“My Ex”
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
We’ve all got ex-lovers, partners, husbands, wives. Some we equate with beautiful moments of love. Others were train wrecks. What’s your favorite ex story?
The worst thing that person ever did? When did the relationship jumped the shark? The top five reasons you’re glad It’s. All. Over.
Tell us in 500 words. Tell us in just 50 words. But don’t hold back. Really, you’ll feel better.
Nothing could top my finding out that a boyfriend of mine who was in Chile for a year had returned and did not contact me upon his return to the U.S. It had been a few months since his arrival and i had learned he was back (three months prior) and actually enjoying a Celtics game at the old “Garden” in Boston. I proceeded to throw back a couple (hundred) glasses of wine and felt we should probably speak to one another right away. I hailed a cab and entered the Garden with a ticket to the game after paying large amount of money to a seedy guy. I went to the info desk and asked if i could have someone paged. His named was annouced on loudspeaker and he was asked to come to the info desk. When he arrived, I jumped out and confronted him! He was shocked to say the least, and the security guards wanted to know if he knew me. He said “No!,” and I was kindly thrown out of the Garden and onto the street. I guess that’s what you’d call “closure”.
My ex was a highly coveted coworker dating someone else at the time. We had a rushed affair one sloppy night in Manhattan and I bumped into her and her man the next day. And ran. She emailed me soon after, “Next time you plan on hightailing it— don’t wear a bright yellow coat.” She was like that. In your face. Soon she broke off with homeboy and I tried to step in—taking her to my pothead uncle’s third wedding and trying to get serious on the World Trade Center’s 101st floor bar. (Where I often went when there was something important to close). She was passive, but nevertheless I spent the night at her place. I hung on for awhile, but soon a friend asked me to meet him for a drink. I thought he was coming out. I thought he was in love with me! But no, just the opposite: my girl was in love with him! They had been a couple for some time. And I never spoke with her again. My friend didn’t even pick up the bill.
I met my ex at a dog training class. It wasn’t his dog. It was his older sister’s and she left it locked in their mother’s house for three days without food or water. She trashed the house and never came back. So his mom took the dog and he just came along to dog training class because he had nothing to do. He told me he was manic depressive that first night he came over to smoke cigarettes out my apartment window. Turned out his sister, who was now living in an abandoned factory in San Francisco, used to be a friend of mine during high school. She was the one who got me smoking. Now I’m addicted. Some of the best times with my ex were spent smoking. Smoking on the back porch, the front porch, in a car on a hill. Now he’s in and out of mental hospitals. I rest better when he’s locked up than when he’s walking around staring at the sun. Sometimes I see his mom walking by with the dog. Now she’s got two. I guess she feels safer that way.
My ex happened to be friends with more than a handful of people you’d call famous. Television and movie actors, members of the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans, Hollywood directors, musicians, bigwigs in finance, Asian royalty—my ex was pals with them all. He didn’t seem to think it was unusual. At first it was highly intimidating, but I realized he treated everyone exactly the same—which is to say, well—be it me or the UPS guy or the Crown Prince of Bhutan. It was probably was the way he got to be friends with all these people; they liked that he treated them just like everyday people. He invited me to come along with him to a book party for his friend Dr. Andrew Weil. The people throwing the party were in finance–at least the male half was—and they had invited a mix of their own friends plus the good doctor’s. Walking along the street in the East 60s where the party was, I stopped to read a plaque on one of the buildings, describing the brownstone as the onetime home of Andy Warhol. I was surprised that Warhol had even ventured, much less lived, above 14th Street. This turned out to be the location of the party. Inside, there was a small bar set up on the second floor landing, and from that vantage point I spent most of the evening wondering if that was really Anna Wintour, if that was really Kelly Lynch, if that was really Anna Deavere Smith. I did manage to recognize Martha Stewart (my ex knows her, too). But the kicker was on the way out, after we got our coats from the coat check. Standing by the front door, I noticed what looked like one of van Gogh’s self-portraits. I paused and said, “Um, could that be real?” My ex said, “It has to be.” They had hung it right by the front door, where you or I would normally put, say, a bunch of hooks to hang our keys. It was a throwaway location—and so near the door, couldn’t it be stolen? I looked at it as closely as I dared. There was glass over the actual painting, and a small lamp lighting it on the top of the frame. I half expected some uniformed guard to come out of nowhere to slap my hand as I resisted the temptation to just…touch it. Just the frame, even. And for days afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it: a van Gogh! In their apartment! Just! Hanging there! By! The door! My ex said, “And what about the Picasso and Matisse upstairs?” Those, alas, I did not notice.
I met M in 2002. Fast forward one year. We were still in love. We watched a lot of episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants together while cuddling. He was still mailing me sweet gifts for no reason when he traveled; he was still showing his soft side by offering to sew the buttons back on my winter coat. He was also out of town a lot, so when it came time to go to my friend Molly’s wedding, I had to go alone.
I loaded up at the sushi station at the buffet, then plopped down next to someone who looked to be alone too. His name was Flint. He said he was a screenwriter in L.A. I said I was writing engagement announcements for a weekly newspaper for a living. His interest was piqued. “How’d you end up in that line of work?” he asked. I told him how I’d never been particularly wedding minded. I’d just sort of stumbled into writing the matrimonial column—and it stuck.
I explained how my parents have been divorced and married six times. I recounted how at four I’d asked a family friend if she would have a divorce party. I told Flint how my great-grandpa Simon was the oldest man in the world ever to get divorced, according to the Guinness Book. Flint was amused by the duality of my life. “Why not write breakup announcements?” he said. We both laughed at the idea. That was that. Flint and I didn’t go home together, but somewhere in the world that night, M was going home with someone else.
When he came back to New York a few weeks later, he announced he’d slept with a woman he’d met at a bar. On top of that he announced he’d taken a job in Boston. “I love you, I just can’t be with you,” he said. “One day if you write a book about your life, I hope I’ll get a chapter.”
Then he moved away. Once or twice, I blocked my caller ID so I could call and hear his voice on his voicemail. Once or twice, I went out with girlfriends and rehashed everything until I got to that crying stage that feels like hiccupping.
Not long thereafter, I left the my job writing engagement announcements and was working at a larger paper. Among other things, they’d hired me to launch their wedding announcement section, because, in spite of everything, I seemed to have a knack for writing about women in puffy white dresses. I got back in touch with Flint and it turned out his latest romantic conquest had just fizzled too. The next day at work during a slow moment I was thinking about M—imagine that!—and in a huff, I dashed off a 200-word announcement about our romantic rupture. I mentioned M’s bizarre food hang-ups and embarrassingly large proboscis. I forwarded the “announcement” to Flint and he sent me his. It began: “Flint Wainess, 29, and Connie Mulligan, 25, broke up earlier this week after Mulligan accused Wainess of being an indifferent lover who never vacuums.”
I took both of them, wrote Breakup News at the top, and posted them on a free blog server. Soon, other people were submitting announcements, too. The people started asking for advice, and Flint and I doled it out. More than just an expert, I started picturing myself as a breakup superhero, combating heartache and granting permission to overeat to lonely-hearts around the world.
M must’ve seen the site, since I knew first hand that it was the first thing that came up when his name got plucked into Google, and I figured he must’ve realized this at some point. Yet he never mentioned it. Instead, his notes were full of encomiums and this only made me feel even more like a super hero: Not only was I a breakup maven, I was also one who remained adored by the man who’d dumped her.
So when he called last summer and asked if he could meet me at a bar near my house on one of his rare visits to New York, I figured, in the name of research, I had to go. I needed to show him the good I’d made out of a bad situation which he’d caused. I wanted him to want me, and I wanted to be the one to do the rejecting this time. I wanted to show him just how over us I was.
I’d spent a year devoting my life to getting over him, but when he was suddenly in front of me again—crisp and cool and comforting—all I could do was cry and beg him to love me once again.
I ran into my ex on the street while I was with my AA sponsor, with whom I had just exited a meeting. I had not seen ex in years. It had only been a few months since I’d had fifty drinks, so I was still hoping never to see anyone I knew within five blocks of an AA meeting. My ex had been a ball and chain secured to an anvil chained to a brass tree connected to the core of the earth. But I had managed to give her the heave-ho years before, at which point she moved in with the herbal healer she’d been having relations with while we shared an apartment. Seeing ex was a total shocker. I had no idea she had moved back to town. We both froze on the sidewalk. It was so awkward that she actually giggled. Her herbalist had cut off all of her hair, which had previously hung like a split-endz carpet down to her ass, so I didn’t recognize her. Ex actually said, “You remember so-and-so?” And I actually said, “Yes, hello.” The two of them staggered away and my AA sponsor calmly observed the interior of my mouth. Not only was it incredibly satisfying because I was carrying a motorcycle helmet, indicating that I’d accomplished something I’d always wanted to do but had been too smashed to pursue, but also–ex had gained at least one hundred pounds.
I left Tucson because I was broke, and because the man I loved didn’t want to live with me. He wasn’t ready, he said. It didn’t feel right. We should be happier. He was right, of course, but that didn’t solve anything. I was still unemployed, recovering from an ear infection and a car accident. The relentless sun still seeped through the walls of my cottage, a mile from the road and surrounded by overgrown creosote. My idea of happiness was not to wake up everyday, hair grown out and 15 pounds heavier, and trudge down the dirt driveway past the imposing stare of the Catalina mountains to the mailbox where the worrying began. Car payment, student loans, rent. Rattlesnakes in the yard, hairy spiders in my shower.
None of this equaled happy, and yet I had never been more in love, or less willing to face the truth that the relationship was dead.
When we did the tour of New York two years earlier, friends had confirmed it; he was the one. Not only because he was intelligent, attractive, a New York ex-pat and 33; but he also meditated. After dating a parade of men self-absorbed in their art, their music, or their looks, I had finally hit the jackpot with someone devoted to Buddhist meditation. I believed then that a spiritual path—particularly an eastern one—would erase or at least soothe most difficulties in the human experience. So when conversations about the future wore circles in my mind, I had faith. When we argued about which was the deeper path, hatha yoga or vipassana meditation (my practice is more intense than your practice, he once implied), I rationalized: we’re connecting on levels more intimate than most of my relationships. Isn’t that better? Our arguments were complex and weird, and so therefore more significant, yes? Possibly with karmic repercussions. We could be fighting about window treatments and the mortgage. It may sound naïve, but our shared faith grounded my soul in unprecedented ways. So did our great sex. I couldn’t imagine anything better in this lifetime.
We drove to Chicago where I hoped to work for the summer. There were many “ifs,” conditions full of potential, contingent on things going right. If you come back to Tucson, he said, we can get a house together. If I adjuncted and lived below the poverty line, he said, I could build my academic resume—and wouldn’t that be great, because eventually we could both teach at the same small, community college in the northeast and he could meditate during the summers. “While you do what,” a lawyer friend had asked me, “wait outside the yurt with the kid?”
Those details would work themselves out, I told myself. Spiritual life transcended bourgeois, urban needs like high-profile jobs and two week vacations in Europe. We sped through the red rocks in Utah, “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” blasting on the radio, dog panting in the backseat. I chose to focus on what we had (yoga, Buddha, and sex) to think positively, since I had once been told by a spiritual practitioner that I was a very powerful manifester. You might say that this is where the magical thinking began.
As great as Eastern Spiritual Practices have been for our culture, they can be misused just as any other religion. It depends how badly the practitioner wants to lie. And I wanted it bad.
It’s so much easier, two years later, to see the hallmarks of an ideal turned sour. I am sure ex-cult members say the same thing. I’m neither stupid nor needy—in fact, I am so highly educated and independent, I thought nothing of him leaving me in Chicago while he traveled for the summer. (Why shouldn’t he continue being a carefree grad student while my life fell apart?). I am so mature, I chalked up his constant avoidance of my misery as a phase. I did the same with his new 50 mile a day bicycle hobby that had him leaving my bed before sunrise each morning. With the early, sexless curfews at night. And with his two hour a day meditation practice (except Sundays when he tried to sit for four hours). I made allowances because I respected the spiritual path: it had helped me, I had even written a book about it. A cousin of mine who has lived in an ashram for over 25 years advised me when I started having doubts, “he’s doing what he needs to do. There’s nothing more important than being true to yourself. To follow your calling.” I know alcoholics who tell themselves the same thing.
There is always a point in love when the qualities that first appear charming lose their magic and become insights into character. I remember wondering if his ability to back burner his dissertation and all cares of the “impermanent world” was actually beneficial. Or if his tremendous reserves of focus and energy were best used watching double features at the movie theatre three times a week. Or listening to two hours straight of the left-of-left radio show Democracy Now, and eating an entire pizza (sometimes with sausage) afterwards while railing about injustice. Was it good or Buddhist that, when we argued about intimacy problems, he could (almost magically) meditate all the anger away? That when he called me from his month long stint as a volunteer guide for a Sri Lankan monk’s journey across America, he sounded just as impassive and disembodied as he did earlier in the summer? While I struggled to pay my bills and practice yoga alone in a city where I knew no one, I thought of him enviously. How amazing, I thought, he doesn’t need a job. He doesn’t even need a girlfriend. Like a trustfunder swaddled in inheritance, my boyfriend simply needed the privilege of meditation.
The break up broke my heart, but it also broke my faith. I was shocked that our spiritual connection couldn’t save us. Worse, that it delayed my revelation that I was being strung along. The pictures of the two of us happily eating a coconut in the hammock in Mexico begged the question, if detachment was the best way to avoid pain, how would we ever have achieved this moment of love?
I wanted to consult with my ashram cousin more, but then remembered she had been celibate for two decades. Love and the spiritual path had never meshed for her either.
While I got on my feet in Chicago, the thought of him still crushed me. It was hard to see that my situation had steadily improved once the scorched desert landscape was replaced by neighborhoods and trees, The Art Institute, Lake Michigan, and, last but not least, other people. Even as I went on a friendly date with the man who is now my fiancé, I decided I must give my meditator one more chance in the best way that I knew how. I did the age old trick that I once heard from a Rabbi—write down all the qualities you desire in a mate. I took great care, actually wrote them in a letter, on nice white stationary my mother gave me, and sealed it in the tiny matching envelope. I put it in a safe place amid my strewn clothes, envelopes of bills and phone numbers of people I hoped would help me find a job. I didn’t want to read it more than once after I wrote it. I felt guilty—even like a fraud—because among the qualities I desired, “meditator” or “spiritual” were not included.
Part of my assignment from the Reverend who is marrying my fiancé and me is to write an essay about how and why we fell in love. As I detail my fiancé’s incredible qualities, I am reminded of the tiny white note card in the envelope I wrote two summers ago. Every quality I had desired in my meditator had manifested in my fiancé. He is hardworking, infinitely thoughtful, and kind. He is creative and funny. And though I will not add this in my essay, there’s one more thing: he hasn’t heard much about the Buddha.
Suzanne Clores teaches creative writing at Northwestern University in Chicago and is the author of Memoirs of Spiritual Outsider.
Shall I tell you about the banker who told me that dating me boosted his confidence? This confidence made him more attractive to other women and, by the way, he would now be enjoying his newfound lease on life with aforementioned other women? Among other memories of him: he was allergic to cotton, so we slept on synthetic fiber towels; he only ate food that was colored white; he once opened a conversation, “You came up in group therapy today.”
Shall I tell you about the producer’s assistant who, on our first weekend away together, made me buy the train tickets, and then at the end of the beach getaway, got a ride back to the city? I went home alone, with his “Just sell the other ticket to one of my friends” in my head. Among other memories of him: he kept a full bar in his bedroom; he once lied about being on the guest list for a concert with a $5 cover (I offered to pay for both of us); once when I was dropping off a camera as a gift, he wouldn’t let me come up to his office, because he didn’t want his co-workers to know we were dating.
Shall I tell you about the two boyfriends for whom I was the pre-fiancee (the last girl a guy dates before he gets engaged?) At least both called to tell me, though no invitation was extended. Or the one who was to be my date at a wedding, broke up with me five months before the event, and then showed up with someone else. She cornered me at the reception, trying to make small talk.
I’m not bitter or depressed, for reasons too long to discuss here. But with one of the fellows described above, I did have good relationship. Good enough that when I would tell a friend about it, she would cry. And when I asked her why she was crying, she told me that in the seven years she had been with her boyfriend-now-husband, she never felt or sounded the way I did. I guess I would endure years of potato-and-rice meals, solo train rides, and obsequious replacements to be able to have what I did for a time. I had it, and it was enough.
My ex became my ex when he went on a short trip to Stockholm and met the love of his life in a coat check line at a club. Within 24 hours they swore life-long allegiance, and my ex returned home to tell me the news. My response: whaaa???
Amazingly enough they maintained a long-distance transcontinental relationship for five years until my ex could get the appropriate papers to leave America behind and become a Swedish citizen….and they lived happily ever after.
Lesson: there really is such a thing as love as first sight. It would have been churlish of me to stand in the way of something so crazily powerful. (You know, I really wanted to type “powerfully crazy,” but I didn’t.)
I was in dire straits. I was working construction and had to lug my tools up the hilly streets of San Francisco as fast as possible, which was rough given my condition (I had to take the biggest crap known to man). I was cruising past my van near my apartment when I noticed not only the street cleaning ticket, but a small package tucked under my windshield wiper. My heart just about hit the floor as I noticed the cutesy hand stamped writing that could only be from one person. My Ex!
I grabbed the ticket and the package and continued to my door. Ran up the stairs, dumped the tools and into the bathroom I went. I threw down my pants, tossed the package on the floor, let out a sigh of relief or what ever it is you do at the moment, and stared at the package. That package was my kryptonite.
It had been about a year since I had had any sort of contact with my ex. And that is how I wanted it to stay. We had, or, in truth, I had, a very tough break up (she dumped me) and it took just about forever to get over her. In order to do so, I did the normal guy thing: went out and got laid as much as possible. If I wasn’t getting some, then I was at the bar getting loaded. I ended up meeting a fat kindergarten teacher who was real easy and I got way to into the “kindergarten teacher” thing. Met another woman at the bar. She was “bi” and I felt like I had to tame her in some sort of way and started to work my magic.
In other words, the last thing I needed in my new life was my ex. I sat on the toilet for about a hour staring at the package until I finally had enough courage to open it. It was a plastic little kid’s wallet with a letter that essentially said she really needed to talk to me and did not like the way things had turned out. I collected kids’ wallets (did you know they don’t fit real money?) and she had picked it up in her travels with her new man. I had heard she met some older more “adult” guy who took her on a trip around the world. He had been to every Chart House Restaurant in the country and won some around the world trip because of it. What a dork!
After about a week of going back and forth with myself I gave in and gave the ex a call. She wanted to come over and relinquish herself of the bad taste in her mouth of our breakup. At first I refused, thinking she just wanted back in my life to ruin it all over again. I was just now over her and back on stable ground. After the begging and crying and whatnot I agreed to meet her.
She came over the next day and we sat down to talk and hash out our breakup. It was weird and awkward at first, but after about three hours of talking things started to change, and I started to see what I fell in love with the first time. Then it happened: the two-hour dry humping make out session that kept us both wanting more. See! She really was wrecking my new life of ladies that took so long to build. The problem was we both wanted back in—and seemed to be headed down that path.
But I had more problems, I was just in the middle of dumping the kindergarten teacher and moving to Mexico to open a bed and breakfast with the bisexual chick. There was no way I was missing out on that.
So I went to Mexico to meet up with her (she had already been there for a month). She greeted me with her new girlfriend, and to my surprise I was already out at the time of arrival. I spent the next two months living the ex-pat bachelor life, and madly writing letters to the ex in the local Internet cafe. Two days before I left, a cab taking me home from a club crashed into a Mexican cop car, and much to my dismay I was sent to a Mexican prison. In that prison, I met two 90210/Melrose Place writers which was lucky since on their way out ]they slipped me a crisp $50 bill that I used to bribe my way out. Man, I could go on forever about that prison experience.
It is now seven years later and that ex and I are happily married with a wonderful three-year-old boy. Thank God she came back and wormed her way back into my heart with that gesture of kryptonite. Let’s just hope that my son has a thing for little kid wallets. I’ve got quite a few.
Nothing worse that being the original breakup-er and then turning yourself into the breakup-ee. Lately, every time I bang my head against the wall I remind myself that the subsequent pain on my skull is just as much my fault as the heartwrenching, nausea-inducing, weepy-eyed, frustrated and scared feeling I have daily. What a total a-hole I am for ever thinking my ex, the same guy I broke up with for rational and legitimate reasons (he’s an irresponsible child with minimal ambition), should ever be the same person worthy of my total devotion and ultimate partner in the future. Why on earth did I have to go back, plead, and profess only to re-learn that he’s just not man enough for me. Of course, this time the lesson came with a heavy dose of self-pity and self-loathing. Man, I wish there were friends, gifts, games, and cake at pity-parties. Ok, enough whining - here’s the jucie:
I went back to the guy swelling with purpose and faith in the idea that our reunion was a clear path to eternal happiness only to be treated like dirt in return. First it was his girlfriend who need to be disposed of. By sleeping with me, I figured the breakup was imminent. Not so. Then two weeks later when we slept together again I figured it was immediate. Again, not so. Still - the banging of my head continued and I went to drinks to hear “his story”. Only then, after buying him multiple drinks, do I learn that he “really likes her” and that he’s just not able to make a decision. Of course, he also adds in for good measure that he’s baffled why girls like him - yeah, makes two of us now. Big bang! Now, with the strings I let him attach to me frayed to the point of snapping, he emails me a Happy Valentines day email and says he’s sorry he didn’t call me when he said he would. Snap! Strings are cut and I’m off to dance through this miserable holiday solo convinced finally (and yes, again) that my ex is a child who will never make me happy.
FAIRY-TALE ENDING (NOT IN A GOOD WAY)
I had been dating my beloved for only a month. She was an incredible artist and talent – and an Apple Macintosh user. If only human romantic relationships had the fellowship and devotion that binds Mac fanciers together …But I am getting head of myself…
When I witnessed a bad scene between her and her son over time on their lone Apple Macintosh desktop PC, I felt I could do my manly part out to ensure domestic tranquility. I hauled over a multimedia Mac of my own to contribute for the boy’s use. Why not? I thought of myself as gradually being embraced as part of this household anyway. Whatever was mine was theirs. They (well, she, anyway) manifested warmest gratitude for the gift. They both ended up using it.
Jump to several months later, when I’ve gotten the message that she doesn’t want to have much anything to do with me. I still crave a visit when she allows, in the general manner of a panting stray dog that got a treat once, and still comes whimpering around, lured by the pleasant memories. I notice on these increasingly rare occasions that she maintains a distance of at least six feet away from me at all times.
This day she tells me I can take back the Macintosh; she’s upgraded and doesn’t need it anymore.
I obtain almost all my computers second-hand. I’ve seen things I perhaps shouldn’t have. With a foreboding feeling, I cautioned that she should ensure that all personal files in the hard drive are deleted. She agreed that this was good policy. I distinctly remember her passing on the instructions to the son.
When I got the poor, obsolete machine back across town to my place and switched it on, yes indeed, there are a number of their documents still inside. Including an old letter from her to her dear son, containing an insulting description of me. Any remaining illusions, denial, hopes or redemption thus dashed, I ceased seeing her altogether.
Moral: Females seem to have a thing for handing out poisoned Apples.
His name was Darius (OK, it wasn’t) and one night when I should have been doing something better than traversing the Net he IMed me and the whole thing started from there. He was in Chicago and I was in New York (strike one), he was too young for me (strike two), and … well, we’ll get to strike three in a minute.
A word about gay men and the Internet: contrary to popular belief (including mine), we’re not all out there trolling for sex. Some of us are actually playing hopelessly romantic melds of Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy and Connie Francis in every movie she ever made, looking for true love where the boys are. This, alas, makes us vulnerable to sneak attack, even when we are at an age and level of romantic experience when we should be well immune.
Such it was with me and Darius, as we embarked on a four-year, up-and-down, push-and-pull, blah blah blah (you get the general idea) long-distance romance that never quite gained traction but never completely disappeared. Finally, this past fall he came back with a vengeance and a full-court press to win me back for the Nth-to-the-power-of PII time, and this time the drawbridge went down over the emotional moat I’d built to keep him out (terrible metaphor, I know, but stay with me … this isn’t easy). I found myself back in the land of Olivia and Connie, swooning to his phone calls and e-mails and anticipating his visit.
He didn’t show. Typically, he never does. What broke us up was what always broke us up: he was closeted, a music minister in a black church intolerant to men who love other men, and his two worlds collided again, with me sustaining the battle wounds. So this time I decided a permanent break-up was in order. One of fittingly Cecil B. deMille proportions.
So one night, on a whim, I boarded a plane to Chicago, rented a car, drove two hours to the suburb where his church was located, and on a sunny Sunday morning walked in, unannounced, doing my best Joan Collins in the cliffhanger ending to season one of “Dynasty.” (Sans wide-brim hat and sunglasses.) I asked a girl here I could find Darius, and she led me to the classroom at the church where he was teaching Sunday school, no doubt the lesson about the evils of sodomy.
I walked in and he looked like someone who had just been shot; specifically, someone who’d just been shot in the balls. We had an awkward hug and I actually stayed for the two-hour church service that followed, ignoring the hissing and reproofs around me (as a white gay man from New York, I was pretty easy to spot). Heaven forbid–a sinner in the house!
I must say that quite a few people there were actually quite gracious, including Darius’ mother, whom I’d never met. In hindsight, I wished I’d dated HER. It might have turned out better.
After the service we had it out, at last and for good, and I left him with a touch on the cheek and a feeling that at last I’d been able to close the whole thing. He climbed safely back into his closet, organ music blaring in the background, and I drove back to Chicago and the airport. And declared that Billy Joel was right. The sinners are much more fun.
To me, airports represent upheaval and transience. My most important battles have been fought and lost in stuffy smoking lounges and overpriced souvenir stands. The moments when I’ve been most genuinely alone were in a crowd of impermanent people.
My ex was a long distance ex. I spent many weary hours wedged in uncomfortable coach seats. I’ve measured my life in inches of legroom and distance between gates. The feelings of loss and hopefulness mingled imperceptibly at each takeoff and landing.
I remember pacing the lounge impatiently before my final trip, studying the pilots in yesterday’s wrinkled dress shirts, reveling in the sound of high heels and miniature wheels clacking against linoleum.
The drive to the airport had been spent awash in tears. I begged and reasoned and sacrificed my dignity to try to convince a man who didn’t love me that in fact, he did. I conjured up images of the past three years, giving them a new coat of unrealistic paint. I staunchly ignored everything my ex said, true as it may have been. He told me our relationship was going nowhere; neither of us was gaining anything. He promised that with a little distance, I would see this in a new light. I wanted so much to resist the disorder and confusion I would meet inside the airport. I wanted to keep my feet planted firmly of the ground.
He walked me up to the security gate. Suddenly I was pitched back into the lonely world of the travel-weary. I felt like I couldn’t go home. I wanted so much to hop from airport to airport indefinitely. I wanted to watch the
earth disappear and reappear as I sliced through its atmosphere. I wanted to feel my back ache from the lounge seats and my vision blur from the harsh lighting. I wanted to breathe recycled air and walk unhurriedly through the terminals. I wanted to know only the outskirts of the cities in which I touched down and know them only from an airplane window.
My plane stopped over in San Diego, where my closest friends live. My itinerary would have me sit patiently on the same plane while the San Diego people alighted and then it would carry me to Oakland. Instead I deplaned without a word to the fight attendants, leaving my checked luggage to the fates. Only when I was sitting outside the airport did I consider my utter lack of a plan – no money, no way home, not even any clothes to change into. But I was elated. Instead of feeling heavy and alone, I felt light and free. I went back inside to explain to the desk clerk my absence from the flight to Oakland. She laughed good-naturedly and phoned the gate where my flight was holding. I phoned my friends and spent a week at their house, feeling surprisingly weightless and bright. I took the train home.
A few days ago I discovered the guy I had been seeing was cheating on me. How did I discover this? By reading a blog on his MySpace profile. He is an adjunct (read: part-time/job-seeking) academic professional in his mid-30s who picked up a 19-year-old punk rock girl in a bar three weeks ago. She has a MySpace profile posting a range of subculture garbage including aliens, dead people, punks, drugs, sexually explicit discussions, etc. She was listed as one of his “friends” on the profile. I clicked on her picture and found a virtual mini-timeline of their entire relationship posted for all of the world to see.
I should have realized that this might happen as his ex-girlfriend was his 20-year-old student when he met her.
The two of them have been posting how they feel about one another/the things they are going to do to each other on this girl’s MySpace blog for the entire duration of our relationship. I had not seen him from the last week in February through the third week in March as he had been in China on vacation. While he was on vacation he rarely emailed me, claiming that he didn’t have access to an Internet cafe. Apparently he had access the entire time as he had been emailing blogs on MySpace to this girl in verifiable baby-talk language during the dates he was in Asia. Picture a college English professor blogging to a child in language like “when we get drunk together like Poconos?” (this is an exact quote from the blog.)
When he returned from China, we saw one another right away and then he told me he had to go to a conference in Ohio for three days (this was last week.) While he was gone, I was browsing through his profile, and clicked on the strange “friend” that didn’t seem to fit in with his other “friends.” This girl had posted many explicit blogs about her relationship with a guy she referred to as “Flutterbutt.” My ears didn’t prick up until I read that she “couldn’t wait until they had upside down alien sex in Ohio.”
So, he basically ran off with this 19-year-old weirdo to Ohio for the week following a night of sleeping with me and promising to call me as soon as he returned. As he kissed me good-bye, he promised to send me a love letter while he was gone.
I called him on his cell while he was at this conference (apparently with this girl) and told him the gig was up and he needed to call me and explain what the hell was going on. Instead of calling me, he waited until he returned into town (coward) and sent me an email instead. I will cut and paste the email that he sent to me and my response to that email below (note his grammar - this is a straight cut and paste.)
His email:
Though there is no excuse for lying to you I’ll tell you the whole story so you will at least know the extent of it. The two weeks before I left for China I went to a bar in my neighborhood by myself for a drink. I met a girl there, an undergrad at XXXXX, and we had a pretty good talk for an hour. Then she and I went our seperate ways. One week before I went to China I went back to the bar, not particularly expecting to see her again, but there she was. We came back to my place, and did the same for the next two nights. It seemed like a three night stand but more intense. We corresponded a bit while I was away, and the week I got back I offered to take her with me to Ohio.
I’m apologize for my deplorable conduct. I thought it was too early to decide what relationships were going to work out and what weren’t, and I guess this proves ours isn’t.
Take care,
XXXXX
My response to his email:
Dear, XXXXX:
Thought I would send you a couple of final notes to sort of round everything off. Circulated your little note to “the gang” and here is the consensus among us about you, your current situation and the “interesting” choices you have been making:
(kinda like David Letterman’s “Top Ten” - Let’s call it “XXX’s Top 10 Reasons
Why XXXX Is a Jerk-Off”)
1) Your ego is so large and your self-esteem so low that you need to be with a fawning teenager to maintain stability.
When you told me your biggest problem was “being too much of a pleaser” did that include the lies, email and fucking around (?) I think you need to look up the meaning of the word.
2) You are a 34-year-old hanging out with 19 year-olds who use drugs, have poor grammar, consider showering optional and watch movies like “ten things I hate about you” to relive your youth and convince yourself you really aren’t almost middle aged, jobless and about to get kicked out of your apartment.
3) You wanted to get caught so you did the blog instead of choose honesty as a method of communicating the fact that you were fucking someone else.
4) We all agree that you have terrible grammar and are trying to figure out who you paid to get into XXX University. Money is on family cronyism.
5) You really are a dilletante.
6) There are about three more women you need to call. Have you had enough time since you returned or should they just be directed to the myspace blog?
7) A timely and helpful discussion topic for your next shrink’s visit: your struggles with sociopathy (defined a person who has no feelings of empathy)
9) Your “swinging” myspace lifestyle makes you part of a subculture that is so ridiculous it should be sold as a parody on Saturday Night Live. Hey - maybe that’s how you can pay your rent and international vacations for
the next six months!
10) Where the fuck is my letter?
Take care,
XXXXX
It down poured rain on the way to our blind date. Without an umbrella I used my newspaper, and the print was tattooed on my face when I arrived. He wrote for the newspaper that was on my face and we laughed about it, and laughed and talked for another three hours. At eleven we decided to get something to eat, and he grabbed my hands from across the table, looked in to my eyes, and said something close to, “you know when you wake up in the morning, in the semi conscious state, and you’re dreaming of the woman you’ve been looking for all your life, and you come to and realize she’s make believe? Well, you’re that woman.” I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, or said it so quickly, but I could nod, understanding what was there. Our next date lasted 72 hours. He joined me for thanksgiving with my friends shortly after and they embraced him like he was going to be around for a long time.
Until we went to dinner a month later, a routine, lets-fill-our-stomachs dinner. We hadn’t exchanged much in the way of past relationships – and it seemed beside the point, which was part of the beauty of it – but tonight we broached the subject. I said that I had been engaged nearly a decade ago, recounted the relationship in that detached way that comes with time, sharing warm anecdotes about the engagement and a brief, wince-inducing summary of the break-up (my doing). He kept asking questions, and I kept answering, trying and failing to change the subject. We left, started walking, and I cried. Not hysterically crying, but a kind of honest, wistful crying. The restaurant was a few blocks from his place, we went up, I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, wiped away the tears, and attributed it to exhaustion that week. I came out, he said that he thought I should probably leave, we walked out with his dog, and he said goodbye, with “I just can’t handle psycho-drama.” No touch, no warmth. We met again a week later, and he said, that he was perplexed as I was by went wrong, since he hadn’t gone “from so hot to so cold, in such record time.” Three weeks later I said that those words would go down as some of the most painful I’d heard, and he said, taken aback, that he meant no offense, since I had been the one who pushed him away.
It haunts me months later. I’m dating again, but he always hovers somewhere close, reminding myself to do nothing unintentional to push the person away.
I present you readers my list documenting the pros and cons of a long-gone relationship that kicked my ass for reasons still not quite apparent to me. But two years pared down to twelve items–there’s nothing sweeter than terse finality.
Pros:
1) HOT! A yoga teacher, an avid bike rider, a former model and erstwhile Buddhist monk. He looked like a blonde version of Tom Cruise.
2) An excellent kisser. Foreplay? Two thumbs up.
3) He loved me right off the bat, and told me so within three days of acquaintance, not like my boyfriend at the time, who in a three-year’s lifespan of a relationship never uttered the words “I love you.”
4) He believed, with every tendon, fiber, and iota of his being, that our love was sacred.
Cons:
He, like me, let the relationship die a slow, painful, agonizing death.
1) He came too fast because…
2) He was sixteen years my senior.
3) He felt that he was above pop culture and refused to watch “The Simpsons.”
4) He was THAT guy who always wanted to sit on the same side of the table at busy restaurants and insisted we do so, always, despite nuclear glares from maitre d’s.
5) He was too earnest and got none of my jokes, which most of the time favor irony.
6) He completely lost his cool in New York City when he came for a visit. No one would have been able to tell that this man taught yogic principles, relayed Buddhist scriptures, or helped people with meditation for a living.
7) He yelled at car service drivers and didn’t like my friends.
Le fin. Easy peasy.
He came into my life like a raging tornado, sweeping me up and everything connected to me, especially my heart. I was stuck in a painful recovery process dealing with an awful, long, drawn out break up from an equally awful, long, drawn out relationship (one that should have ended long before its 20-year mark). After 8 months of retreating into a self-protective shell and scraping together what was left of my self-esteem, he came into my life and “rescued” me from despair by treating me like a queen from day one. He told me all the things I had ever wanted to hear that was missing from my former crappy 20-year relationship. He said I was “THE ONE”, that I was beautiful every day, that he saw marriage, children, and growing old together with me. He said, “trust me”. Sexually he was perfect - extremely giving, intense, passionate, and displaying expertise in all things pleasurable to me.
Wow… I felt like I had hit the lottery. Bliss is what I felt.
But, funny enough, I also had this nagging feeling that the lottery money would one day be gone and I’d be left holding an empty bag. That day came exactly on our 3-month “anniversary”. He literally woke up that morning, told me his feelings for me had run their course, said he was no good at doing relationships, he didn’t want to hurt me, I deserved better… you know, the standard breakup fare. It ended with him giving me the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, and then he left. I don’t really know what happened, if he got scared or overwhelmed and realized he was in over his head, or if he hated something about me and was mad at me for it, or if he found someone else. I will never know. I never saw nor heard from him again after that, and I didn’t bother trying to reach him either. My heart was broken once again, but this time was different: I was wiser and stronger.
The biggest lesson I learned from “the break up that would never end” is to let go when someone no longer wants you. No emotional blackmailing, no pleading or crying, no begging or demanding explanations. As painful as it is, holding back your emotions and letting someone go saves a lot of pain in the long run. As it stands, I mostly remember him with a smile rather than with tears/hatred/disdain/disgust (check all that apply). Yes, it was a crappy way to leave, but at the same time, he made it real easy for me, too (just think - he could’ve been a stalker or worse).
I think of him sometimes and wonder where he is in this world and how he is doing. While I am perplexed and dumbfounded at the level of intensity he seemed to feel for me in the beginning, only to have it drop off just like that, over time I came to feel that he was just what I needed to get over the hump of despair that I was stuck in. I truly believe that people come into your life for reasons not always obvious at the time. I will forever be grateful to him for helping me find my “hotness factor” and allowing me to feel confident in my abilities to be the strong, proud, and beautiful queen that I am.
No one has a better “ex-story” than I do. Believe me, I have seen, done, and dated it all. The thing that brings me to write something regarding this subject is no matter how we label those individuals whom we previously dated, they will always remain someone who has touched our hearts and left an imprint on our abilities to love. Now, I don’t mean the one person you went on a few dates with and imagined yourself having kids with. I am talking about the love, in which you can probably count on one hand, which shook you to your core and temporarily changed your life.
If an observer were to open my, what we like to call, “ex-files”, they would find a history of men which I left with bleeding wounds, or to the lay person, a broken heart. I had never had my heart broken, until that one guy, every one knows who I’m talking about, manages to take a grasp of your heart and squeeze it until it pops in your face- leaving you with a bleeding wound of your own. Well, this is what happened to me. Heart. Pop. Blood. Face.
I have spent the past couple months trying to wipe the blood off my face and move on with my life. I have tried everything in my power to get over him. Such attempts include, but are not limited to:
Running up my phone bill to vent to my friends about how much I hated the way he dressed; crying myself to sleep only to wake up with mascara run eyes and a slight heart attack as I look at myself in the mirror; eating pints and pints of Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream only for it to end up on my ass; and of course, the infamous reading of old love letters only to have the sheer satisfaction of ripping them up later.
Although I was able to fly through life without a broken heart, I wish someone had taught me how to heal a gapping wound. Instead of taking such electives as astronomy or botany in college, schools should offer electives that instruct the common heartbroken-individual how to easily cope with getting over your ex.
So, my ex-story doesn’t consist of him sleeping with someone else or his inabilities to love someone other than himself. This submission is spreading the very strong message that it is not pathetic that it has been half a year since that special someone, or un-special someone, has broken your heart. Healing a broken heart takes time. Removing someone from your life who was in your daily routine is hard and takes courage. Unfortunately, Broken Heart 101 is not an option and we must learn from others about getting over someone. This is why I respect the many people who submitted stories. Having a broken heart is universal. Everyone has an ex and everyone has the ability to heal that gapping wound.
“The Donut-Cheeseburger Moment”
There is a moment in all failing relationships when you know things won’t last. For me, that moment was the donut-cheeseburger.
After two and a half years, I was slowly coming to accept that things were stalled. I wanted more, I wanted to change the past, I wanted things that were never going to happen. I wanted to drag things out as long as possible.
And then there was the BBQ.
BBQ’s in San Francisco are different. Owing to the cold and fog, many of our BBQs take place indoors, with only the grill master and a few die-hard cigarette smokers socializing outside.
It was a frigid spring day and everyone was crowded into the kitchen. We’d been drinking beer and snacking on the ubiqutous brie and hummus. A good time, but nothing spectacular. I was making more salad when I heard frantic shouts of “Molly!” Sensing emergency, a burn victim or other certain disaster, I moved toward the cachophony that was heading up the back steps.
It’s Richard*, they shouted. “Richard’s eating a cheeseburger between two Krispy Kremes!” Men were high-fiving, everyone was laughing. Except for me. My first thought was, “Now I know how Marge Simpson feels.” Then I felt my heart sink. I knew. I knew this was an omen, a sweet and greasy sign that things were over. There was no turning back to the time before the donut cheeseburger.
In my circle of friends, this moment of clarity has come to be known as the donut-cheeseburger. My tale is one of consolation and understanding for friends who are at the end of a relationship. I have been introduced to people at parties who ask, “Wait… Molly of the donut-cheeseburger Molly? I love that story! Let me tell you when I knew things were over with my ex…”
I am on friendly terms with my ex and now I can laugh about the donut-cheeseburger. It’s a popular and often-requested parlor story. Sometimes it’s a double-cheeseburger between the donuts, and maybe once it was a bacon cheeseburger. But its role is clear: there is a time when we know things are over, and we cannot ignore the sign.
*name changed to protect the guilty
Molly Ditmore lives in San Francisco where she and her husband host indoor bar-b-ques. She writes about style at Molly Bloom and blogs about daily life at Molly Golightly.
“Moving Day”
She told me she needed a big truckload of her own space. When I gave it to her, she backed it up to our front door and abruptly filled it with her belongings.
“My security deposit!” I snapped when the love seat, reluctant to leave, screeched and clawed the linoleum as it was dragged out. She left Hiroshima outlines on dusty shelves where her volumes once stood, and transformed the closet into a mobile of swinging boomerangs. She said I could keep the kitchen table, now a tea and coffee ring chart of our waxing and waning phases. For me, it’s a record of morning conversations while we watched the cat chase invisible prey.
“It reminds me of you,” she told me. “Luke warm weak tea.”
She doesn’t know I kept the scrabble game. I sometimes play against myself.
“Gone but not forgotten”
She was lovely, young and ripe for the picking. A 19 yr old virgin, while I was 25 and just divorced. It was all lust and fun the first three yrs of our marriage. But when the kids were born, 2 back to back, she changed. Stopped caring, and the children were too much for her to handle. Her personal need for attention grew and she became just another child. Years pasted with me taking care of the three of them only distinguishable by the age difference, all children. As the two grew and matured, she digressed. First it was illness she feigned, and when that failed to satisfy her need she turned to aggression, that boardered on manic. She took it out on all of us. After the kids left for college, she turned her rath and assaulted the wrong person, was arrested and jailed. Only then did I actually see, realise the barrenness of it all. I left and never looked back.
The Perfect Life
Starts out just like anyone elses does. You marry your highschool sweetheart, you have plenty of laughs, and lots of sex. Next thing you know, your pregnant. As with most young couples who just finding out they are having a baby, you are both excited, and scared. You spend all your hard earned dollars planning, and painting the nursery. You get cute little outfits that say “ Daddy’s Boy” or whatever, and 75 jumbo packs of diapers to line your garage with until the baby arrives.
All the while, your time is spent reassuring your pregnant wife that she is more beautiful than ever, and that your not planning to leave her for a younger, less pregnant woman. Doctors visits, vomiting sessions, and dealing with the effects of mood swings that would bring the strongest men to tears occupy the rest of your days until “the day”.
“The day”, that transforms you from a person, into a parent. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it did happen to me. From hearing his first cry, to this day, there is no one that I love more.
One would think that having a new baby in the house would be a joyous event, but please remember my previous paragraph “It doesn’t happen to everyone” In fact, it apparently has the opposite effect on some, and in others it goes to extremes. Post Partum Stress Disorder to the 10 power.
Symptoms of P.P.S.D-10x include but are not limited to:
Never holding your own baby
Never looking at your baby
The need to not live in the same house as your baby, because “I can hear him cry !”
For several months we sought help, and for several months we saw no results.
What was I to do ? My wife wanted nothing to do with our new baby. Or me either, IF I was holding, changing, or feeding etc…
I did the only thing I could do, I loved her, I sound proofed the house so the late night cries would not travel as far. I slept in the baby’s room, and relied on the nice ladies at day care to watch after the little one while I worked during the day.
I would dream of walking through the door after work one day, and she would be standing there ready to hug us both. Unfortunately, that never happened. She existed like that for 364 days before she took her own life, one day prior, to my son’s 1st birthday party.
I still have the best part of her.
No words should ever be needed for some special break-ups. Not even a “It’s over”. One person eventually gets so creeped out by their partner, they immediately feel the need to change their name and phone number. Even if we don’t seriously change our names, we wish we could avoid talking to the other person forever, including the avoidance of the “it’s not me, it’s you” speech.
Upon returning from a long trip early because a family member was gravely ill, I needed to take a few hours in solitude. I informed the house-sitting “boyfriend” prior to my arrival, and he agreed to leave my place to give me time to decompress.. alone.
Alone is not what I felt when I walked into my bedroom to find all four walls covered from carpet to ceiling with letter sized sheets of paper displaying such bold handwritten statements as “I love you” and “you (heart) me”. I never thought such loving words could feel so violating.
To the EX: if you’re reading this (which I know someday you’ll find, since you apparently always find my internet footprints, which is also absolutely skeevy), I AM talking about YOU, and that event was the last straw that ended our relationship. The other straw being the time you called me right after learning a family member of mine was in the hospital, to accuse me of cheating because I had a supportive friend who was keeping me company in times of hardship.
The most shocking part, the ex used to be normal.
….so I admit I’m a blonde. I accidently put a response to this on the main page. I believe it’s number 27 or 28 in the stories. Truly a doofus, I am.
Anyhoo…Read your story 3 times and didn’t get how you pushed him away. If he couldn’t handle you talking about the past, he should of stopped asking questions. Don’t let it haunt you. It’ll keep you down in future relationships. I think it was Genghis Kahn who said “That which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” Take the experience and redirect the negative energy into a positive lesson…one that doesn’t “hover”, like you said. I know that sounds like something from The Church of Divine Woo-Woo, but it seems to help me along.
Best wishes for a happier experience!
While I was at work, he decided to leave. He took every single trace of evidence that he ever existed. Even the rug that was crushed by the weight of his trunk had been fluffed — leaving no indentations. Every single strand of hair was excavated from the drain prior to my arrival home. The house was as if he and all his possessions were transported to another planet. I ran around the house and yard trying to find evidence that he was ever there. Did I imagine his kisses? Was there ever a tangible relationship?
Baseball and Beer
The end always brings a difficult set of choices and feelings, that’s why it’s the end. You have the end of a candy bar; if you eat it too fast, the last bite must be savored. The end of a beer could be warm and flat or it could leave you wanting more. The end of a ball game could be a disappointment or a joyous celebration. You never know what you are going to get when you get to the end.
When you come to the end of a relationship, you come to a major crossroad. Sometimes you take one direction in haste, feeling a sense of vindication. Only later do you face the sense of loss or void left from the relationship gone astray. You feel the loneliness at night, the missing phones calls, the quirky email that litter your inbox, and the weight of the decision hits like a hammer to the head.
You are then faced with choice number two: to call or not to call. Being the semi-neurotic chick that I am, I gave in…I called….a pattern. This never leads to any good. You have yet another set of choices from the outcome of the phone call. Either, you can choose to “try it again” or you are thrown into the back and forth that forced you to make the decision to go your separate ways in the first place. Is either a better option?
Let us look at option number one. You can “try it again.” There could be the honeymoon phase where you and your man try your hardest to make each other happy in hopes of making the relationship work this time. You are lovey-dovey all over again. OR, you could be the last sip of beer, warm and flat. It usually tends to be the latter, even if you start out trying. There was a reason for the initial split. We are who we are and can’t change that.
Which takes us to door number two, get thrown into the back and forth. Unfortunately, another bad choice. Limbo land is only fun on the beach. You are now forced to take a look inside yourself, which you have been doing for awhile already. However, is your partner doing the same? You are questioning yourself constantly, trying to make improvements that are so far beyond your control. Again, you are probably at this alone because the other party is more than likely completely unaware. Limbo land, save it for the beach.
It all boils down to this, baseball and beer kept you going for a while. You have lovely memories and a special bond. Sometimes, people aren’t supposed to stay forever. Love what was there, cherish what you remember, and don’t stop moving.
When feelings are intense, the end is truly a bummer.
We met in college. She: a naïve, Protestant country girl. Me: a Jewish, urban socialist.
We graduated, cohabitated, married, relocated, had children.
She grew intellectually and spiritually. I shrank mentally and cynically.
She told everyone but me of her unhappiness. I only told her I loved her.
She chose divorce instead of dialogue, her decision delivered while I recovered from life saving surgery.
She came to despise the person I had become. I came to realize she was not the person I had married.
She would do anything to expedite the process. I would do anything to avoid it. Friends, family and acquaintances took your side. They say there are two sides to every story. Except in divorce.
Five years later we have two homes, two children, two new lives.
It would have been 20 years tomorrow.
I hate what you’ve done to me and the children Christine.
At my most vulnerable, you chose to destroy all that we had worked toward.
I will never forgive you. Know that my future happiness will in one way or another rest on your misfortune.
When I was growing up, my mom would constantly complain about how small my eyes are. “You have moon-face,” she would say, an underhanded way of saying I look like I have Downs Syndrome. “So ug-u-ree.” But it wasn’t my fault — it was my parents’ Korean genes and not my choice to be born with tiny eyes that always appear to be pissed.
By the time 7th grade rolled around, I’d endured about 13 years of being teased about my “chinky” eyes, so that year, I started wearing layers of thick black eyeliner. When I went off to college, I started to wear eyeliner every single damn day, without fail. I was afraid people wouldn’t recognize me without it, or think I was ugly.
Every boyfriend I had would ask to see me without my eyeliner on. “Sure,” I’d say, blushing and looking down. “Someday.”
When I was 19, the one man I fell head over heels in love with asked me almost everyday to take off my eyeliner. Everyday for nearly a year. I never did. I thought if I showed him, he’d be appalled and leave me. In the end, I had many more secrets besides how I look without a black ring around my eyes that he did eventually leave me.
The last boyfriend I had asked me, too, to take off my eyeliner. We were together for over a year, and we moved in together. I figured we might get married eventually, because we had so much in common. We had the same birthday, we were awkward at social gatherings, we liked to drink beer and watch TV together. I met his dad, and we talked about getting a dog together. We even thought of a name for it — “Professor Applesauce.”
I figured that I was 21 years old now, we were living together, and if we were going to have a future together, I might as well show him what I really look like. So one night I washed everything off, turned off the light in the bedroom, and climbed into bed with him.
In the morning, when the light shone into the room, I begged him not to look at me, because I looked retarded and ugly. He said to me, “Don’t worry, babe. You’re beautiful to me no matter what,” but he looked away as he said it.
Eventually, he and I grew apart. He started “working late” and not coming home for dinner anymore. He’d come back drunk, and I’d find myself crying myself to sleep. I started to hate him.
When I started to pack my things to move out, I found something glittering at the bottom of his pants drawer. A girl’s bracelet. Not mine, and certainly not his. Then whose?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. But I knew he was lying.
Last week, I went to get the rest of my stuff. Somehow I’d forgotten my wafflemaker, some CDs, some magazines. I still had the keys to his place, and he was away for a few days for his sister’s wedding. I had told him well in advance that I’d be stopping by to retrieve the few belongings I had left behind. “Sure,” he said.
When I opened the door, my head started spinning. There was a small track jacket hanging up on the wall, next to his. Condoms on the table. Stains on the couch, no doubt from him fucking her on it. There were notes scrawled to each other on the chalkboard he and I had bought together. Perfume in the bathroom. Earrings on the dresser.
“Did you fuck her while we were still together?” I said into my cell phone. I was leaving him a voicemail because he was no longer answering my calls. “Did you?”
I know he’ll deny everything, while looking away. Now that I think of it, he and I never really made eye contact while talking. “It’s just feels weird,” he’d say. “I never really look anyone in the eye.” But maybe it was just with me, because of my ugly eyes.
I hope to never find out who this new girl is, and I’m not even sure if I want to know if he was screwing around on me with her while we were still together.
And though I may never see her, there’s no doubt in my mind that she has beautiful eyes.
Two Degrees
Lesbians really like each other. They must because there are never more than two degrees between them. I would love to pay my Italian cousin to “take care” of my ex’s — just a little re-location situation. A girl can dream.
So what’s a modern lesbian to do who lives in the Bay Area, or any area where packs of lesbians live, have L Word dinner parties, and go to the same two bars on every other Friday or second Thursday? Or who yearns for the yearly dyke march so we can have those lovely ex-girlfriend run-ins on the street while screaming into our cell phones to find our friends who used to be ex’s and are now official friend status again?
That’s a long way of saying: when a new bar opened near me, I was thrilled. I knew that every Wednesday, dyke night, I could go and find a new date. However on my first night there, enthusiastic and hopeful, I entered Charlie’s, a neighborhood bar where everyone knows your name and your business. I saw not two but three of my previous ex’s. Actually, the situation was more like three x two = six happy coupled-up ladies. I was thinking next time I go, I should just park it at the bar and do shots for every ex that comes in. And then an extra one for the new soul mate I was sure to meet that night.
The answer? FOB! The Festival of Babes, a marathon of soccer by day and parties by night, when athletic wear gives way to naughty nurse’s uniforms and Catholic boarding school skirts. FOB is designed to be about free and easy jello shots and free and easy lovin’.
The first night a few party girls and I all drove home from the games and then the post-party together at 11pm singing “We are Family” while wondering when the action would start. What I got instead of action was an appearance of my latest Nerve.com date, the one who thought, “Let’s see in my closet: I have 10-year-old Teva’s and yoga pants, I think that’s a great outfit for my first date.” OK, she was very nice. And we had some fun. But Tevas?
Night two: lot’s of sweaty lesbians, the same hip hop song from the 90’s on heavy rotation … but no love. Good thing my Teva-wearing lady was there and bought me a drink — while she downed her thirteenth Long Island Iced Tea and slurred her words. It was charming, really. I think she took dance lessons from her favorite episode of Seinfeld (you know the one where Elaine stole the show). And as I was leaving, Nerve.com gal leaned over in a whiskey-laden whisper and asked me to go kayaking.
Not all was lost, I did see one girl I wanted to kiss. I asked her out the next sober day via email. Naturally, her current girlfriend is my ex’s tenant.
By Tai Moses
When I was 14, I went on vacation with my family to Yosemite Valley, where I met a boy named Andy who was
15. He was from the Midwest, an exotic place I’d only read about in books. We walked in the meadows and held
hands and kissed under the pine trees. When we left we both promised to write. I wrote first. He wrote back immediately and his letter was strange. Beneath three carefully printed paragraphs about how he was working on his motorcycle and had won a race and was looking forward to kissing me again was a scrawled sentence in childish handwriting. It said, Andys a liar he dunt have a motorcycle and never been in a race, signed, his little brother Steve.
Googling the Dead
Like most computer-literate Americans, I find that one of my main activities on the web is looking up (or “Googling”) people I used to know. But when, a few years ago, I Googled one of my old girlfriends, Karen Dollinger, and found an obituary, I was devastated, even though we had never been “in love” per se.
Karen and I met through an ad I placed in the Village Voice back in the late ‘80s. Karen was a psychiatrist, very impressive to me, and I really got a kick out of the fact that she would consider me, who had a history of childhood emotional problems, suitable material to go out with. She was very heavy, about 250 pounds, and for that reason, men had avoided her for most of her life. But since I’m really attracted to large women, her body was an incredible turn-on. I couldn’t get enough of her, with her gigantic legs, ass and breasts, and sometimes we’d have sex several times in a day.
I would play little verbal games with her:
“Karen, could you look at the clock and tell me what time it is?”
“Eleven o’clock. Why?”
“What do you think we’ll be saying to each other at midnight?”
“Oh, please fuck me!”
“And what do you think we’ll be saying at one o’clock?”
“Oh, PLEASE, fuck me!”
Karen and I had a strange relationship — we spent weekends together, but during the week, it seemed like we hardly knew each other. We had gone to the same state university, but outside of music and films, we didn’t really share each other’s interests. She was really into horses, having ridden from childhood, and owned at least one, which she kept at a friend’s farm upstate (I always suspected she was trying to hide the fact that she came from a fairly wealthy background; for example, she had owned a BMW in college, but claimed she’d gotten the money from an accident settlement).
She shared none of my consuming interest in politics — she never watched the evening news or read the newspaper, and once asked me, “Who’s Al Sharpton?” Although we were both Jewish, it also shocked me that she was so non-religious, she treated even Yom Kippur like it was just another day (she described her family, who I never met, as being “extremely white-bread”). Although I’m far from being Orthodox, I have strong religious and spiritual beliefs, and her total indifference threw me for a loop (at least if she’d told me she was a militant atheist, that would have been something!)
Still, I respected her intelligence, and I liked her lack of pretense and the fact that we had really intense conversations. I might have turned her off a few times by yelling enthusiastically, in bed, about her “big fat ass” — to me saying this was merely an intensely sexual turn-on, but to her it was probably a reminder of the insults she’d gotten throughout her life. Then, there was the matter of my asthma, which was pretty serious back then and which made me cough and wheeze constantly. She thought it was psychosomatic and advised me to return to therapy. She would have been better off telling me to go to a good pulmonary specialist, like the one who finally helped me a few years later.
The relationship lasted about nine months — we both sort of understood, from the very beginning, that it was basically temporary, and that at some point we’d move on to other partners. Still, I assumed that we’d always be friends, and I was shocked when she decided to cut off all contact with me (my leftist friend Bert later said this was proof of how “conventional” she was, since, “middle class-type women, unlike artistic and intellectual types, rarely have stay in touch with their ex-boyfriends”). About a year later, another friend, Alan, answered a personal ad that she herself had placed, and I was relieved when she dropped him after two dates.
The obit said that she lived up in Putnam County and was married with two children. It didn’t give the cause of death — I wondered whether she had killed herself, since she always used to talk about how depressed she was. She might also have died of a heart attack. She herself had predicted this, since her mother had also died of one in her forties. At any rate, here’s a shout out to Karen, I wasn’t in love with you, but I still feel love for you.
And I hope we’ll meet n the next world.
“Not a Day Goes By”
He had his ears pierced and silky long hair. He smoked too much and always wore sunglasses. The teachers thought he was bad news until I started dating him, and then they probably looked at me a little less innocently.
He was my first everything. He was a year older, but he was gentle. We waited five months to have sex, and then I lost my virginity in his single bed, with my socks on in case his mother came home. Somehow it made sense.
He cast me in our high school’s plays and held me when I missed my newly dead mother or got a bad grade. We passed a green spiral notebook back and forth between classes my whole junior year. We partied at friends’ houses when parents were away and went to the prom and helped his mom make chicken salad for dinner and watched shooting stars from the quiet beach house porch.
When I left for college, he partied harder and did heavier drugs. The drugs turned him mean. One summer he pushed me hard and my dad saw it from the top of the stairs. That was a tough one to explain. Soberly the next morning, he pleaded for forgiveness, and I screamed at the top of my 19-year-old lungs that if it ever happened again, we were done. It didn’t happen again.
I forgave, but I never forgot.
A year later, when I was a little older and a lot less in mourning, we were celebrating our fourth anniversary with a long distance phone call when he passed out on the phone. It went dead. I was worried that he’d hit his head, so I called repeatedly until 5 am when his mom finally found him and recovered the phone. Her son had pissed himself and passed out in the downstairs bathroom, she said. Did I think he was doing drugs again?
A few days later, I broke up with him on the phone. He asked if I didn’t love him anymore. I didn’t know it until I said it, and then it was true. He wanted me to tell him face-to-face so he could see my eyes. I wouldn’t.
He told people he never thought I’d break up with him. He wouldn’t let me go. Showed up in places where he thought I’d be. Put an Andre the Giant sticker on my bumper (I’d taken off the one he’d given me) in the middle of the night while I was home for spring break. The police couldn’t do anything because there was no proof. He left so many drunken, 3 am messages that the phone company kindly sent a letter of warning to his parents’ house (I bet his military dad liked that one!). He haunted band message boards to read my posts. When he found out I’d moved to New York (by then I’d heard he was engaged), my late-night boozer began to strike again. The good ol’ phone company sent another letter and the neighborhood precinct helped me change my phone number for free.
Now when friends bump into him, my married ex-boyfriend says, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her.”
I think about him too, though it’s usually in the midst of nightmares. In them, we are finally face-to-face and my eyes are glowing the fieriest mixture of anger, fear, disappointment, sadness, and loss. But he claims it to be love.
Growing up, I was always jealous of my Korean and Filipino friends. They had such a beautiful, sexy, mystery about them, because of their pretty, round faces, perfect skin, and almond-shaped eyes. Jet-black hair and petite figures.
I’m half Irish, half Brasilian, but I look Irish. I’m tall, with big blue eyes, blonde hair and blonde eyebrows. I’m twenty-five, but without make-up, I’m twelve.
I still wish I looked different. I’m happy with myself, but I think everyone has certain things about themselves they wish they could change. The grass is always greener, right?
I loved reading this piece. I don’t know if this is fiction or non, but it was very powerful, and your honesty and vulnerability is touching.
And to you now I am nothing; I am no one to you now. Nor you to me; we’ve been erased. Like waking from a dream, I am, and you are faceless, voiceless. Snippets of moments — your hands on my body, my back against a cold tile wall — thin flashes that could have been anyone, no one, could have been from a movie I saw.
When you left our dim apartment, on a corner by a diner, between the sushi place and the saki place, where young white couples wheel baby carriages and walk small dogs just groomed, it got so very hard to breathe. Of course it did, it always does, when couples divide, when one is not ready. I saw you everywhere, and when I didn’t I imagined you, waiting on the front stoop, waiting outside my office building, waiting where you knew I’d be to tell me you’d been wrong. I cried walking home from the subway; I cried closing my front door. I cried in public, in rush hour sidewalk parades between suits and suits and suits, every face a pointed dart, unveering, unaware.
I kept walking and did not stop. You kept driving and did not stop. We kept going and kept going ’til we got so far apart, kept going, going, until everything that happened was only that, something that happened, a pictureshow across my eyes to be swallowed hard, down, down, away and gone from me.
“My Ex Sang Lead.”
My ex was the younger-by-minutes, less handsome, less athletic of two identical twins who had chosen, after years of grade and high school together, to attend the same liberal arts college. That’s where I met him, mop-topped and fresh-faced, a sophomore member of the less popular of two all male a cappella groups at school.
I already had a boyfriend when I arrived on campus, but I was a freshman girl seduced by the a cappella “scene.” When my ex invited me to my first a cappella concert that fall, he sang the lead solo in U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” I beamed when it was me (yes, me!) who was the object of his refrain, standing at the back of the auditorium in the college’s music building, while shrieking freshmen girls filled the seats in the rows up front. I was his at that first high note.
His family lived on a farm near Cooperstown where they raised alpacas and lived a quiet life. I met them once or twice, after concerts, standing awkwardly in a semi-circle (along with his ex), exchanging pleasantries and glares and other thoughts until my ex emerged from the backstage area to be congratulated. We’d hug him and tell him he was “sooooo good” and he’d say he’d meet me at the after party, current girlfriend territory.
Around Christmas of that year, after my ex had gifted me several skeins of alpaca wool from the family farm, I brought him home to New York City to meet my friends at a holiday party thrown annually by some parents. They called him “Snoopy” and thought he had a funny nose and floppy hair. They said he was a little short and extremely skittish. They were suspicious that his ex was attempting to maintain a friendship, but showed no interest in me. I retaliated by telling them that he had a beautiful voice, but he refused to sing carols with the rest of us later that evening.
Several months later, when my ex took on the daunting task of creating a multi-part arrangement of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” for his a cappella group, he became frenzied and irritable. I’d try my hardest to cheer him up, reassure him that he’d finish the project before the big spring concert, but he was inconsolable. One moment he’d be quietly sitting on my bed filling in notes on lined music paper, and the next, he’d gather all his stuff and abruptly leave the room. I didn’t know what was going on, but I figured it was just a bout of a cappella stress.
When I realized that my ex had been seeing his ex and I at the same time, I knew our brief romance was over.
As a freshman, it didn’t occur to me to be angry. If I lashed out, I’d be no better than a shrieking groupie—in the front row. So I decided I would go to another concert, showing good will. That spring, I took my normal spot near the back of the recital hall, with a view of the graduated seats, and I could see my ex’s ex sitting in the audience, perfect in her pink cashmere cable-knit sweater and jeans, the last time we’d be at one of these concerts together.
My ex sang—
“Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you,
But time makes you bolder,
Children get older,
I’m getting older too”
And I knew he wasn’t singing to me anymore.
Jenn Yee is writing a collection of short stories about her grandmother, Catholicism and fried chicken. She is a 2006 grant recipient from the Urban Artist Initiative/New York City.
My ex weighed 227 pounds and she was proud of it. In fact, everytime after we “did the bump,” as she referred to it as, she would wink at me and comment on how a quarter pounder with cheese ALWAYS went well after sex. Especially if it was bad, which was often.
My ex’s last name was actually the name of this web-site, but that’s not important. What is important is that she got pregnant and then blamed on me, even though I would always pull out everytime wearing a condom. Precaution never goes too far when you’re a junior and college bound.
Now, my ex didn’t so much blame me as in saying, “It’s your sperm, your child,” as she knew very well it couldn’t be mine. Might she have taken me up on going on Maury Povich for a paternity test as I requested, things would have been all but case closed, but she didn’t.
In fact, she wasn’t even blaming me for impregnating her, but rather, for being so bad in bed that it led her to be unfaithful and go with some other guy who impregnated her.
I was in a lose/lose situation here.
The reason I brought up the weight issue in the beginning, though, was not to poke fun at her. We both had our faults, mine being my love for eating icepops when we “did the bump.” But I mentioned it because, with such a great deal of poundage on her (and also a preference to wear overly baggy Pelle Pelle clothes), she was able to hide her pregnancy from her parents for six whole months.
SIX WHOLE MONTHS!
After the six months ended and the bump started to show, her parents came to me.
“What kind of man are you?” I’d get, which was always followed by, “You’re not a man, you’re a boy. A rotten, little bitch of a boy!”
And at seventeen, I was. I really was.
My ex eventually moved down to Georgia, had the baby, and left me alone forever. But it wasn’t until a whole year after the baby was born that she finally told them it wasn’t mine. Her parents sent me a card.
The only word on it was, “Sorry.”
My most recent ex was a sous chef in the restaurant where I worked over the summer. He wasn’t very cute but he was smart and we had this crazy chemistry that drove me crazy. He pissed the hell out of me. He had the stereotypical chef’s arrogant attitude but he was usually right. One time we got into a fight in the kitchen about ketchup. KETCHUP! He didn’t want to let one of my customers taste our red pepper ketchup that goes with our Kobe beef burger. He claimed he was trying to consider his bottom line. I told him it was FUCKING ketchup and stormed out of the kitchen. He admited he was wrong and gave me the ketchup. This was after we had broken up because he wanted more time to go to the gym but before he came groveling back saying breaking up with me was the dumbest thing he had done. I have to agree.
bummer. but good for you.
Being that I never bought into the idea of marriage, and “till death do we part,” I have a number of ex’s. I suggest that you buy a copy of my sort of memoir, “The Delivery Guy,” for any sort of delving into this. (www.lulu.com/mikelkpoet)
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The Delivery Guy is a short burst of the intense life of Atlanta music writer and poet Mikel K. K covered the bands for years and then started one, The Mikel K Band. Fistfights with famous front men, ejections from clubs and entrances into jail cells and mental institutions are all blatantly discussed in this intense book. K makes no apologies. K blames no one for the dire straights that his sex and drugs and rock n roll life style delivered him into. The Delivery Guy is profane. This book is not for the fainthearted. See a man transformed from one with lust for the cover of The Rolling Stone to a man happy to sit in the bleachers at kid ball and watch his son run around the bases. The beginning and the middle of this book are ugly, gruesome nearly, but there is a happy ending. The Delivery Guy delivers. This book will not bore you. It will scare you. It will make you scream. It will make you laugh and shout.
The one who shattered my moment, my memories, my life and me: was a Fin from New York I met in Vermont. She was tall, and blond with the eyes of ocean water in bright sunlight, long legs and a very short memory for pain. I had to have her, and I did in every way possible. But once I had her heart, I was desperate to run. She skin smelled like perfection, even in the morning, her hair like sunshine but she had baggage that was increasingly difficult to bear and ten years longer in her life then I at the time. I was 23. She was 30, divorced, two small children, an ex-husband and a history of verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Funny when you lie down with someone, never meaning to get up, you never notice the puddles of regrets that fall from them. I needed the night life, more legs, more lips and breasts, and I had them too, faithfully breaking her heart each time. Years went by and I met a young law student, dark hair, fickle, irish eyes and the tenacity of the irish to keep me. She had me. I never forgot my Fin but though I no longer miss her, I miss our youth, her innocence and even mine. At 47, she is in a relationship with someone who is abusive, manic depressive, spent years on disability for mental issues, unemployed an d a severe alcoholic. I wonder still whether her puddles of regrets, have now become chasms filled with lives of her own unspent, unlived. She hates me for getting away. I see her in the sunshine still…I see her failing, but not so quiet desperation for happyness.