badly for him to kiss me. Then he did, and I melted.

“Stay with me tonight,” I whispered.

Pierce didn’t think it was a good idea — he didn’t know where it would leave us — more confused than ever?

“Look, we’re both miserable and we still love each other. Why don’t we just try it for now?”

He promised to call around 10 after the wedding. I went out with my friend to an Irish bar, hoping to distract myself, but as soon as the clock struck 10 p.m., I was watching my Nokia like a hawk. He waited until the excruciating time of 11:30 to call me, but it was worth it — he was on his way to the bar. We fell into each other, kissing, hugging, breathing “I love you so much.”

He stayed the night with me.

“I made a mistake, letting you go. I won’t make it again,” he told me as he left for Lubbock. The night had convinced us we could make our lives together work.

We were going to try the long distance thing after all.

He seemed like a changed man over the next few months. We coordinated visits between Austin and Lubbock. When we were together, we were like drowning people who had found a life vest in the other person. When we weren’t together, we emailed or talked on the phone. The attentive boyfriend I had always wanted him to be — had tried to make him into, stupidly — finally existed.

“He looks so happy,” my mother told me after we visited her one weekend when he was in town. “You look happy too. I think he’s changed. He’s really grown up.”

When I got laid off in late February, somehow the idea surfaced that maybe I could look for jobs in Lubbock. Pierce latched on to the idea. He was unexpectedly excited about it. He emailed job listings to me, talked to his friends, was always brainstorming and supportive. Now I see how it was really a selfish thing for him to do. After all, he didn’t see himself leaving Lubbock for several years because he needed to rebuild his career. Why not bring me in to his carefully arranged world? I could be his plaything while Lubbock bored him.

Of course there was a huge roadblock still in our way despite our new-old love. His parents. I decided the only way we could move forward and make our relationship work was if they accepted me. And for them to accept me, Pierce had to stand up for me and tell them I was his girl, that he loved me and that he planned to be with me long-term.

I learned some painful truths during that time. Pierce confessed he may have been partially responsible for his parents’ attitudes toward me. He complained about what didn’t work in our relationship, and never told them how much he cared about me. Pam was convinced the woman for him would be chosen by God, and clearly I wasn’t that person. It was clear, she told him, because when he found God’s chosen one, everything would be easy. He would never have to work at the relationship.

I should have run fast. I had almost gotten away once.

But I was so crazy in love with him and he was finally the person I had wanted. It was as if the months apart had helped him see clarity. He couldn’t stop telling me how much he loved me. How beautiful and kind and smart I was. How he was a fool before. How we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. There was a ring, he promised, and a plan.

And so it was with that backdrop that we finally had The Talk with his parents. It was a spring evening in Lubbock, following a dinner with the usual stilted conversation — me, because it was always hard for me, and I knew what was coming — Pierce, because he knew what was coming as well and he had never backed down from something his parents wanted. The fact that he would do this for me solidified the idea in my head: this man loved me.

Pierce began the discussion bravely. I was so happy he was sitting close to me, with his hand on my knee. I thought at the time it was to help me be strong, but now I wonder if maybe he needed me so that he could be strong.

“I think we all need to get our issues out on the table,” Pierce said.

I was choked with tears from the beginning of the discussion, but I managed to tell his father how I felt invisible around him. Several times he had left a dinner or an evening without saying goodbye to me. Once I arrived at a dinner and everyone had already finished eating. Pierce kept jumping in and claiming fault for parts of these interactions, but his mother didn’t want him to take any of the blame.

Suddenly she fixed me with her steely gaze. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sorry — what? My problem?” The conversation had been steering me toward weepy and sad, but her words had shot me through with adrenaline. I was pissed.

Pierce tried unsuccessfully to intervene. “Mom — “

She turned the gaze on him, her mouth pinched in anger. “You be quiet.” Back to me. “You have an inferiority complex. I don’t appreciate your attitude. You haven’t tried at all to fit in with the family.”

“That’s not true, I did try — “

“No, you didn’t. You aren’t good with uncomfortable situations. It’s up to you to make it better.”

At that point, I was flabbergasted in addition to angry. Why, I wanted to ask, were these “situations” so uncomfortable? Because she was correct, they indeed were uncomfortable. Excruciating might be a better word. Pierce, as he had attempted to point out, had actually created these situations by telling him about how his girlfriend was a real drag and a gold digger, and it seemed my role had simply been that I was a person his parents had never imagined for him.

Which was the point his mother drove home next, by asking me if I believed Jesus was our savior. Now, on top of my confusion, hurt and anger, she was going to tear apart my religious beliefs. Pierce gave my knee another reassuring squeeze. I explained that I didn’t believe in Jesus as the savior, but as a prophet. I haltingly told her that I believed in a number of aspects from different religions, including reincarnation. I thought her head was going to spin and pop right off her neck. Her eyes may even have bulged from their sockets. Unaware that I was damaging my life and love with Pierce beyond repair, I blundered on.

“We all have different beliefs about God,” I said, ignoring Pierce’s silence, “but it all boils down to one thing — you should love all people and all things. The specifics don’t really matter to me.”

His father, sitting across from me in a huge leather chair, looking nearly as stern as his wife, considered what I had said. He shook his head slowly, almost as if I were an idiot, which I’m sure he believed. “You and Pierce don’t have a foundation for your relationship because it’s not based on God. Everything else,” he went on, “shared interests, respect, attraction — they don’t matter without a foundation in God.”

How do you know what it’s based on? I wanted to yell. I wanted to yell at Pierce too — he was part of the problem here — talking trash to his family about me for the past two and a half years.

“You shouldn’t be sleeping together either,” his father continued, his fingers steepled together in an illustration of a foundation. It reminded me of the Saturday Night Live skit about George P. Bush — “1,000 points of light” and I wanted to laugh deliriously because this was going from bad to worse. Worse than I had even imagined, if that were even possible.

“Because marriage is a covenant, not a contract. And if you’re taking all the benefits of marriage, then you’re just trying it out, and that’s not right.”

The fight went out of me. I had underestimated my opponents. Resigned to listening, I heard his father tell us that a contract means that you can back out if you don’t hold up your end of the bargain; and a covenant is only broken by death. “And not only that. You’re not considering what God wants for you; you’re selfishly only thinking of yourselves.”

It was his mother who finally delivered the death blow. “I will not allow my son to marry a woman who believes in reincarnation,” she said, fixing us again with her stare. “It is an Islam belief and that is wrong.”

Then she told me if I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior that he would fix my inferiority complex.

Remember how I said I should have run?

Yeah. As fast as my legs would carry me.

The lecture completed, Pierce drove me to my hotel room. I was so emotionally wrecked I couldn’t really talk. We sat in the depressing glow of a table lamp and he said, “Do you love me?”

I nodded. I did love him, but at what cost?

“Good, because I love you,” he told me, wrapping me in his arms. “You’re the one for me.”

He couldn’t stay with me, of course, because of his parents. I couldn’t stop crying, even after he left. I dreamed he broke up with me, again, and it was so real that waking up felt like I was still trapped in a nightmare. Because I was.

We kept up our long distance relationship for the next two months. The relationship even marginally improved with his parents. We tolerated each other, much like my pets do now — the Labrador giving my old cat a wide berth, as she cautiously sniffs at him. It was better than out and out war, but the words they had hurled at me that night in March still haunted me. I suppose I knew they weren’t going to let us happen, but again, I underestimated them. I believed that our love would trump everything.

In late May, I got a job in Lubbock. I was ecstatic to finally join Pierce and put an end to our long distance relationship. But leaving Austin — again — was hard. We had an impromptu going-away party with friends and family. My friend Monica hugged me fiercely and told me not to put too much pressure on Pierce. He was going to be my only friend for a while. “But he’s not responsible for your happiness,” she reminded me. “Keep it in check.” I promised I would try.

She was right. Life in Lubbock was a roller coaster of emotion. Even though we were finally living in the same town, he was still living at his parents’ house. That meant we couldn’t spend the night together. There were so many nights that I just wanted him by my side, and I hated it when he’d pull away and say it was time for him to go home. I think there was a part of me that felt if he really loved me and wanted to start a life with me, he’d stand up to them on this. The big talk had been a huge step, but I needed more from him.

I always needed more.

My job also required that I travel quite a bit. Sometimes I was away for 10 day long trips, flying into airports in large cities and then driving to stores that were off the beaten path. I have never been particularly good at going somewhere on my own, forging a new path. I get lonely and scared and unsure of what to do. I function best when I have a routine, when I’m confident I’ve handled each thing that’s coming my way each day. So moving to a new city, starting a new job as a Sales Trainer — something completely new for me! — and trying to get on track with this man I was obsessively, crazily in love with — was difficult for me. So much change all at once will make anyone a little crazy, and I was already crazy.

It was especially hard for me to believe that Pierce was serious this time around, no matter what he said. The experience with Maple Sugar, the previous breakup and his harsh words wouldn’t leave me. In my lowest moments, I remembered them and they played through my head like a serious of sad movies. When I would tearfully confess my thoughts to Pierce, he would reassure me.

“I don’t just stop loving you,” he told me one night.

“But you did,” I said.

“I never stopped loving you. I was confused and mixed up.”

It worried me. What if he got confused and mixed up again?

Those were the bad times. There were great ones — didn’t I say Lubbock was a roller coaster? Pierce would tell me all the time I was the prettiest girl in the room. He would always make sure we talked on the phone while I was gone. He was patient with me. We had fun: Willie Nelson concerts, restaurants, bars and art openings. Sometimes he would join me on a work trip and we’d have a little vacation. July Fourth weekend we watched the neighborhood parade. Over cheese fries and drinks at Cricket’s, we talked about getting married in Belize. Afterward, we would have a reception in Lubbock and a reception in Austin. Pierce’s friend Ben was a jewelry designer and Pierce hinted, with a gleam in his eye and a grin on his face, that Ben was already working on something special.

I couldn’t wait to get that ring on my finger. I kept hoping it would fix what was broken with me — maybe I could look at the ring and the prior hurts would disappear. No more Maple Sugar, no more of his parents’ ire, no more wondering. Maybe that ring would spell confidence and security.

I know now how stupid that was.

I started to catch Pierce in little lies. I’d be out of town and he supposedly went to a party, but Ben would say, “What party? We went to that new club.” Or I’d return to the table at the bar and everyone would clam up because of the story Pierce had just told — “I swear to God that story was about my brother and a strip club in Mexico” — when it was nothing of the kind. He started hanging out with his beautiful blond colleague after work. When he’d tell me he was leaving work, he was really at her apartment doing drugs. I was helping him pay his bills because he was terrible at paying anything on time. I had access to his cell phone records online. I saw 900 numbers. And I saw repeated calls to a local number, always late at night, after he had left my apartment. Was he cheating — again — this time via phone? When I asked him about it, he claimed it was the blond colleague’s mother, and it had something to do with managing a band. At one a.m.? The conversation about the late night local phone calls happened in the backyard at his parents’ house, and Pierce was annoyed I would bring it up. He was defensive and nervously smoked a cigarette and kept glancing inside to see if they could tell we were fighting.

He delivered the second death knell, broke my heart again, in December. I had been in Lubbock for about six months, and my birthday was days away. We got into a stupid fight over the phone — Pierce wanted his space — and I pointed out that when you get married, you don’t have that kind of space.

“You know, presumably we’d live together and spend the night together every night,” I spit at him.

“I don’t know if that’s what I want,” Pierce said.

I felt sick.

He came over at my insistence so we could actually talk. I hate the phone, and especially for something like this. He sat heavily on my purple couch. “I just haven’t been happy lately,” he told me. He said t wasn’t just me. But as we delved into it, he accused me of resenting his family and said that I didn’t understand how he needed them in his life. In halting words, he went on to say I hadn’t tried hard enough to get back into their good graces. Then, in even an even more bizarre turn, he said that he couldn’t deal with our conflicting beliefs.

“We have an Eastern philosophy vs. a Western philosophy and that won’t work,” he said. I started at him. It was as if Pam were feeding him lines off stage.

I again made a last ditch effort to save our relationship. “We’re good, Pierce. We’re really good. People are trying to find what we have.”

He agreed. But then he said, “I think we both know deep-down that marriage won’t work for us.”

“Sounds like your mother told you what to say.”

He protested — “No, these are my feelings” — but I didn’t believe him. I still don’t. His parents told him to end it, and he did.

“I just need some time to get my head on straight and figure things out,” Pierce said, running his hands through his hair.

“I thought you had,” I whispered, my eyes pooling with tears.

He said he needed a couple of days.

“What am I supposed to do? Just sit here alone in my apartment?” I retorted.

He shrugged, but he didn’t get up.

“Well, are you leaving?”

“Yeah,” he answered. But he still didn’t get up. After a few minutes, he finally stood. He looked down at me and said, “I love you” and tried to kiss me. He got a corner of my forehead. Then he grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go and tried to kiss me again — this time on the corner of my lips. He stood at my door and looked like he was going to cry again. It was like a carbon copy of the year before, standing at the doorway to my apartment. He was making this decision, it was killing him, and he somehow wanted me to fix it, when I had nothing to do with it.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked, still sitting on the couch.

He mumbled something about calling me when he could. I didn’t respond. I stared ahead at the television, which was muted, the actors on One Tree Hill playing out their fictional drama as my real one unfolded. My dinner sat untouched.

After six days of silence, he came over again, simply to confirm what I already knew. I can still see him standing in the kitchen, edging toward the garage door, while I sat in the same position on the couch as the week before. “I fully expect to walk into a Barnes and Noble someday and pick up your book and read about the asshole on page 36.”

Here you are, Pierce: your page 36.

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Playing with Adulthood: My Awkward College Experience

This is part 2 in a series about my great loves aka fuckups in terms of relationships.

My college experience, as I’ve already more or less described, was weird. It wasn’t the time of my life, filled with frat parties, beer and freedom. It was a struggle for me. I studied very hard, and was obsessed with my grades. I made very few friends. In fact, I don’t have a single friend from college that I still keep in touch with, even with the advent of social media.

I can think of three boys I went on casual dates with, one a real relationship, I think — who also went to school with me. Otherwise, I dated people who didn’t go to college at my school or at all. It’s probably why I was so disconnected from the college experience. My senior year, my friend Mindy and I walked through west campus — I call her my friend at the time, but as I mentioned, we made no lasting connection — talking about our creative advertising class. I was having a difficult time coming up with my concepts each class session, frowning over my ideas late into the night at my desk in my bedroom.

“You need to come up to school and hang out with us,” Mindy told me. She was a tall, elegant girl with classic good looks — dark hair, perfect skin, almond-shaped eyes. She was always perfectly put together, always seemed to have a styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand. I half-wondered if she ever drank it, as her red lipstick was perfect and her teeth even and pearly white. “The reason you’re having trouble is that you don’t come to school and brainstorm with the rest of the class. You’re totally isolated with…Billy.” She said his name — always — with derision. Mindy didn’t think I should be tied down to one guy, I was in college, after all! — and Mindy was extremely concerned with looks, money and popularity. Billy had money, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.

One of my mistakes, as I mentioned above, was not being strong enough. My other mistake, my big regret, is that I dated people who were friends with my brother. It was sort of a natural fit, because that was my crowd. I had one foot in each of two worlds, really — college being one, and I wasn’t really doing that one right — and his world being the other. My brother Dean didn’t go to college. He tried it, and it wasn’t for him. He had a job and an apartment and a corner store where he could buy beer without getting carded if he walked in wearing a suit from work. So his world seemed to me terribly adult, and it was fun to hang out there. He, of course, had friends who also didn’t go the college route, and they had jobs and money and seemed to already be doing this thing I was trying to figure out. And — bonus! — they thought I was cute.

That’s how Billy and I sort of…fell into a relationship. He and Dean worked together. I met Billy through Dean, and didn’t think much of him at first. A brutally honest and somewhat mean point here: Billy was ugly. It makes me cringe to say it, but it’s quite simply true. Billy was well over 6 feet tall and skinny as a rail. It didn’t help that he had a strange birth defect I’d never heard of before, nor since — his rib cage was backwards, so his chest was concave. He had deep set hazel eyes, a long skinny nose, and thin lips. But Billy was one of the nicest guys I had ever met. He was smart as a whip, and he could make me laugh.

He made up a road trip game (made up? I don’t know — like the birth defect, I had never heard of it before, and haven’t played it with anyone else since) called The Cow Game. The simple rules were as follows: each person counted the cows on their side of the car, if you passed a graveyard, you lost all your cows and had to start over, and the person with the most cows when you arrived at your destination won. Of course much of the game was estimating — it’s pretty tough to count cattle as you’re speeding past them at 70 miles an hour. Billy and I had returned home from a road trip to Dallas, and I got in a fight with Dean. I was feeling down, so I called Billy to talk.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked, lying on my daybed in the apartment I shared with a high school friend named Krissy.

“Oh, not much. Been driving circles around the Sirloin Stockade to try and win the cow game since you beat me.”

I laughed out loud.

And so it went. I fell in love with his kindness and his wit, and as I mentioned above, his seeming adulthood. It was my sophomore year in college, and I liked dating a guy a few years older than me who got paid handsomely for his work in computers. I’m not sure what he saw in me. The only thing he seemed to actually care about was computers. He was absolutely lost in that world, and it was that world that ultimately drove us apart. He was a child, not an adult, in that way. Sometimes he stayed up all night playing computer games. He would rather spend his Friday nights in front of a glowing screen, in an alternate universe, than hang out with me.

It was during my relationship with Billy that one of the most formative events of my life happened. In typical fashion, I had no idea it had such an impact on me. I brushed it off, moved on, didn’t think too hard about it — and it wasn’t until years later that I realized it was a big deal. I walked into my therapist’s office for my first appointment ever. I knew I had to talk to someone because I was unhappy in my latest relationship and I suppose I finally had this inkling that I was indeed broken, because I just couldn’t make these things work. I sat down in the plush purple armchair and looked at the therapist Kat and I announced, “My dad died when I was 19 but he was never around anyway, so I don’t think it’s a really big deal. My problem right now is my boyfriend.” Kat smiled kindly at me and said, “Let’s back up just a bit and talk about your dad, okay?”

Billy and I lived in the same apartment complex at the time. It was a somewhat botched situation, since he had asked me to move in with him and I had agreed. But then I panicked a little bit — I was only 19, was he really The One? Was I ready for such an Adult Move? — and I backed out. Billy was terribly disappointed and I had hurt his feelings. I think it was a little bit like turning down a marriage proposal, but one of the issues in our relationship was that Billy just didn’t talk to me. My decision not to move in with him had, in his mind, meant I had made this huge statement about the State of Our Relationship, but he didn’t tell me. He just quietly withdrew.

Because I had agreed to live with him and then retracted my statement and Dean had gotten a different roommate, he took his own apartment and so did I. I was again bridging the gap, a part of me in both worlds. It was a Saturday morning, I had spent the night with Billy, and the phone was ringing. Billy had a stupid Mickey Mouse alarm clock that was in its usual place: facedown on the floor.

After trying to wake Billy several times to pick up his phone (1997, landlines, no cell phones), he tossed himself off the bed and barely made it through the doorway to the living room. I laid back down, closed my eyes. Something was off, like the light was all wrong outside, and Billy didn’t get that many calls.

He entered the room, holding the cordless phone. “It’s for you.”

I frowned. “Your mom,” he said, and left abruptly, no doubt to have a cigarette.

I held the phone carefully, looking at it. There were icy fingers of fear closing around my heart. My mother could only be calling about something important, most likely bad.

“Hello?” I said cautiously.

“Did I wake you, sweetie? I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly.

“Yeah, but it’s okay. We should be up anyway,” I fumbled for words. It was still a bit awkward for my mother to call me at my boyfriend’s apartment, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

“Honey, I got a call,” she began, and the icy fingers of fear grabbed hold with the strength of claws. Never is “I got a call,” a good sign. I sat up in bed, letting the sheets fall from me with a sudden clear head. No more cobwebs of sleep.

“It appears that your father is in the hospital in Maryland. I don’t know how serious it is or how they found us, but I thought you should know right away. Your brother is making calls now.”

I was silent, unable to speak. I had known in the back of my mind for so long that it would happen just this way. Automatically I started counting back…how many years since I had seen him? And at least a year since we had had an actual telephone conversation, if you could call our stilted one-way talks something like that.

“….So you should probably call Dean, as soon as you can…” she continued.

“Yeah, okay,” I managed, feeling hot wet tears welling behind my eyes. “Thanks, Mom.”

I pressed the off button on the phone and sit looking at it for a moment. I wondered what Billy was thinking, probably sitting on the couch, as was customary in the morning, watching soft tendrils of smoke curl from his Camel. He was just as I had pictured him, patiently waiting. He knew, just as I had, that the call wasn’t good news. My mother could have waited for that.

I sank to the couch next to him. He took a long pull on the cigarette and looked at me, waiting. Always waiting.

I set the phone down, finally, carefully, as if it is a bomb that may explode at any moment. “My dad….my dad is in the hospital, and I don’t know what’s wrong. He’s…probably dying.” I broke into bitter, heart-wrenching sobs then, as the full weight of what I was saying hit me, and Billy immediately stubbed out the cigarette and took me into his arms. He didn’t say anything but “I’m sorry,” very softly, and stroked my hair and let me cry.

I talked with Dean later that morning. Our father was lying in a coma thousands of miles away, in the final stage of cirrhosis of the liver. He was jaundiced, unresponsive, and ready to die. Dean and I made immediate plans to fly out there, if for nothing else than to say goodbye.

An image kept coming to my mind, of an old, broken man — broken by life, by relationships — lying in a sterile white room, alone. No one at his bedside but an efficient nurse who is checking his machines, and tubes, and fluids, making sure he was comfortable and perhaps wondering briefly who was this man? Does he have children? A wife? Where are they? Surely, no one should have to die alone.

That’s what made me cry. I was sure that he had been alone for a long time now, not just in the hospital, but every day, until he no longer had the strength or the will to do it anymore.

“I love you,” Billy kept saying, because there is nothing else. “I love you so much. I’m sorry you’re sad, baby.”

How could I explain what really made me sad? I was a girl who missed some vague shadow in her life. It was him I was sad for, him, who at age 57, had decided his life is over. He missed his ex-wife, he missed his children, he missed the life that he had before and now that life is gone. He replaced all of it with alcohol. He drank and he was lonely, and he waited. He simply waited for his pain to end.

It was not my pain that I shed tears for, but his.

*

Dean and I sat outside the airport in St. Louis, Dean smoking a cigarette thoughtfully.

“Are you sure you want to see him this way?” he asked, as if we can actually turn back at this point.

“Not really,” I replied, watching a man calm his enormous dog. Perhaps it is half Great Dane, half Dalmatian. “But I feel like we should be there.” I don’t want him to die alone, I almost added, as if an hour at my father’s deathbed could make up for so many lost years.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Dean answered, stubbing out his cigarette and shaking a fresh one from the pack.

I look at my hands. “I know he can’t talk or anything, but we can talk to him, can’t we?”

Dean takes a long drag. “Of course.”

*

Baltimore, when we arrived, was cool and humid. I headed to the baggage claim while Dean found a payphone to call our uncle. After I grabbed our bags, I joined him. He was hanging up the phone with a terse expression.

“His condition’s worse. He could go at any time.” It was already midnight and I was exhausted, but there was such urgency in Dean’s voice that I know we have to hurry.

We grabbed a cab. It’s was a 30 minute drive, and all we could do was wait for the ride to be over. I wished again, for the thousandth time, that we had had more time. Just a little more time.

*

At the doors to ICU, Dean and I looked at each other. It was a look that passed between us and was understood without words: This is It. No turning back. We had to face whatever was on the other side of that door. Dean took my hand, and I squeezed.

We walked into the entryway, where a few doctors and nurses were monitoring patients and working on menial tasks. A man approached us with a gentle smile. He seemed happy — maybe relieved — that we were there. I wondered if this was one of the nursing staff I had imagined, one of whom was hoping this man wouldn’t have to die alone. The doctors had done all they could, and now we needed to take care of the rest.

“Your dad’s been waiting for you,” he said to us.

Behind the curtain, my dad is lying there, hooked up to monitors and tubes: breathing, heart rate, blood pressure. His forehead and ears were covered by a small towel, and the rest of him covered by a hospital blanket. I immediately started crying, and Dean put his arm around me. It shouldn’t be this way, I thought. It shouldn’t be this way after so many years. More time, dammit. We need some more time.

We approached his bedside, and I looked into the face I used to know so well; the long, dark lashes under bushy brows, a strong nose and wide lips. He was yellow, jaundiced, and as Dean reached for his hand under the blanket, I noticed that he was puffy. The fluid he is supposed to be getting rid of through his liver is collecting, poisoning him from the inside out.

“Hey, Dad,” Dean said softly, next to his ear, “We’re here. It’s me, Dad, Buster Brown…” he said, using my dad’s nickname for him. My heart went out to Dean to hear the way his voice broke as he finished the sentence.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said tentatively, wondering if he could hear us. “Hey, Daddy, your Precious is here.” Precious was my name. There was nothing. No response, no squeeze of the hand, no movement behind closed lids. Somehow I thought maybe we would know, that we would feel his acknowledgement that we are here. We just had to go on blind faith.

We sat at his side, examining every part of him, looking at his face. We pulled back the towel covering his head and touch his hair, as if we could make it more real by putting our hands on something tangible. He never moved; nothing ever changed but the blips and beeps on the monitor. His heart would speed up, slow down, sometimes beat at an amazing speed, and I kept thinking, He’s going to go, right now, right here, with me holding his hand. But he hung on. The breathing, slow and ragged, with the help of a machine, kept going. We talked to him, told him our names over and over. And that we loved him.

I can only hope he heard.

We sat in our vigil until four a.m., when we decided that our job was done. The doctors were instructed to let him pass when the time came; there was no need to resuscitate him.

We peeled back the towel from his head; we each kissed him in turn and whispered, “Goodbye, I love you.”

He died twelve hours later.

*

I found an old diary entry from this point in my life. There were exactly two mentions of this event. I recall bombing a statistics assignment shortly after my trip to visit my father. I tentatively explained the situation to my professor after class one day — I had been out because of my father’s passing — could I get a redo on my homework assignment? I had been distracted. I actually felt guilty for my excuse.

I honestly and truly thought my situation didn’t warrant any special treatment, and life should go on as though nothing changed.

Billy’s reaction? He picked me up from the airport and there were red roses in a vase on the front seat of his 240SX. He didn’t talk to me about it, didn’t ask me how I felt, and when I asked him, he said he didn’t know what to say. In retrospect, in the relationship I have now, in which my husband is my best friend, my confidante, my entire world — it sounds completely insane to me. My father died, I was 19 years old and we hardly said a word about it. I didn’t spend nights curled up next to Billy, reminiscing about the good times with my dad, or lamenting his untimely demise, voicing my worries that I or Dean would end up just like him, crying about how he ultimately died alone — nothing. We had one brief discussion about it, during which Billy admitted how uncomfortable he was with, you know, feelings, and we moved on with our lives.

We had no idea what we were doing.

I eventually moved in with Billy, despite my earlier misgivings. We lived together for my junior and senior years of college. Billy pushed me to enter the Adult World on more than one occasion. Another time that my inability to be strong, to stand up for myself, to take care of me — was a huge problem. I wanted to study abroad for a semester, but Billy wouldn’t let me. I wanted to take a series of classes that meant I would graduate in the spring, on time, instead of early, in the fall — Billy didn’t like the idea. He wanted me to Grow Up and Get a Real Job.

I think Billy was similar to Alex in this way — Billy didn’t go to college, and had a chip on his shoulder about it. He, of course, wouldn’t say a word about it, but I knew it made up a big part of him. He felt like a failure because he dropped out, and it was hard for him to relate to me. He was a little bit jealous of me. I spent my days walking through campus and looking at the couples, feeling jealous of what they had. I wanted to sit on the lawn between the buildings we called The Six Pack and do nothing in the sunshine — other couples did that. Again, I was doing both things — college and Adult World — neither of them well.

I was alone during much of my relationship with Billy. Because he was always playing computer games, it was rare that we even went to bed at the same time. Sometimes I felt like we were nothing more than roommates. I had to ask him over and over for something that made me feel special — to take me out on a date, to buy me flowers — these things seemed so important to me at the time. I was looking constantly for signs that I was a good girlfriend, that I was loved. I wanted romance and fun and excitement, and he didn’t. He was satisfied with life, and with our relationship just as it was. He didn’t put a lot of work into anything — except the computer — and least of all, into our relationship. We entered a never-ending cycle of me begging him to do something with me, take me out, go somewhere, hell, have a fucking conversation, and his response would be to get me a stuffed animal or a rose, with a note about how much he loved me and wanted to marry me. Two months later, repeat. At the time, I thought I was completely justified. Now I realize I was trying to change someone’s fundamental being. He just wasn’t that guy. I must have been driving him crazy asking all the time. I wonder why he stayed with me so long. I spent the entire relationship screaming, jumping up and down and waving my arms, “Look at me, Billy! No, really look at me!”

Sometimes while he was gone, working or pretending to work because he was really playing computer games at work, I would sit in our apartment with tears running down my face, splashing the keyboard, and I would type into my journal, “I am so lonely.”

It’s not surprising to me that I had an emotional affair. It’s also not surprising that it was with one of Billy’s friends. I’m not proud of it, but I can see now with clarity how it happened. Isn’t that the reason people cheat? They’re not getting something from their current relationship that the outside one provides. Billy’s friend Jay was definitely in Adult World — ten years older than me, with a failed marriage and a son. He lived in Dallas, and I met him on one of our trips there. I remember what I was wearing the day I met him — a pair of cutoff shorts and a striped midriff-baring top. He couldn’t take his eyes off of me.

We started chatting on the computer. It was 1998 and the underground chat program was called ICQ. It was a play on words, meaning “I Seek You.” It was a fitting theme for the relationship I started with Jay. He gave me everything I wanted from my relationship with Billy. He told me how beautiful and funny I was; he was also a writer. He wrote me poems. I was a hopeless romantic writer, who at 20 years old was afraid my life had passed me by. I felt like I was already married to a boring man who was addicted to computer games and would say that he loved me, but he didn’t really know who I was or why he loved me.

I was a goner from the first words Jay typed.

Jay came to visit us one weekend in the fall of my senior year. Strangely enough, I had told Billy that we were talking, and that sometimes Jay said things that were, to put it mildly, inappropriate or flirtatious. I’m sure that I told Billy for two reasons — one, I tried to be completely transparent and honest with him, always. It was something my mother instilled in me from an early age. She always said that she would forgive me anything but lies, so I should always tell her the truth, and we would work through whatever truth I had confessed. The second reason is one I’m not proud of, but it makes sense when I think about it now. I wanted him to care. I wanted Billy to be jealous. He had this maddening way of either being completely unfazed by other men — or completely flipping out. I had no way of knowing what would trigger his jealousy. And in my mind, jealousy meant he cared. Yet again, I was waving my arms at him, frantic for him to “get it.”

I don’t think we even left the house when Jay came to visit, except for a drive around the block at 5 a.m. after we’d stayed up all night. The three of us sat around drinking beer, watching football and talking. We couldn’t stop talking. Well, Jay and I couldn’t. The three of us stayed up all night. Billy might even have been dozing at points during the evening, as the night stretched into morning, but Jay and I couldn’t get enough of each other. He had a brand new Mustang, and I wanted drive it, hence the 5 a.m. cruise around the neighborhood. After his visit, it occurred to me that Billy and I had never stayed up all night together. Just…being together.

Our chats became more serious. One night, about a week after his visit, I asked him if I could tell him something and would he please not laugh at me or think that I’m stupid?

“Your mind is beautiful,” he typed to me. “Of course not.”

How could I hesitate after words like those? So I told him that I was having “Jay withdrawal.” He admitted he, too, had been a little bit depressed since the weekend ended. We were both trying to ignore it, given that I was in a relationship with his very good friend. But once we acknowledged it, a torrent of feelings was unleashed. Jay said we had a different connection than most people.

“It doesn’t mean you don’t love the person you’re with — it just means this other connection fills a void in your heart or mind,” Jay typed. We rationalized our relationship, trying to convince ourselves this connection we had wasn’t dangerous. We pretended that it wasn’t going to destroy my relationship with Billy.

We kept talking over ICQ, and after a couple of weeks I realized I had fallen in love with Jay. It sounds insane. Maybe it was. I loved Billy too — or, I thought I did — and it was only then I understood that you can love more than one person at the same time. My relationship with Jay starkly exposed the faults in my relationship with Billy. What I was describing to myself as a “different” connection was really just a connection. Billy and I were just bumbling along together; we just fell into each other as a couple. If someone had asked me why I was with him, I’m not sure I could have answered. I would probably have said, “He’s nice.” That also sounds insane, because I wanted to marry the guy. Because he was nice? Because he didn’t treat me like I was disposable or yell at me like Alex had? I was painfully young and I simply didn’t know any better.

That’s why Jay rocked my world. That’s why I fell so hard. It was practically inevitable.

Billy figured it out. He may not have had a plethora of endearing qualities, but the boy wasn’t stupid. I was acting way too cagey about my ICQ account, hurriedly closing the window on my computer if Billy happened to walk in the room at a bad time. Logging on to ICQ from school in the computer lab, just to get a dose of words from Jay. He was my drug, and I couldn’t quit. I was at a football game with my friends in late November when it happened. The game was amazing. That was the game Ricky Williams broke Earl Campbell’s rushing record, and we were chanting “Run Ricky Run!” at the top of our lungs, high-fiving, hugging each other, shaking the bleachers. It was one of those days that was a college day — a real college day. The sky was overcast and it was deliciously chilly, perfect football weather. As the stadium began emptying out, I called Billy for a ride.

From the moment I heard his voice, I knew what had happened.

The elation from the football game evaporated instantaneously. Billy was stoic, hardly looking at me as I got into his car. He had already called Jay, and Jay told him we’d fallen in love, that we didn’t mean for it to happen, that Jay felt like the biggest asshole on the planet. But it sounded like Jay was willing to fight for me, for us. Billy and I went home, fought, cried, hugged, talked, and cried some more. Billy was furious at me, furious at Jay, and furious with himself for being played a fool. He knew he should leave me, but quite plainly, he loved me and he didn’t want to. He laid down the law — if I wanted to save this relationship, I had to cut Jay out of my life. I told him I couldn’t. Jay had become too important to me. I wanted to see if what we had was real.

I went out that night with my friend Mindy. Before we left her apartment, I called Jay. We talked for nearly an hour. We both felt like heels, but we were giddy hearing each other’s voices. I promised him I would figure out what to do. I decided it was time to take a break from Billy, move out of the apartment we shared and give me and Jay a real try. We had only been in the same room together for a total of 24 hours, ever. Before we got off the phone, Jay said, “I really really love you Christianne,” and my heart melted. I was head over heels for this man, and I had to be with him. Billy was the “logical” choice, the comfortable choice, but he didn’t make my heart sing like Jay.

But by the time I woke up Saturday morning, extremely hungover, Jay had removed himself from the situation. He called the apartment, and the three of us had the most bizarre three way conversation. Jay told us he wanted us to “fall in love again” and that I couldn’t really examine my feelings for Billy with Jay in the way confusing things. I was heartbroken and angry at Jay. In turn, Billy was heartbroken and angry at me.

Saturday night Billy and I grabbed some beers and went to the top of the cliffs at the 360 bridge to talk. Again. It seems all we did that weekend was talk, and rehash, and talk, and talk some more. But we weren’t getting anywhere. Billy knew he should leave me, but he couldn’t. He wanted to fix our relationship, but I was exhausted and unhappy. I’d had a glimpse of something else, and I wanted that. I didn’t want the relationship I already had. Those exposed faults didn’t seem fixable to me. There was no real foundation for us, and even though I was young and bumbling around in the dark when it came to this stuff, I had figured that one out.

By December, we called it quits. I moved in with my parents temporarily. I knew it was the right thing, and I didn’t want my current relationship, but I was so used to Billy. He was a habit I had to break. We didn’t know how not to be with each other. Even thought we’d split up, we went to my office Christmas party. Went back to the apartment and talked about still hanging out even though we had broken up. It was ludicrous.

And so my last semester in college was exactly that — ludicrous. Billy and I tried again. We moved to a new apartment just off campus. He interviewed for a job in New York. Sometimes Jay and I chatted on ICQ, or sent long sappy emails, or sneaked conversations on the phone Sometimes we were silent, trying to stay away from each other. I promised Billy that I wouldn’t talk to him. There were times when I looked at Billy and knew I didn’t love him anymore. Then I would imagine my life without him and not be able to breathe. There were times when I wanted to get in my car and drive to Dallas and knock on Jay’s door. I should have, because I would have forced his hand. Jay was never going to make us happen. He always had an excuse. He slayed me with his gorgeous words. But he didn’t make the effort. And at the time, these two men were my whole world. I couldn’t fathom the idea that neither of them was right for me. They were all I could see.

In May, I graduated college and moved to New York to be with Billy. We were so battered and bruised it was pointless, but we just couldn’t let go of each other. It’s another time in my life that I feel badly for the earlier version of me. I was depressed. I felt directionless, boring, bland. I got a job at a little magazine, made some friends, tried to be an Adult.

It didn’t work. In December, Billy informed me he wasn’t happy and wanted out. New Year’s Day, 2000 — I woke up hungover, our apartment trashed from a party the night before. I switched on the TV to watch the Longhorns. They were losing to Arkansas. The vet called to inform me that my cat, who had been sick and in his care, had just died.

A rather inauspicious start to the new millennium.

I moved back to Austin on a brutally cold day in January. Billy helped with my suitcases, but he wasn’t wearing shoes so we wound up in the vestibule of our apartment building, and he put his hands on both sides of my face, and kissed me. I cried. “Tell me if you want me back,” I whispered. He didn’t seem to hear me.

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High School Love, aka a Learning Experience. Also, a Trainwreck.

This is part 1 in a series about my great loves aka fuckups in terms of relationships.

I was a junior in high school when I met Alex. The phrase “high school sweetheart” perhaps could have applied when we first met: Alex was a grade behind me, and so earnest, so dogged, in his attempts to become my boyfriend it was almost painful to watch. Ironically, my mother encouraged me to give him a chance, something I’m sure she regretted later as our relationship took a twisted turn and spiraled quickly downward. I don’t think I realized at the time how bad it truly was — wasn’t everyone’s relationship like this?

Junior year. Other than meeting Alex, the thing that stands out when I look back now is that I had finally made the cheerleading squad. Junior varsity, not varsity, but still, it was something I’d been working hard to achieve. In summary, my high school curriculum vitae went something like this: Not popular. Latch key kid with a single mom and an absentee alcoholic father. I certainly didn’t consider myself pretty and to my knowledge at the time no one else did except my mother. (I can see now how Alex dug his hooks in and got them in deep.) But cheerleading! It was a little glimpse, my own little slice — of popularity, of pretty, of rich.

I took newspaper class that year as well, which is where I met Alex. He was a gangly 15 year old, acne on his face and some funky crooked teeth. His best feature was probably his big blue-green eyes. It was the 90s, and he would show up for class in the baggy jeans and steel toe boots we all favored at the time, topped off with a cheap tee or a flannel shirt if it was cold. Alex took the class as a blow-off, and it showed. There were about six of us who actually did work — obviously, I was into the writing — and six others who didn’t do anything. Alex was one of those.

Alex spent most of his class time flirting with me, relentless in his pursuit. He would tell me later how hot I looked in those cheerleading skirts. No one had ever said those kinds of things to me before. Me, pretty? Me, with a nice ass and good legs? I still refused to go out with him. It wasn’t as if I had boys knocking down my door, but he just seemed like friend-zone material to me.

The thing that finally changed my mind, oddly enough, was the chicken pox. When I came down with it, I was out of school for weeks. Alex called me every day from newspaper class, telling me how much they (he) missed me, giving me the gossip from the day, telling me stories about our poor tortured teacher, who kept trying to make him do some work for a change. He begged to come see me, but I was too vain to let him. He was the one boy who actually thought I was pretty — I couldn’t chance ruining that. Even if he was firmly in the friend zone, honestly, I liked the attention.

When the worst of the spots had faded, I acquiesced. However, I didn’t let him come see me. I was dying to get out of the house, and I was a newly licensed driver. My mother let me take her Acura to see him.

I can’t recall now if I’d been to his house before. I can picture it perfectly now — a modest one story with three bedrooms, a two-car garage that had been converted into what I suppose we now call a “media room” — at the time, remember, the 90s — it was the movie room, or the den. I’m sure that Alex greeted me at the door before his parents or his brother could interfere.

This was a big deal for him.

We crossed the shabby living room to his bedroom, which was painted a garish blue and had the requisite boy posters tacked to the walls with actual push pins. Sports, girls, bands. I don’t recall what we did exactly, probably sat uncomfortably on his bed and talked about school and my recent illness and recovery. I do know that at some point he leaned in to kiss me, and I didn’t push him away or pull back like I had so many times before. You might say I had given in. Or given up.

*

Our high school relationship was just that — high school. It was homecoming dances and prom dates. It was football games and gathering in the school parking lot afterward to talk about where to go next. It was trying my first beer. It was sneaking more and more beers after that. It was my first time to have sex, thinking to myself, “That’s it? That’s what all the fuss was about?” It was growing apart from my best friend Lily, because she was into drugs and I was into my boyfriend and those things didn’t go together anymore. It was lunch off campus for seniors. It was driving our parents’ cars, it was working our first jobs, it was house parties until the cops came and broke them up.

I’m not sure when it all took a turn for the worse. I think it built slowly, Alex’s resentments and insecurities piling up, as the inevitability of what was going to happen to us became apparent. He kept trying to slow things down, to stop that inexorable march of time, to keep us — maybe me? — in this box where he had some measure of control.

I was only six months older than Alex, but I was a grade ahead because of an early start in kindergarten. I made excellent grades, and I knew I was on my way to the University of Texas by October of my senior year. I had made the varsity cheerleading squad. My mother’s boyfriend, a man who would eventually become my stepfather, had moved in with us, which meant I had a father figure for the first time in nearly 10 years. I was still a frightened, insecure teenager who didn’t know much about relationships or how men should treat me, but I was doing okay considering.

In contrast, Alex was struggling in school, nearly failing his junior year, certainly not even thinking about college. His family life left much to be desired. His parents yelled instead of spoke, his father usually in bed by 8 p.m. so he could do his job as a postal worker early in the morning. This meant we all had to tiptoe around the house lest we disturb him and get a good tongue-lashing. Alex’s mother was not much better — she was a substitute teacher and I think sometimes cared more about her kids at school than her own. I’ll never forget the day I won an award for some scholastic achievement — that woman cut the article out of the school newspaper and taped it to Alex’s bedroom door. She might as well have told him, “Your girlfriend is better than you.”

He probably wanted to murder me right then.

It was a powder keg, ready to explode. Alex and I both got jobs at the local grocery store. When I was promoted from bagger to cashier, Alex couldn’t handle it. He was so jealous and insecure that he wanted me to step back down to bagger. According to him, it was because he liked it when I was near him, bagging groceries at his register. I cringe when I think back to discussing the situation with Rodney, our boss. Rodney was a small, worried man, with narrowed eyes and a fluff of quickly disappearing blond hair combed over his head. He studied me as I stumbled through an explanation of why I wanted to move down positions.

He could see right through me. “Is this because of Alex, or is it something you want to do?” he asked.

“It’s not Alex, it’s me. I want to.” I blushed, stared at the floor.

“Sorry, Christianne, you’re a good cashier and I need you on the floor. Alex is just going to have to deal with his issues.”

He was right, but I had no idea how to handle my boyfriend.

His jealousy didn’t stop at the grocery store. It invaded every part of our life as he worked frantically to manage me. He hated it when I cheered at games as it took time away from his time with me. I loved cheerleading, and he was systematically destroying my enjoyment of it. He didn’t like it when I went to work, even though it was time for my shift. One afternoon, we were fighting, and he wanted to finish it. I was exasperated.

“Alex, I have to go. My shift at work starts in half an hour. I’m leaving.”

I stormed through the living room of his house, with Alex in hot pursuit, spitting words at me. It seemed that lately whenever we argued, it involved him telling me that I was a bitch, that no one would ever love me like he did, that I was essentially insufferable. The illogic of him loving me despite my extreme bitchiness didn’t occur to me.

The screen door banged behind me as I strode down the sidewalk, fishing my keys from my pocket. A neighbor across the street tended to his flower beds. Suddenly Alex had gripped me from behind, around the waist, physically dragging me back toward the house.

“We’re not finished talking!” he screamed at me in the relative safety of the front entry way.

Disturbing, again, how at the time, the fact that this was very real abuse hadn’t occurred to me. Disturbing that the neighbor across the street hadn’t noticed, that Alex’s parents hadn’t noticed. My mother knew things were bad, but perhaps not how bad. He was able to hide most of it from her. And she felt powerless to help. Try telling a 17-year-old girl what to do.

As school got worse for Alex, he started skipping. One spring morning, I went to pick him up and he refused to go to school. I sighed, idling in the car blocks from his house.

“Fine, Alex. What do you want to do? I’m going to school.”

“Take me to your house.”

Desperate to get rid of him, and because my parents weren’t home, I took him.

My morning at school was odd. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong. Had my mother come home and found him in our living room? Was I in huge trouble? Had Alex done something awful? Because it was my senior year, I had a half day and was able to come home at lunch. I found Alex in our wood-paneled living room, sitting on the couch with a look on his face I had come to know well — he was, to put it quite plainly — pissed off.

It turns out my boyfriend had spent his morning playing hooky from school and reading my diary. Of course he knew where I kept my diary, because Alex couldn’t stand that I would keep anything from him. My recollection now is hazy, but I’m sure he wheedled his way into that knowledge, much like he did everything else. And because Alex couldn’t stand that I keep anything from him, including my very thoughts, he had read the diary.

The diary was a big blue spiral-bound notebook, with three manila divider folders. He sat with the notebook open on his lap. With that look upon his face. I could see my perfect penmanship within the college-ruled lines, black ink stark on the paper. Now I understood my feeling — that very odd feeling that something was very wrong.

“What’s wrong now?” I asked wearily, dropping my backpack to the carpeted floor with a muted thud.

At this point, I must confess that I had a very high school crush on one of Alex’s friends. His name was Bo, and I saw a kindness and an understanding in his brown eyes that was missing from most of the high school students I knew. I sensed he could see the misery Alex was putting me through, that he thought I was worthy of more. He was with me and Alex one night when I was driving and got into a car accident. Thankfully we were all okay, but the car was nearly totaled, and I was in tears. As my parents dropped Bo off at his house, my mother watched him put his hand on my leg, briefly squeezing it in a gesture of solidarity or hope or friendship or…something, and I think in that moment I fell a little bit in love with him.

I had increasingly become aware I was in a cage and I had no idea how to get free.

This high school crush was more or less detailed in my diary. It was, after all, my diary, and I was, after all, a teenager. It was my safe place. The place where I could be honest. The place where I could think, because Alex was always in my head, banging around and screwing me up. Alex, had, of course, read every word. Alex had destroyed my only safe place.

I no longer recall the details of our fight. I imagine it went much like the others, with tears streaming down my face, while telling him I didn’t really like Bo, not like that, him telling me that I had broken his heart with, you know, feelings. Feelings that were completely justified for a teenaged girl who was in an awful relationship with a manipulative asshole. All I know was in the end, he forced me to burn the diary. I watched my words burn into ash in the fireplace, and I’m sure I wondered where it would all end.

*

Alex didn’t want me to live in the dorms. As spring turned to summer and graduation was behind us, we fought almost constantly about it. My life had become a tedious routine — fight with Alex, try to placate him, try to simply get away from him, and then wait for the calm before the storm of the next big blow up. There were plenty of times when he refused to get out of my car, or to stop calling me over and over again. Once I took my phone off the hook — I had my own line, as this was way before cell phones — and he called my parents’ line instead in the middle of the night. I was so angry, hurt and confused. The sweet boy who desperately wanted a date with the pretty junior girl in his newspaper class had utterly disappeared. In his place was a jealous, manipulative and desperately unhappy person who thought the entire world owed him something because he’d been dealt a shitty hand. And for some reason, instead of being let off the hook because I was his girlfriend, I was even more responsible because I didn’t cater to his every need, or do exactly as he told me. Like daring to go live in the dorms. I wasn’t even leaving town to go to school. I would be just a 30 minute drive away, but he was terrified of letting me go.

He knew I would most likely not come back.

Somehow I found the strength to move into the dorms, despite his vehement protests. I want to cry for that girl. I want to reach out and hug her, hold her tight, whisper in her ear that everything really is going to be all right. I was a wreck — instead of looking forward to leaving home and starting a new adventure as an adult, the next chapter of my life — I was terrified. I was already lonely. My parents helped me move in, a flurry of activity, and then they were gone, and my tears started. I had no idea how to move forward with my life.

One night my mother came to the dorm to eat with me. I hadn’t made any friends. I knew a couple of girls from high school, but they were rooming together in the other wing of the dorm and didn’t really have time or space for me to intrude in their twosome. I was so messed up from the lies and the manipulation of my high school sweetheart that I had no idea how to move forward with my life. I had no idea I had value as a woman or a person.

We limped along until my sophomore year. There were several break-ups, several we’re-back-togethers — when I could see the disappointment in everyone’s eyes — people like my mother or my brother Dean or my high school friends. I know I wasn’t blameless, but I struggle to figure out what my mistakes were besides being, quite frankly, an emotional mess. That alcoholic absentee father had affected me more than I thought, despite my mother’s excellent parenting. She gave me all the love she had and more. She sacrificed everything to make a cozy, loving, comfortable home for me. But I was completely broken. I craved love from a man, and I believed somewhere deep down in my gut that I didn’t deserve it. When Alex told me things like, “No one will love you like I do” and that he was the only person who thought I was beautiful, I believed him. He fed me those lies for three years. I was damaged — and I honestly didn’t know — and he just kept chipping away.

My mistake was being too weak to walk away and not look back.

I suppose it finally ended because Alex put a stop to it. That was the only way it could happen. Again, it was so long ago now that I can’t recall the details, but I do know he moved on to someone else. By that time, I had more or less moved on too. We were hanging on by a thread, doing that thing couples do when they know they should be done with each other, but try to be friends, or date each other while dating new people, or whatever bullshit story helps them put one foot in front of the other and get through the day. There’s something comfortable about being in a relationship with someone you know as well or better than your own self. The flip side of that is being terrified to put it all out there and meet a stranger.

I was visiting my friend Lily in Dallas. She had moved there with her boyfriend Jeremy after high school. Lily and Jeremy had a roommate, Travis. By Saturday night I was lying in his bed, making out with him, and he fingered the ring I wore on a chain around my neck.

“What’s this?” he asked quietly.

It was a promise ring from Alex, an awful yellow gold thing with diamond chips. I wore it for a while, then wore it on a chain because we were in that no-man’s land of dating, friendship, whatever. “Nothing,” I answered uncomfortably, and tried to distract him with a kiss.

Travis wasn’t having it, though. He pushed away and looked me in the eye — “Do you have a boyfriend in Austin?”

I rolled over onto my back and sighed. “Not exactly. He’s my ex from high school. We still talk, sometimes. You know how it is.”

Travis smiled. Honestly, Travis wasn’t much better than Alex in many departments — he didn’t have a car, he smoked too much — both cigarettes and pot — and he wasn’t in school. Much like Alex, he seemed to be drifting aimlessly through life. But Travis had a wonderful smile, and he smiled at me like I hung the moon. “No, how is it?”

I laughed. “It’s a mess. I’m sorry. I should take it off.”

Travis put his arms around me, pulled me close. “You should. Because I want you to be my girl.”

My Alex chapter ended with Travis. I thought I would love Alex forever. But along the way, I found out that wasn’t true.