I’m moving away from California and we are still Broken Up
- Step One
Feelings rain down like water, but I’m learning that experiences do that too. How can it be possible to want something so bad and so clearly and yet still be surprised and skeptical when it arrives?
I’m rereading some of the things I wrote in the early stages of my falling in love in the past, and in later reflection pieces in hindsight of the end of a relationship, and somehow I still feel the things I describe so strongly, so vividly; my memory holds onto them so tightly in a way that I can say for certain it doesn’t do for other subjects.
Here we go.
I doubt myself in the ways that I can recognize myself slipping into familiarity, the comfort of feelings that I have felt, categorized, compartmentalized before. But are we ever able to fully compare one relationship to another? I can compare myself to the selves I have been in previous relationships, but i suppose it is naive to think that I can recognize a relationship as being a mirror of one that came before it in order to avoid all the same kinds of hurt that have come for me before.
The first time we said I love you, I was nearly bursting at the seams with it. It was one of those things, one of those combinations of words that once you’ve identified it clearly in your brain, once you’ve matched it with your feelings, it seems impossible to keep it to yourself. Does it feel the same to say it to you as it has to say it to people in the past? Yes and no. I get the same flutter of excitement, the same sense of safety, the same reflex to say it in common situations as I have in the past, sure. But somehow it feels the most true. Not that it didn’t feel true with my exes, but those times felt so tied to emotion, to feeling, to that initial burst of emotion, and then, eventually, to a system of habit. I don’t think that I didn’t love them, I mean the things that I say when I say them.
I don’t know. Things have been so easy, so effortless, so natural with you. I don’t know a better way to communicate than to say that you are the most similar to me as anyone I have ever met.
This is so hard. I love you.
Is it possible to feel the things you recognize as having happened in hindsight in the moments that you are actually feeling them? We went to the sports bar a block away from my apartment, and it was so hot, hot enough that I took my sweater off and hung it on the back of my chair. But I’m no match for you — your sweat was dripping down your forehead into your eyebrows and we both laughed about it. It was a little gross but it was funny — we both pictured that meme with Jordan Peele where he’s dripping sweat, and we were both frantic but relaxed — it felt natural to chug a beer and laugh with you about how little time we had before we had to leave the bar.
At the haunted house — god, what did we talk about? I don’t really remember, but I remember the pizza and the reddish light of the room where we sat on the couch together and talked, and I remember liking the things I was hearing, liking the way that you were taking in our conversation seemed to mirror me. It felt safe to enjoy having you there, to feel comfortable with the idea of having you in my bed for the night not as an obligation but as something I actually felt a desire for. I had liked the feeling of your arms around me while we walked around following the storyline of the haunted house and waiting to get scared, so I had been able to relax a little and listen to you talk with the interest I reserve for someone I’ve had the comforting realization that I am physically attracted to. I thought you were cute and silly in your Hinge pictures, and I already knew I liked talking to you and I hated myself for thinking that you looked kind of cool driving up in your car with the top down in the middle of my neighborhood in downtown Oakland.
It’s funny — you told me never to trust an Asian person with curly hair but if you hadn’t said anything I never would have thought twice about it aside from knowing that I liked it when I saw it for the first time. I don’t know, you had this weird little aura of cool around you — I can still picture the whole thing in my mind, it was very Bay Area. Your clothes: simple and loose-fitting and a shirt that was both a graphic tee and a plain beige thing without any logo or label or comment anywhere near it at the same time. I mean the style.
When people ask us who said I love you first I’ll remember forever that it was me. We had just finished watching Waves, that A24 movie I had only seen one other time, alone in my room at one of the apartments I shared with Donovan, the movie where I cried both times thinking about the final days of my dad’s life, the way they feel inevitable, inescapable, like one more price to pay for having been born to him. I cried and you held me but more than any of that we TALKED about the MOVIE. and it didn’t feel contrived and I didn’t feel like I wanted to walk next to a still body of water or walk into a bathroom and close the door and turn the lights off so I could THINK and FEEL my thoughts about what i had watched, it simply felt like existing next to you after stoking my emotions with art was as natural as breathing, in and out. We had already been communicating i love you nonverbally for at least that entire afternoon into the evening, so saying it out loud felt like the most natural progression of putting breath behind the real words.
I’ve always loved movie dates. I don’t mind going to the movies alone, but I love to take a shower and hold someone’s hand and when we went to watch Shang-Chi you taught me two things: that it tastes good to put jalapeños on popcorn and that sometimes the chairs in the movie theater are the kind where the armrests go up and you can get even closer to the person in the seat next to you.
I love you, I think, the way that I love the cherry blossom tree in the front yard of my mom’s house. To love you is to appreciate the way your existence simply makes my life feel better, feel more beautiful. I have no control over the way that you bloom, and yet each time it feels as if I designed you myself — a perfect representation of all the lovely things my brain could come up with if it were asked. Does that make sense? Metaphors are hard when I am happy and anguish and difficult emotions feel far away.
The worst thing that could happen, I think, would be if the universe turned out to be what I always thought it was — a dark place without rhyme or reason and you and I had to separate. How many times can I say this — I had always been looking for it but I never truly believed I would find someone that I could both be friends with, be myself with the way I am myself in my closest non-romantic relationships, and have a physical connection with. You complement so many of the things that I love about myself, and dude, I really love myself.
I want to cram your head with books I’ve loved and I want to make you the strange recipes that my family taught me to love and i want to teach you to snowboard and i want to knock down every barrier that any college ever puts in your way when you go to school, the way i wish someone had done for me. And I want your family to love me and my family to love you, and I want our lives and our closets and our plans for the future to melt together like, I don’t know, something liquid and syrupy that would work for this metaphor.
But not just that — I want to read every book you’ve ever loved, I want to sing a song together and get up the courage to roll my r’s in front of you until I’m so good people will think I purred as a kid just like you. I want you to tell me what hurts, what hurt in the past and what hurts in the present, and I want to take on the emotions that are too big for you to carry alone. I want you to talk to me about your life until your voice gives out, I want you to talk to me about submarines and the military until I get so tired I’m sorry i asked.
Baby, what is your favorite flower? What animals did you dream about when you were younger? What fear is strong enough to wake you up in the middle of the night?
I’m here now. You’ve got me. And some people, they think that’s scary, and they run away and would rather be alone. And I would never beg someone to stay when they would rather go. But the people who I love — the ones who love me back? I’d die for them, probably. I’m not really afraid of anything except for the loneliness of existing without someone once I’ve understood how good it feels to exist alongside them.
~~~~~~~~~~~
2. Step Two
a. Shock
I don’t want you to confuse this with surprise. My heart thudded against my chest, deeply, evenly. I heard the motion of it in my entire body. Even when I called Lo, when I recognized it was too late in the night to call my mom, I hadn’t truly registered it. The contents of my stomach poured out of me and that first message I left for you, I whispered its words from the floor of my bathroom. The letter was on the table outside next to the couch. I felt sick, so sick. But I didn’t feel surprised. I hadn’t seen your car outside. This hurts to write.
The other day I had a distinct memory, actually, of what it felt like to come home from work expecting to see you and to see Lulu alone, a note on my coffee table, instead. What else could make me feel sad to see her come running to greet me at the door, like she had been waiting, alone, for my company? A letter folded into thirds, with my name in all caps on the front; there’s nothing ever good about a letter like that. I think I knew what it was before I opened it. How could I not?
At the time, I couldn’t feel the hurt, the sinking, heartbroken pain of knowing I’ve been left behind. I just know that I felt so sick it felt like being pulled out of my body. I don’t know what thoughts were going through my head; my mind may have been a little peaceful because it was so late, I was so tired from work, I couldn’t put together what it might mean that you had left me.
But today, when I remember how that note looked on my table, remember my name written in your handwriting on a folded up letter, i want to cry. I want to run from the feelings, I feel a little bit sick.
b. Defensiveness
Those first few days, I would have defended you to the ends of the Earth, if it would have meant I hadn’t been wrong about you. That there was a chance this had nothing to do with me, with our relationship, with our words and our feelings. And I wasn’t wrong, not for feeling that way about you, or for defending you and what we had. But I also wasn’t wrong that this didn’t have to do with me, with our relationship. I know people say that kind of thing in order to make another person feel better, but the trouble with me is that I am too quick, too generous to make things not about me, but about someone else. Too often the things that people do to me don’t have anything to do with me. It often feels like I am a soundboard, a support beam, a home for other people’s problems, for their emotional labor. It makes me feel strong to be empathetic, but it makes me feel scared and weak when that empathy is not reciprocated. I defended you because I love you, and still do, but also because I’ve grown accustomed to saying soothing words about another person in order to demonstrate that they loved me, that they were worth my time, that I am not an idiot for the ways I’ve let myself be fooled.
c. something in the middle
I miss you so much that it hurts. I trace the words I love you with my fingers across my stomach, my thighs, sometimes when I’m lying in bed alone. Of course you can’t feel the heat from me as I scribble, but it must say something that I’ve had the thought sometimes, right?
We weren’t together very long, but that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? We’ve both admitted that the other person is exactly what we’ve been wanting, exactly the kind of person we’ve been picturing. I know you aren’t lying. I know I’m not lying.
Of course I can’t make you better. Everyone in my life is so worried (including you) that I will sacrifice my life, my wants, my needs, my youth and my time, waiting for you. And that does attest to the quality of the people I have surrounded myself with, the nest of support I have nurtured over the years. But baby, I’m not worried about myself. I wouldn’t have trouble moving on — I just would need more time. I’m on a path, I’ve found myself, I love the person I have become with the confidence of someone at true peace. I’m not necessarily worried about you, but yes I am. You said something to me, early on in our relationship; maybe we hadn’t even really started dating yet. You said that being one’s best self in a relationship takes not just you but the other person too. Or something like that. I don’t think I’d let myself throw my life away for you, but I don’t think you’d let me do that either. I think we’d figure it out together. And so that’s why I keep my hopes up, why I take others’ comments about how long your mental health journey will take with a grain of salt. Other people know you better than I do, but no one knows you and I better than we do.
I don’t know. It’s late.
d. The matching tattoos
The only time I let myself be sad about you in front of other people anymore is when I show them the tattoo on my left calf. A weird little Halloween-themed tattoo of a ghost with pursed red lips, its sheet flying up like Marilyn Monroe in that white dress, yet instead of sexy legs it’s the legs of a skeleton and instead of making people horny it makes them laugh. I can’t think of anything to describe our relationship better than the tattoo, I mean, it was a decision we jumped into together, it’s something quirky and fun and something I will never regret and my favorite tattoo artist in Oakland did it and the tattoo is so me, so you, so us. Anyway every tattoo I have is a story, a story of the kind of person that I was at the time I decided to get it. I don’t mind telling the same stories over and over again, isn’t that what life is anyway?
Sometimes it’s too embarrassing to admit that we’ve now been broken up longer than we were actually together but that I still miss you like you’re one of the regular people in my life and I simply haven’t seen you for a little while. That’s why I only reveal it when talking about the tattoos, and that’s why when people who don’t know you ask how long my last relationship was I say something vague like “not that long” and then sigh without detail.
e. When do I think of You?
- When I wear things from Uniqlo, or when I go into a Uniqlo store, or when someone asks me where I got an item of clothing and I have to tell them Uniqlo. Remember when we got pizza after we went shopping there? Of course you do, you only wrote about it in the little journal entry notes I will keep saved in my phone as long as iCloud lets me. A piece of trash flew off the table and I got up to go get it and put it in the trashcan, and you told me that was so hot and it was so much the right thing to say for a moment I wondered if I had said it. That’s how it was with you, sometimes. You’d take words right out of my brain.
- When I look at the little gold pot on the shelf next to my degrees and I wonder how I am going to get it to you when we don’t speak and I don’t know your address. I know it might sound like a ploy to get you to remember how much you loved me when I was caring, and it is, a little, but in all truth the list of questions are for you to answer, regardless of whether I am the one who gets to hear them, or not.
- When I think about you. That’s it, that’s when.
f.
The other day, I met up with another, different ex than you and I described you, a little drunkenly, as the closest thing to my person that I’ve ever felt. I meant it, in all the ways you can mean something when it’s both true and said as a way to show someone from your past that you’ve moved on, you’ve found other loves besides them. But tonight, as I read over some of the things I’ve written about you but hadn’t yet felt comfortable publishing, I’m crying again in the bathroom of my apartment, the linoleum tiles slick against my palms, the air feeling somehow heavier than the weight of gravity, pushing me down, pulling the wind out of my lungs.
g. goodnight, I still miss you.
