re: cycle

Some of my Twitter followers like being read to. Here's an audio recording of this piece for those of you who feel similarly.

 

Re cycle

 

Last fall, I was bored. I was in front of my computer, and I was bored, as we children of the twenty-first century are wont to be. I was struck, as we so often are, with the clarion call of the bored and the jacked-in. “I wonder,” I thought, “if ____________ is on Facebook.” I did a cursory search and discovered that, uncharacteristically, improbably, unthinkably, ____________ was indeed on Facebook. I sent a friend request and waited.

In this case, _____________ was the ex-boyfriend I have referred to alternately as “the heretofore love of my life” or “C.” We were desperately, crazily, ridiculously in love, and we were desperately, crazily, ridiculously mismatched. He was Palestinian, conservative, Republican, and eleven years younger; and I’m, well, not. Still, the love we shared was real and true and amazing and it stretched the bounds of credulity and I’ve never felt anything of its ilk before or since.

I trusted C entirely. I believed him when he said he loved me because his actions mirrored his words. It wasn’t just that he took care of me when I was splintered fragments, that he fed and housed me, that he cooked for me, that he held me in the dark. It was that he worked to mend my relationship with my family. He didn’t judge or condemn; he just saw something that was broken and needed fixing. He taught me to care about my family, to see the value in their stunted attempts at love, and to work at being better to them.

Beyond the sex—and it was shockingly good sex, achingly good sex, the kind of sex wherein time stops and planets form and stars become suns—what C and I shared was probably the most adult relationship of my life. I have this thing where if I love someone, I mean really love someone, I see his faults and love him for them; if I don’t love him, I mean really love him, the man can’t even chew food right. My ex-boyfriend Ernie, for example, slurped when he ate. I wanted to decapitate him with every mouthful. C, for all his faults, was perfect.

And then, somehow, he wasn’t. Or I wasn’t. Or we weren’t. Or the future wasn’t. We began talking marriage, and we couldn’t make our parts fit together. He wanted a wife who stayed at home and took care of the kids. I knew that I was not that woman. We negotiated and we talked and we discussed and we realized that we were wrong for one another. With the gentility and civility of two partners finished with a waltz, we parted. I regularly dreamed of him for seven years, until I didn’t.

In the meantime, he did find a woman more conservative than I. They married, moved to Jersey, and had a couple of kids, as some people—people who are not me—do. Over the years, I would occasionally stop by his business to chat, and I remember his disappointment when I said I was getting married myself. Some people reacted that way. They wanted to me to be unfettered and fancy-free; to think of me married was, apparently, a violation. It was a strange reaction, but C was hardly alone in it.

The last I’d heard, there was trouble in domestic paradise. Conventional nuclear family living, it turns out, is hard to maintain. The marital bed had been surrendered to the kids, the youngest of which was four and refused to sleep anywhere else. The wife had failed to find fulfillment in being a housewife and had found refuge in a pottery store and an affair with her trainer. I didn’t feel a scrap of schadenfreude at C’s cold crash into contemporary reality. See above: when I love a man, I love his faults. It was an indulgence that didn’t end with time or with space.

That afternoon last fall, to my surprise C accepted my Facebook friend request with alacrity. Not only did he accept, but he immediately sent me a message. “Where have you been?” it read in complete. I read the message, and then I looked at C’s pictures. He looked good. He’d always been terrifically vain. He had pretentions toward modeling, and whenever he had a bad day, he’d put on a wife-beater and my Gap overalls and walk through Washington Square Park, gathering the glances of NYU coeds like wildflowers.

His pretentions to modeling had followed him to adulthood, because these pictures could only be shots for a book. One in particular stood out for its shiny ridiculousness; it looked like a CD cover for a collection of Julio Iglesias-style love songs. But, whatever. If it made him happy. And he did look good. He also looked divorced. There was not a mention of the wife, not a picture, not a scrap of wifey evidence. Indeed, he was divorced. The half-life of his nuclear family was that of a radon isotrope. It turned out to be short, in short.

That one Facebook message opened a torrent of communications. There were emails and texts and phone calls. There were plans and there were confessions. There were reminiscences and there were stories. There were laughs and there was some strange patina of intimacy. It wasn’t intimacy exactly, but it was tender as flesh and twice as tempting.

The dates, though, kept on being rescheduled, pushed off and remade. It was no big. I was busy; he was busy; he was, after all, a solo parent half the week and he was seeing someone else. “It’s not serious,” he said to me, as if I’d asked, and I hadn’t. I can’t say that visions of C didn’t dance naked in my head, but I was no fool. Whoever I had been thirteen years ago when we broke up was not the woman I was now. I had no desire to take up old roles and tread those boards again, but I can’t say I didn’t dream of the sex. I also can’t say he didn’t oddly encourage it. Sometimes our texting seemed more like something I’d expect from a lover. It was disconcerting.

We had one almost meeting, foiled by the exterminator at his business, who came unexpectedly and stayed late. Maybe there was no bugdude. Maybe it was all cold feet in the pretense of killing roaches. I’ll never know. It almost happened, and then it didn’t. I took off my make-up and my big-girl clothes, scrubbed my face and my teeth, slipped into my jammies and went to bed.

The texting fell off. He stopped leaving excited phone messages. The emails ceased. It was a read-between-the-lines kind of end of the affair, which is sad. Being an adult, I can deal with rejection. It’s not my favorite jellybean, but I recognize its existence and its necessity. And yet. It’s confusing to be rejected after what felt like nothing as much as an electronic courtship. It’s confusing to have a person whom you’ve loved text you that he divorced his wife in part because they didn’t share the passion, trust and lust that he had shared with me. It’s hard to know how to parse those blips and blops on your iPhone.  It’s no place for heartfelt confessions of lifelong regret. It’s no place to reveal the bleeding.

I have stalked, and I have found. I have friended, and I have lost, again. It hurts less, but it still hurts. Great loves should have more dignity than to blip on in cellular calls and Facebook updates and tattered emails. Great loves deserve better than recycling. Lesson learned. Lesson learned, but it's an empty lesson, for there is but one heretofore love of my life.

 

Comments

[Sweat Shop Sissy]

Wow, you're like a modern day Scheherazade. I love listening to you read.

[Pete]

CG,
Well written as usual. Reading between the lines, it seems that you have avoided new heartaches since the meetings never happened.
Pete

[Onthesensor]

Thanks CG for the audio. I read the piece before I listened..the audio added a depth to the piece that just the words don't convey.

[Mike]

wow, looks like you're going to have some voiceover gigs in the future.

[Mike]

I think I can get through my quantitative methods for business class very easily if I find the same voice to read me the material.

[chelsea g.]

Thank you, Mike. I'm glad I could help.

[bulldog]

Total boner. Did you whisper that whole thing on purpose to cause such throbbing purple tumescense? Cause that's what I got now. Damn.