My Only Onliest One

I've willfully broken up with two boyfriends. In one case the relationship had run its course and in the other it stagnated and stuck in its heels when it should have been progressing into some of the most exciting uncharted waters. Thoughtful and deliberate person that I am, these breakups were never the fallout of fickle moodswings or faulty reasoning. They were decisions made with respect and care and goodwill toward all involved.

For what it's worth, I've felt relatively good about these breakups because they were proof that I was thinking straight and looking out for my best interests and never settling for less than what I like to imagine I deserve. These are the relationships I've walked away from with insights about myself, new understandings of the male mind and heart, and lessons about how to love, be loved, and be in love. Granted, breaking up never felt good, but it wasn't ever entirely bad either. There's relief in letting go of something that is fatally flawed and headed nowhere.

But breaking up is one thing. Getting dumped is another. All of the good that comes from releasing a troubled relationship in a breakup is missing when you are dumped by someone you still want.

When I was twelve, I fell in love--real love--for the first time with Matt Jones, center of attention, slick and smooth as a bridge in winter, hopelessly unGoogleable these days, and still the guy other guys try to eclipse in my memory. He was better to me than any twelve-year-old boy should know how to be to a girl, and I thought he was the greatest thing in the world. He gave me a ring decorated with a heart made of real turquoise and he held my hand under our jackets while we sat in the front seat of my mom's car as she drove us to and from junior high. In class he passed me notes full of the most wonderful and dramatic sentiments and every time he was away visiting family in Elko, Nevada, for a week, he wrote me long letters bursting with sweet words and Lagerfeld Photo cologne. The stuff liquifies my knees to this day.

Matt and I dated for eight months, which was quite a feat because, for one, we lived miles and miles away from each other and had to rely on the unreliable whims of our parents in order to see each other outside of school, and two, eight months is mathematically equal to eternity when you're in seventh grade, and eternity is a long time to stay with anyone, I don't care how old you are.

The story goes that one night Matt hung out with this hippy girl named Steffanie and her boyfriend Noodle at a pool hall and they smoked pot and in that one evening he decided he'd become a pot-smoking, pool-shooting hippy too, and the next day he showed up in full grunge attire and refused to have anything to do with me, no explanation given. After he slipped me a note in the car about how I didn't fit into his new life, I cried all the way home in front of the carpool parent and the kids I would have to see every day for the rest of the school year. I felt stupid and I knew I looked stupid and I hated that I'd turned into a sniveling wimp, but I couldn't stop the tears and the snot and the audible sobbing and choking. But to tell the truth, I didn't really want to stop and I didn't think I should stop because I knew THIS was big and THIS was something and THIS was worth crying over, no matter who saw me or what they thought.

I did some crazy things for months afteward, things that made me feel like I wasn't myself, like a part in my brain had shaken loose and was rattling around and bumping into things inside my head, causing synapses to fire that shouldn't be firing, making my body do things it shouldn't and my mouth say things it oughtn't. I felt like I didn't have any control over my life.

Matt refused to talk to me about what was going on and explain why he'd had the sudden and inexplicable change of heart, but I couldn't just let it go. I needed to resolve some things, whether he wanted to or not. One day when the carpool dropped him off at home, I jumped out of the car and ran into his house and into his room. Instead of talking to me, though, he acted like he didn't care and just let me sit there alone on his bed while he watched tv in the living room. The carpool parent called my mom, of course, and when she showed up to retrieve me, I locked myself in Matt's room, sandwiched my body between his bed and the wall, and called up his across-the-street friend Gary, who may have been the Littlest Drug Dealer and not the best company, but he was close and on my side and my only defense against my mother, who was ferreting me out. There was running and jumping of hedges and kicking and screaming and flailing and crying before I left Matt that day, and that is so not me and so far removed from the way I handle situations that I literally thought I was losing my thirteen-year-old mind.

I didn't get over Matt until I was sixteen. In the intervening years, I cried, I pined, I wrote stories and poems about him, I composed music, I made mix tapes, for months I hardly ate, hardly slept, hardly showered, could barely dress myself in the morning, and for a whole year I actually prayed for his well-being every night to a god I didn't believe in.

Looking back on that time now that I'm a grownup (ha!), you'd expect me to roll my eyes at what a silly, overreacting, melodramatic baby I was. You'd expect me to pass it off as unstable hormones and growing pains and all that other lovely puberty stuff. But honestly, I think I reacted exactly as I should have, exactly as the situation warranted. Even though I was only a kid and even though I've been unquestionably over him for almost a decade now, what I felt then was definitely big and definitely something and yes, even worth all the turmoil and just plain crap I went through for THREE WHOLE YEARS after he decided I clashed with his new image. When something extraordinary happens, I believe that extraordinary actions and reactions are not only acceptable but also in order, even if you end up doing crazy things you wouldn't normally do. It's a testament to the extraordinariness for the situation, I think. And what is love if not extraordinary?

Matt and I shared a lot of history after that. We were distant but deep friends throughout high school and we went through some nutty stuff too complicated to get into here that bonded us even tighter. We existed in completely separate social circles and he went through another three personality crises before settling for good on angry punk, but whenever it was just the two of us, everything was stripped down, peeled off, and broken open, and the chemistry was startling, even thought it was no longer romantic chemistry but more of a primal, animal thing (I don't know how else to describe it).

At a dance at the end of our senior year, I kept an eye out for him, hoping to sneak in the dance he promised we'd have before we graduated and moved on to the rest of our lives. At the close of the night, I remember standing in the middle of the dance floor, worrying that he'd not shown up at all, cursing the part of his personality that would make him skip a lame school function, even though he said he'd save a dance for me. Finally I spotted him across the room, and once he'd caught my eye, there was a frantic shoving through the crowd as we made our way to each other. We danced in silence, holding each other tight and close, and I felt no residual frustration, regret, or anger toward this boy who had shattered my heart and strung me along and done some really emotionally damaging things to me, whether he knew it or not. But in that moment, while we were dancing, there was nothing but love, the kind that exists between only the oldest, dearest friends. When the song ended and the crowd dispersed, we swayed in each other's arms a few minutes longer, our cheeks sweaty and slimy and stuck together. We caused a bit of a scene. It was something else, I tell ya.

We'd done a lot of growing up in the six years since we were in love with each other, and I left high school with peace of mind and closure and an assurance that he'd never be completely gone, which he hasn't been, not completely, even though I haven't talked to him in three or four years.

Since Matt Jones, I've had two spectacular long-term relationships, both of which I've broken off more or less willingly and learned a lot of valuable lessons from. But breaking up is nothing like being dumped, especially when it's by your first love and you're only thirteen. Here's what I know: The ones who leave you are the ones who stay with you and haunt your heart. They're the ones you didn't get sick of, the ones you didn't get bored with, the ones that didn't annoy you with their loud breathing and the way they scrape their teeth on their silverware when they eat. These ones are pure unfulfilled potential, a swimming pool of might-have-beens. The ones who leave always remain the perfectly imperfect people you worshipped and adored and desired and dreamed of and laughed with and learned from and smiled about in your sleep. In a way, these relationships are like a beautiful person who died young; it was tragic to see them go at the height of their greatness, but in the same breath, death has preserved them that way forever--they will never grow old and lose the blush of youth. In the same way, when love is taken before its time, you feel cheated, angry, like there's been some mistake that simply must be reversed somehow. It's impossible to shake something like that.

So this is for Matt Jones, the boy with the unGoogleable name who still nests in the little corner of my heart where he can guard the door, bouncing out the unworthy and admitting the guys who measure up to his high standards.

And this is also for anyone who's ever had someone taken away before they were ready to say goodbye. It hurts. I know.

wrote Leah at 6:41 AM | Comments (13)