Hey! I hope you are all doing as well as possible. It is such a privilege to be able to write these to you and I have been really enjoying the feedback I’ve received thus far. Keep it coming! Thanks again for reading, it really does mean a lot.
Last night, a friend told me that a friend told them that if I didn’t live in my head so much I would be a lot happier. This friend of a friend is on to something.
Sometimes miracles happen and I think well, wouldn’t this just make a lovely story.
What a shame, to live a life from the outside looking in. I guess I have always seen my life through the lens of a spectator. The issue is, that spectator is just another version of me and I have the most ridiculously warped perspective of the world. So many levels of bullshit.
I used to joke around with my friend that I wanted to marry her. I would tell her how beautiful she was and tell her that there was no one in the world for me besides her. She would laugh and I would laugh and I never meant it, but really I did mean it and when I laughed I laughed at myself and when she laughed she laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.
I took her to dinner last night. I said it would be, “the date I always dreamt of.” What a joke! I meant it. I love to set up scenes of a life I wish I could live.
I picked her up in my mom’s much nicer car and took her to a fancy restaurant in Buckhead. We sat at a table I requested be pre-set with a bottle of champagne. What a joke! The waitress introduced herself and said, “I understand we are on some kind of first date?!” I asked her to say that. I love that shit. My friend was mortified and we sat in near silence for what felt like centuries waiting for the waitress to open the bottle of champagne. Eventually, the manager came over and tried to open the bottle. They stood directly behind my friend, so as I looked at her trying to make conversation, I was baffled by the scene behind. What a moment. My friend asked me, “so, how was your hair transplant?” and I laughed.
Eventually we had drunk enough champagne to talk about my love for her, so we did just that. She asked me if I really liked her in high school. I said of course I did. She asked why and I said because she didn’t like me back, but that’s not really why and I told her that it’s because I’ve never met anyone else like her and I have always been enamored by her. That’s the truth.
I sobered up and she put on Soccer Mommy as we drove back to her house. She said I showed her the album Clean early in high school and I said I remembered and she said she couldn’t relate to the lyrics of “Still Clean”, even though that was the song I had shared with her and said reminded me of her. We sang along regardless.
Every day I wonder if I could possibly fall in love with another person and every day I find out yes I can. I have a catalog of fantasies in my head. Oh, to kiss him, to go to Italy with her, to share a bottle of wine with him, to play piano with her, and on and onwards et aeternum.
In my first semester at McGill, I met this boy named Lucas. He was a fourth year, older and supposedly wiser than me. Our first date was to a sleepy bar on a Monday night. We ordered one cocktail each the whole night. We talked for four hours straight without interruption. He asked me about my life and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. He asked about my family, my relationships with my siblings, my parents, my high school friends, ex lovers, where I’ve traveled, where my family is from. What really convinced me was that he asked me about where I wanted to travel, where I saw myself in the future, who I wanted to be and how I planned to get there. We talked about the end of the world because that is something our generation talks about a lot thanks to constant war-mongering, COVID, climate disasters, and countless other tragedies. He asked about where I would want to be when the world ended and I realized I had never thought of that before. I took a moment to think and told him I wanted to be laying on my mother’s chest so I could hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth. I stand by that to this day. I’m working to separate that truth from Lucas.
We left the bar after midnight. He walked me around the neighborhood, I was still new to the city. He took me to an old church and we watched the fountain out front and talked about something that at the time felt so, so important, but has since escaped me. When I got back to my dorm, I saw that he had texted me thanking me for the night and said I had made him think about a lot of things which I thought was strange because he asked most of the questions. The next day he said he stayed up late that night talking to his roommate about me and our conversation. He said he liked me, so I took that to mean that he liked me. My mistake.
Over the next few days, I reached out to him a couple times, but tried to play it cool. Eventually, we planned a second date and then he delayed it and then he delayed it again and again and again. We finally agreed on Tuesday at 1:30pm. That morning, I texted him confirming the date and he didn’t reply. At 1:25 I walked down to Roddick Gates, McGill’s front gates, where we had agreed to meet. I texted him asking for his ETA. It took maybe five minutes for him to respond that he “wasn’t looking for anything serious”. I remember all the exclamation marks he used in that awful text. What a joke, I can’t fucking believe this shit.
I spent the next few months trying to get over him, but I was so obsessed with his smile and the way he talked and the questions he asked me and his laugh. Only, now I look back and feel resentment.
The next semester, we matched again on Tinder or Hinge or something. What a joke! We texted for a bit about what we had been up to. After a few weeks of texting off and on, I asked him to meet me for a cup of coffee, but “not a date”. We met at a cafe and I ordered a coffee and he ordered a coffee and we sat and laughed because it was so strange to see his face again even though it had only been a few months. We talked, again, for four hours uninterrupted. This time, I asked just as many questions as him. I tried to figure out what his plan was after college. This was his last semester. We talked about our summer plans, we were both taking road trips across the country. He asked about what I had been writing about and I remember I pulled out my bible and read him some quotes or something for some reason. What a weirdo.
When we left the cafe, it was cold out, but it was my second semester, so I was getting used to it. The wind whipped the back of our necks. I remember how our eyes met so naturally, like they were meant for one another. Equidistant, parallel, congruent, aligned. He told me he was sorry. He said it was wrong what he did to me the prior semester. He said he wanted to do better “this time” and I believed him because that’s what I do when someone amazing and beautiful tells me something I want to hear. I told him that I was willing to give it a shot and that I really appreciated him apologizing and owning up to the immaturity of it all and we hugged and said goodbye see you soon let's hang out next weekend ok sounds great bye goodbye text me when you get back to your dorm ok will do thanks see you soon.
Next week we met for lunch and he took me to a few thrift stores afterwards. We laughed and smiled and I remembered seeing us together in a floor-length mirror in one of the stores and thinking dammit I don’t like these pants and I don’t like this jacket, so I bought new pants and found a new jacket and put them on and felt better. I remember he told me he didn’t know how to tie a tie and I laughed and he asked me to show him and he lowered his mask as I put my arms around his shoulders and tied his tie, my hands shaking and my mind in 10,000 different places all at once. I didn’t kiss him because I didn’t know what would happen if I did.
I can’t remember the exact timeline of what happened after that date. We may have gone on another date, I don’t know. What I do remember is going to a rave with friends and him showing up with his friends and ignoring me after not talking to me for several weeks. It felt like shit and I was drunk and mad and in love, so I pulled him aside and shouted in his ear over the music, “Remember how you said you would treat me better earlier this semester? You’re doing a pretty shit job at it.” And he said something like, “you said you wanted a friend and I have been a friend” and I was drunk and mad, so I left the rave and walked block after block in the wrong direction in the cold. I wanted to fight someone (I wanted to be beaten by someone), so I was going to try and fight the bouncers at this one club who are known to be complicit in rape and sexual assault. Before I could get to the club, I was hit by a cab and thrown probably five feet onto my side. I was drunk, so it didn’t hurt and I laughed and the cab driver was mortified, so he gave me a free ride home and I thanked him and he told me not to worry about anything and to find a wife who loves me who I can come home to who will give me kids to focus on and give the rest of my love to. He said that that is what he did and then he threw it all away and he wished he didn’t because he still loves his wife and he still loves his kids and he has a lot more love left to give them.
I cried when I got back to my dorm. It was a dry cry, like a silent scream. Tears wouldn’t come out, so really I sat in the darkness of my lonely single-occupant dorm and breathed sadly and wrote things down on my phone and eventually I fell asleep.
A few weeks later I saw him at the student bar and he talked to all my friends and completely ignored me. I was fuming, so I pulled him away and yelled at him in the middle of the bar and he said, “you wanted a friend and I was a friend” and I told him he didn’t know what I wanted because he “never gave me the fucking time of day.” I remember he looked scared. My friends pulled me away and I made my way back to my dorm feeling vindicated and slightly better, but mostly sad and helpless.
I called him sometime that week and he sent me to voicemail. I never heard from Lucas again.
So, when I say that my heart was broken by Lucas, what I mean is that I trusted him with my dreams and he acted like it all meant nothing. Do you have any idea what it feels like to fall into love with someone who now acts like it never happened? Love is impossible without reciprocation. One-way love is just an obsession. This was not an obsession.
Do you know how magnets work? The north seeking poles in an atom find the south seeking poles in another atom and the force generated by the alignment of the poles is a magnetic field and everything is either repelled by or attracted to the magnetic field and thus a new world, a new reality is created. Each magnetic field defines the rest of the world. Everything is either repelled or attracted. Everyone is either Lucas or someone else and everyone is either highschool boy or someone else or fancy dinner girl or someone else or everyone is either me or someone else and I’ll take what I can get.
Thanks again for reading, I love you all.