I’ve been reading too much and catching up on all of the episodes of Grey’s Anatomy that I missed. This week was the wrong time to do so, with that bitch Aunt Flo visiting. I find myself nostalgic. About what? Love.
I’d be able to confidently say I’ve been in love twice. Once was requited, once not. I won’t name names because…well, I just won’t. But I will say this:
I don’t think, in hindsight or when I was in it, that I was ever in love with JDawg. I loved him, yes. But did I fall? Did I get butterflies and misty eyes and pitter pattering? Not without blood coursing through my veins – owing to good or bad reasoning.
I fell for the first time in my teens. He was a boy who was too good for me, maybe, possibly. But we had some moments that made me think I was close enough to him that he felt close to me. There was almost a kiss one time, maybe. But probably not, and our interaction was mostly under the guise of forbiddenness and secrecy.
The second time was also in my teens and I fell hard for my little silent boy. He would hide under his hair and behind his music, never speaking much to most. He had an arrogance about him – he still has it – that people mistook for pure shyness. But me. He opened up to.
Our first time really talking, sharing, we spoke for hours in a densely wooded area of the park by our school. The kissing came later, hours later, when we’d traipsed through the rain to his parent’s house and hid under towel tents, trying to get the fall chill out of our bones. Once we started, we really couldn’t stop.
I loved first that this boy spoke with me. Not to, not at and not against. With. I loved that I could see myself in his eyes, though I made more tears spill from them than I would ever want to remember. I loved that he made me feel…like I was acceptable to him, more than even, when so many others that we knew weren’t.
I loved that he played me songs he’d written, worried that I wouldn’t like them. He asked me to teach him to sing more confidently because he liked the sound of my voice as I taught him to sing from his stomach to Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. He loved me.
That might be what I loved the most. That he loved me. But it was also him and our life and our future that I loved. That he was scared to tell me it sometimes, because he meant it so deeply that if I didn’t feel the same, the feeling would crush him.
JDawg told me that he loved me on our third ‘date.’ I think that put it somewhere around the two or three week mark, and he was fairly drunk and used that as the precursor, “I know you will think I’m just saying this because I’m drunk, but I’m falling in love with you.” That was the romance. I was 20, had been single for a year before that and he loved me. I was a goner.
Regardless of thoughts of future and wedded bliss and windows we fogged up, I knew from the beginning, almost, that JDawg wasn’t going to be permanent. I knew my capabilities, or so I thought, and I knew that he had a penchant for the drink and a closeted weed habit. (He still, to this day, thinks that I really had no idea that he’d been hiding smoking pot from me for a year. He’s that good a liar, apparently.)
I knew we had different philosophies and paths and methods of dealing (or not) with things. And I knew that while I had become a grown up around 12 or 13, he’d kind of (and I don’t mean this in a cruel way) stalled around that time.
I let myself love him, for his good qualities and sense of humour and intelligence. For his beauty that I saw occasionally, even though he kept it buried fairly deeply. For the fact that he loved me. But I never let myself fall.
Because that would have just been stupid and my heart would have broken a million times. And it can only break so many times before it’s unmendable and then, even the best superglue and duct tape will not put it back together.
But he loved me, he was in love with me. And now, I can see that going away and I’m mourning it. Because as far as I know, four boys and a girl have fallen in love with me, and he’s the only one who’s gotten over it. That sounds horribly conceited and self-absorbed. But.
If you’ve never had to watch someone fall out of love with you and then all of the sudden you must, it’s a shocking, stabbing sort of pain.
And so, I look at all of the relationships I know.
I can think of one couple who are happy – who are always on and there are never thoughts of leaving and fights or silences are not a common thing. I know one who are so deeply into each other that even though they have broken up slightly a million times in six months, they keep coming back together and their love hangs in the air around them. I know one who are based upon her wearing the pants and him having a new job which now gives him permission to spend their money – and she’s still waiting for a ring after nine years.
And I think of Petit Anglais and how she knew. How her heart sped up and she put everything on the line because of that nagging feeling of something.
And I want some of that, you know?
