In the middle of the night on a day in late June, 2003 – the very same day my now-sister-in-law got married – a relationship ended that I desperately did not want to end. The boy, who I loved very much, and who was very young, called me at 1 in the morning, waking me from a sound sleep. He stumbled through some fumbly non-sentences, and when I said the words out loud (“You are breaking up with me,”) he said yes, but he was scared that I would kill myself and he just wanted to be sure I wouldn’t before he got off the phone. (How noble).
Through my faceful of snotty tears I snorted and rolled my eyes. “I love you, but come ON. Please. I’m not going to kill myself.” The grief was real, his sudden absence from my life was like he’d died, only he hadn’t died, but instead had chosen someone else to love. And the breakup pretty much wiped out all of my future plans, forcing me to move somewhere different, find a different job, and make new friends, because all of our friends chose him and his new girlfriend, and asked me not to come around anymore. But still. Come ON. Please. Had anyone made the ubiquitous “other fish in the sea” comment at that moment, I would have socked him in the jaw. But I’m proud of my twenty-five year old self, that she knew, even in the freshness of her grief, that it was absolutely true.
It’s a story I tell often, not because I’m not happy now or because I dream of this boy I once loved, but because it is one of those vertical gaps in my lifeline – a Before This Happened and After This Happened hash mark along my thirty-two year continuum. Maturity comes in lurches, I think, at least for some people, for me. This changed me, and I still occasionally run over the story in my mind, like dragging fingertips along the ridge of an old scar.
It hurt a lot.
There’s lots more to the story. The general theme is that I discovered who is still on my Christmas card list and who, emphatically, is not. I’m not sure if I needed to go through this to become the lovely and entrancing woman I am today, but go through it I did. Life hands you lemons, yadda yadda yadda.
The boy and I are on friendly terms now, though we are only in contact maybe once a year. He has a happy life. I have a happy life. We were both worthy of love, and for a little while we loved each other, and I’m glad for that. And I’m equally glad we did not marry, as I one day hoped we would. Not to go all Back to the Future on you, but my destiny was to be with someone else, someone I met about four months later.
The morning after The Awful Phone Call, I dragged my books to school so that I could pretend to work and thereby force the hour hand on the clock to drag me forward through the dreadful, miserable day. A sweet friend came in and said – Look at you! Being all productive this early in the semester! And I burst into tears, and she furrowed her brow and made clucking noises and fetched me tea and allowed me to say the same things over and over again for a couple of hours, my books toppled over in the corner, my tea un-drunk and going cold. She was a happily married woman, mother of two, and told me a story about how she went through a breakup just six months before she met her husband, and felt like she would die but now she’s very thankful it went down that way, and she wished the same for me.
I’m happy she got her wish.
