When I was younger, probably around the time Tyler started seesawing between me and other girls, wandering back into my life if I smiled too much in the hallway and then dropping me when someone more interesting walked by, I'd lie in bed and I'd beg God, 'Please make me hard like he is. Make me indifferent. Make me inaccessible. Make him chase me, not the other way around. But above all else, make him love and forgive me, and if you can't do that, then make me hard." I still labored under the delusion that love, no matter how much it hurt, no matter what they did to you or you to them, was worth it. Our story was going to be the exception, high school relationship statistics be damned. Whatever we faced as a couple was stronger then anything anyone else had ever faced and goddammit we deserved to be together. Love was the higher law, wasn’t it?
Living in this dream world didn’t do any favors for me. Things got decidedly worse. The prayer became not make him love me but please make him go away. Please make me fall out of love with him. I don't want this anymore. Please make him go. And if he tries to come back, please make me hard so I won't let him. I want him, but I don't want this anymore. The brief shimmerings of self preservation were there somewhere, but I was still in a prison with the keys in my pocket, thinking he had the only set. Giving up on him felt like failing us both, considering I was the one who ruined the whole goddamn thing in the first place.
So in my head I created a Rae who could break out of prison. I started writing a story. I was the main character in that story. So was Tyler. And the roles were reversed. I said goodbye. I told Tyler to hit the fucking road. It didn't need to be good. It didn't need to be polished. It needed to take me there so I could try to be a halfway functional human being during the day. And then there was another guy, because, well, of course there fucking was, I couldn’t very well save myself, could I? His name was Adian. (A-dee-n, not Ay-den, and yes, I will always stick by that pretentious distinction, fuck you, I hate -den names.) Adian saved me. He never made me wish to be hard, and he never made wishing hard. I probably fucked myself on this one, creating an impossible standard for any real guy to live up to, but I was just trying to get through fucking high school. This story gave me the fortitude to walk into Hahnville and pretend that Tyler didn't exist, to avoid the spots where I knew he hung out, to hide when I saw him coming with Erin or even himself alone, to leave class and escape to the computer lab to write all the heartbreak out of me. Which, of course, usually landed me in the fucking counselor's office or the goddamn principal's with the fucking school cop and administrators going through my backpack. It's a miracle I never ended up in jail. I never stopped to think about how dire my behavior must have looked, especially since I was in high school in the years following Columbine. I was so fucking stupid. I just didn't give a fuck. What did it matter?
The universe intervened-he moved away, and I still saw his ghost loping around every corner. I wrote harder. I pined harder, despite the distance, which I hoped would make him miss me. I didn't understand. Why was he so blind? I was asking the wrong question. Why was I? The universe had finally removed him out of my sight (just doing what I asked it to do, for once) and I just kept after him, because, you know, a hard head makes a soft ass. I had assumed I knew what was best for him simply because I thought I loved him the most. I mean, look at us, everyone and everything trying to pull us apart-we were Romeo & Juliet, Nny & Devi, Christian & Satine, Sally and Jack. I had loved him in his innocence. In my ridiculous little raised-on-Disney-fairy-tales-and-seduced-by-Savage Garden brain, that should have set me apart from all those other girls. I thought he'd come to his senses and we could love each other all over again but better. By that time we were too far from the people we had been when we had started and I had no more idea on how to love and trust the new Tyler then he had any idea to love and trust the new me. Also, Romeo & Juliet both die at the end. Out of sheer impetuosity. Girls never remember that, and if they do, they think it's romantic. To end your life over someone you're too young to chain yourself to and for an emotion you barely understand. Nny tries to kill Devi. Sally and Jack are already dead. Satine dies of TB and Christian wastes away. Screw Disney movies & the WB, we had all our doomed, romantic heroes right where we needed them. Predictable, tragic, emo Hot Topic angst. It didn’t help that my generation thought it was cool as fuck to be depressed as shit.
The reality was that giving up on him meant having to admit to myself I had wasted invaluable time, and given up so much to chase him. I had not taken care with my future because I was so wrapped up in trying to make him my future. I stupidly thought time would lie down and be still for us. And not everything I had given up was all his fault. It was just easier to blame it on him. Love made me do it. Anger made me do it. Hormones. Whatever. I'm old enough now to call a spade a spade. That I was afraid to get over him because I didn't know who or what I was without him. Zeta fucking female to the max. Of course, I have to always remind myself that I was sixteen. And certifiably insane, just like a normal sixteen year old should be.
We never know what we fucking want, even when we get it. We never get wise until we're forced to. Sometimes not even then. Wisdom is what the universe hands out instead of answers and if we don't want to take any we don't have to but it's gonna kick our asses either way.
After a few years of loitering around in the background, Tyler exited stage left. Finally.
Others entered the stage, they exited, they entered again, they disappeared. And the play continued. So did the refrain. "I don't want to love this hard. Please let me be the one that the waves crash against, not over. Let me be able to walk away first." I kept saying it to myself, but after a certain amount of time conducting this useless experiment, which had produced zero results, I decided I was who I was, case closed. I was a romantic, and I didn't like having it known, but my heart was still pulpy, open, gooey, needing, wanting. I still hungered for sweet words. I still waited to hear someone bear their heart to me. I wasn't scared of it. I still tried to believe that if I loved someone with all I had, it could be enough for the both of us, could forgive all sins, wipe the slate clean, we could be happily ever after, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But, open heart or not, I learned my lesson-never be the one to say "I love you" without someone having first established it. It had already been proven that guys had the home field advantage when it came to walking away; they couldn't have everything. You love me? Fine. Say it. But when you decide you don’t anymore, let’s remember who started this shit. I was finished with being the desperate one. To tell you the truth, I was ready to make someone pay, because I had paid my heartache dues.
One day, in a classic case of ‘God laughs at plans’, I went into a Yahoo chatroom. The curtain parts. A trapdoor opens. A boy appears. Act Two Begins.
I thought Tyler had brought out the worst kind of beggar in me. I thought my first love was the only time I'd ever have to feel that desperate. I was completely, hilariously, incredibly, irrevocably humbled by this miscalculation, but this time, I didn’t fall to pieces. I got angry. I decided that it was high time to stop accepting my cowardice as fact. That was the first time I ever, ever walked away from someone, for the sake of my own heart. Somewhere along the way, in the middle of all of this disaster, the first seeds of dignity had whispered into the Earth. Love shouldn’t have to be desperate. This boy taught me how to walk away. First from a relationship that had died on the vine, and then from the boy himself. I did it then and I did it again, years later. Best lesson I ever learned. The lesson. Not the boy. Most of the time I tell myself I regret him, but someone has to teach you how to walk away, or you never will. Just don’t get too good at it.
The years danced by and I met someone. Someone who had (almost) perfected the art of being stoic. We brought out the opposites in each other. I was a fucking disaster who needed to grow the fuck up and he needed permission to be his own disaster for awhile. There was finally balance in the Force. It was a good time for a long time. I felt safe. I started wanting things that I never thought I would again. A bullet left a gun. We tried to meet in the middle where we had first met, but forces bigger than ourselves caused us to shoot right past each other, like drunken stars. This relationship shaped my adulthood. Tyler taught me to never lie about who I was in order to be loved, but also to never show my cards in the first hand. The boy taught me to walk away, and this one taught me there were bigger things coming and would require more than love to survive, so I'd better buck the fuck up. Back to square one. I decided that I didn't want to want things. Peace of mind was infinitely more valuable than love.
Tyler and I became tentative friends and then just regular friends, but I never forgot how pathetic I was in front of him, so I resolved to never lose my dignity, especially in his presence, a practice I still hold to this day. I can’t get past the idea that when he looks at me, he’s remembering the stupid, clingy, crying idiot from 2002. It’s fun to hang with him when we see each other once or twice a year, but I’m always careful. My heart doesn't belong to him anymore and I'm over it, but some things burrow deep into the soil of your Earth and become a permanent part of your ecology. He was my Chicxulub. Everything formed around him, because of him, in spite of him. I'm not special. Happens to everyone at some point or another. If it wouldn't have been him, it would have been someone else. He just happened to be the one who killed my dinosaurs first. I'm grateful it happened when I was younger. It would have stunted my emotional growth as an adult and I'm fucking stunted enough as is. I'm grateful I got to keep him as a friend. I'm grateful that there is a tiny piece of truth to that tired old axiom that time does indeed heal all wounds. All? Most? I won't split hairs. Let's leave well enough alone. The point is, it was 20 years ago and it happened to two different people and I’m just trying to figure out how to undo this fucking curse I put on myself.
Adian stayed, the only constant through the cycle of boyfriends, and on two separate occasions, very brief girlfriends. Sometimes he was the only thing on my mind. Sometimes I could write 300 pages in one night and go to sleep feeling like he was simply on a long trip and I was waiting for him to come home. Sometimes I wanted him to be real so badly that I would hole up and hug myself at night, pretending it was him. I still do, when I don't feel deserving of a real person. I don't give a fuck who thinks that's pathetic. Tattoo shops make me think of him. The color blue. Hawaii. Tool. Hotels. But I couldn't make myself be the main character any longer- writing about myself from his eyes felt so fucking narcissistic. Tyler became a background character, more friend than enemy, and not romantically involved in any way. The story's guts changed. I created another girl, and I made her into the person I had always wanted to be. Tough. Stoic. Didn't need love and wasn't looking for it. I took (take) great pleasure in torturing this girl. Every time she got up, I knocked her flat on her ass and waited for her to try again, until the tiny bit of romantic in me relented. I had to make her deserve him. The jury’s still out on that, but my muses are fickle and I needed to get to the good stuff before they got bored. Adian comes along and melts her to the bone. He's the one who speaks her languages, who gets the lock to unstick, has the answers to all of her riddles, who plays the tune that brings her to life. I tried to make her fight him. I tried to make her resist. I had to say I tried. I threw them together and then I ripped them apart to where they would never be the same. I guess I do it because I don't believe that love is real unless you put it through the wringer, and even then, nothing is a guarantee. The real wringer, not the 'My Mom doesn't like you-I live all the way at the top of the country-I'm in love with your best friend' kind of wringer. I know it's a Mary Sue. I know my therapist would have a field day with it. I'm not trying to become the next Suann Laqueur, or show up in iBooks, or re-invent the wheel, I'm just trying to get by. Don't get it twisted. I know Adian's brand of comfort porn is not the answer. I know he is not the honey in the lion and that he will only ever be a faucet compared to the ocean I'm supposed to want. But I can’t hurt him unless I write that I want to, and he’s not the one I want to hurt. If I don’t want him around, I can send him away, no hard feelings. And if I leave, he is always there when I come back. Well, almost always. I’ve lost him before. Getting him back keeps getting harder and harder. I guess this means I'm on the road to not needing him, but I'm not ready to not need him. Adi is the only situation in which I am in complete control of what my heart does.
I saw glimmers of the person I wanted to be. I had finally forced myself to look the ugly truth in the face and call it by its name: just because you love someone, that love is not everything. And just because you love someone and you want it to work, it doesn't mean that it will. It also doesn't mean you have to stop loving them. It just means you have to find another spot for them in your heart while everything else untangles itself. I had finally grown the sack big enough to say "Look, I'm not happy. Goodbye." I had help along the way, don't get me wrong. But I developed boundaries, which is a beautiful word when you enter your thirties. At this point, the question was, was love or survival more important? And as the world grew darker, I don't think I need to finish that sentence for you. I don’t think we can have both. Not forever. Both demand your full attention.
Walking away from heartache may save your life but doing so takes a bounty, each bigger than the last, the loss of which left me staggering and unsure and wary. Boundaries would save me, I decided. They would keep me careful. They would keep me from making reckless, hurtful choices. So, I kept developing them. And then I built walls as extra insurance. Massive ones. Bigger than even I could climb. I couldn't stop. I felt powerful, and I wanted to keep that power, and in that power I made reckless, hurtful choices. I was an idiot. And now those walls aren't coming down, despite the fact that there is an army outside the gates, bellowing at them, throwing every weapon they have at the doors, spending all their energy trying to do what I can't. I don't know what is big enough to make those walls come down, I'm terrified that they can't, and I don't know if I'm brave enough to face whatever's behind them, if, in fact, they are capable of coming down. So I'm just standing at the bottom of this fucking wall, cursing myself for not having the balls to start climbing. And I can't turn around. And I can't walk forward. You can't scale a wall without gear. I have no gear. I can't be asked to ignore my intuition. There is no one that can help me, not even the army trying to get in.
Back in the day, I used to write about how I'd give anything I owned to see what the hell was inside some of my exes that made them incapable of showing honest emotion, and I don't know how close my experience is to theirs, but I can now definitely understand the frustration of wishing I knew what the face behind the face behind the face wanted and being utterly fucking clueless as to how to obey it and at the same time, push it away.
And alas, frustrated reader, we may now finally stumble over the fucking point-
What I ultimately failed to realize as a teenager is that you can't just become indifferent out of nowhere. I wanted a switch, a lever, a button, a simple and neat resolution to the unsolvable equation I was in. Boop. Beep. Emotions gone. I didn't realize that it would take the slow grinding of the years to get myself there, the slow chipping off of all the soft edges that made me a child, a teenager, a young woman, and Tyler was only the fucking BASE of it. Heartaches. Anger. Betrayal. Guilt. Humiliation. The feeling of being cheated out of something for reasons that I still don’t understand. When you’re young you can’t imagine being old. What I also didn't count on is the fact that when I finally got here, this person who doesn't get emotional and doesn't like talking about her feelings and shies away from I love you and gets terrified at pillow talk and can't promise a future and refuses to chase anybody is that you have to be fucking careful what you wish for, because a sixteen year old's desperate prayer is a thirty six year old's frustrated confusion. You have to be fucking careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
I ultimately became the person I thought I needed to be to survive a relationship that's been over for 20 years. A relationship that is no longer relevant and no longer fits my life. It started off with Tyler and it kept escalating and escalating and I kept hoping and praying for the wrong fucking thing all along and well don't say the universe never gave you anything, kid, because here we are, signed sealed and delivered, as asked for.
I should have never asked to be hard. I should have just asked to be brave.
-Rae