Dani
When I look back on my relationship with my ex, I don't typically think of the good times. I don't think about the nights when I couldn't push the drive back home far enough away, when I sat next to him on the D.C. metro and couldn't imagine myself leaving to go back home on the train rather than intruding and staying at his house with his mom who didn't approve. I don't picture myself being young, and innocently loving someone.
But today, I remember going to his graduation, not the big one for his Bachelor's, but the one right after we started dating, the one where he instructed me to wear a white dress, and where I sat in the back with several older strangers I had never seen before. It was the ceremony for his Associate's degree, he was embarrassed about having to go, but his mom insisted. She and I didn't sit together. I started to get tired after getting only a quick glimpse of him in his black cap and gown, smiling with braces on a giant screen.
I remember how I drove my mom's car to Montgomery College to see him for only a few hours, how I must have seemed so impossibly young, driving her car out to a city an hour away for the graduation of the first boy I had really started dating. I remember how we couldn't go back to his house to have sex, how we argued a little about where to go because not doing it was out of the question, how we finally settled on taking my mom's car to a mostly empty mall parking garage, how he whispered that he didn't want me to take my dress off because the idea of having sex with a girl in a white sundress was so sexy. I remember the car moving and how we got caught by a security guard and how glad I was that all I had to do was slip my sandals back on, giggling secretly about how I wasn't wearing anything underneath my sundress in the middle of an open parking garage.
At the end of the evening, we took a lap or two around the mall, held hands, and went back outside to where my car was waiting. I think we had driven separately from his house to the mall, and so his car was also somewhere lingering in the parking garage too. We really didn't know each other that well yet, and it's so odd to think about dating him in that period where we were still getting to know each other, still learning to understand each other's mannerisms, still laughing at all the right moments and hoping to seem only likeable, to only inspire positive memories.
But even more than this, it's so odd to think about how I felt so vulnerable and so powerful at the same time. How I always felt like the one that was more emotionally dependent, and how I knew, clearly, that even though he wasn't perfect, he was all I wanted, nothing else. I truly, genuinely, only wanted him to love me, and wanted to preserve the feeling of comfort I got from having him stay at my house, watch Walking Dead with my mom and I, sleep in my bed.
I look back at this relationship now, and I tell the same story again and again to people when they want to know what kind of relationship it was. We went to a concert, I explain, and I brought a jacket that he wore and wouldn't give back to me when I asked for it. MY jacket, I always make sure to highlight. But we dated for two years. We had lots of memories that were positive, funny, creative and silly. We cut down two Christmas trees together with my mom, he's the only person I've dated who has gotten to meet all of my pets before they died, when I used to dogsit he and I cuddled up together with three dogs that didn't belong to either of us, watching Narcos, me turned on by the fact that he could understand the Spanish parts without even looking at the subtitles. Of course I remember one time when I finished reading Portia de Rossi's memoir about her eating disorders, and how I went upstairs so he wouldn't see me, and cried because of a line at the end of the book. It was something that made me feel for a moment that I was in a relationship that would never be everything I wanted, but that I was terrified to lose. But I also remember how he was one of the first people to tell me that he gets lost while talking to me if he stares right into my eyes for too long, and how I really believed him. I remember when he said disposable thumbs instead of opposable thumbs, I remember how he and my mom and I had an easy existence together, how we all fit together like puzzle pieces in our own little family, how I wasn't afraid to leave him downstairs with her while I went to take a shower.
I say all the time that I'm still impossibly young, but I never realized how impossibly young then I was too. How much different my problems were, and how my overall summary of the memories with my ex tends to neglect what my actual experience was. I guess because our relationship didn't remind me of a Lana Del Rey music video, and because of how he wouldn't tell me he loved me, I try to discount it as a serious emotional period in my life. But it doesn't hurt anymore to remember moments when I truly felt I loved him; instead it feels refreshing to admit it in all its truth. It's nice to look back and remember being nineteen, feeling so comfortable being in a relationship that I was willing to sleep in a single bed in a room where I had to wait until his mom left before I could use the bathroom down the hall. To remember being so inexperienced at how I wanted to be treated in a relationship that I was perfectly content eating the frozen waffles he cooked for me one time in all two years of our being together. Even after he dropped the plate on the floor and made me eat those while he made a new batch for himself. We weren't good together, but we were happy, in our own way.
But today, I remember going to his graduation, not the big one for his Bachelor's, but the one right after we started dating, the one where he instructed me to wear a white dress, and where I sat in the back with several older strangers I had never seen before. It was the ceremony for his Associate's degree, he was embarrassed about having to go, but his mom insisted. She and I didn't sit together. I started to get tired after getting only a quick glimpse of him in his black cap and gown, smiling with braces on a giant screen.
I remember how I drove my mom's car to Montgomery College to see him for only a few hours, how I must have seemed so impossibly young, driving her car out to a city an hour away for the graduation of the first boy I had really started dating. I remember how we couldn't go back to his house to have sex, how we argued a little about where to go because not doing it was out of the question, how we finally settled on taking my mom's car to a mostly empty mall parking garage, how he whispered that he didn't want me to take my dress off because the idea of having sex with a girl in a white sundress was so sexy. I remember the car moving and how we got caught by a security guard and how glad I was that all I had to do was slip my sandals back on, giggling secretly about how I wasn't wearing anything underneath my sundress in the middle of an open parking garage.
At the end of the evening, we took a lap or two around the mall, held hands, and went back outside to where my car was waiting. I think we had driven separately from his house to the mall, and so his car was also somewhere lingering in the parking garage too. We really didn't know each other that well yet, and it's so odd to think about dating him in that period where we were still getting to know each other, still learning to understand each other's mannerisms, still laughing at all the right moments and hoping to seem only likeable, to only inspire positive memories.
But even more than this, it's so odd to think about how I felt so vulnerable and so powerful at the same time. How I always felt like the one that was more emotionally dependent, and how I knew, clearly, that even though he wasn't perfect, he was all I wanted, nothing else. I truly, genuinely, only wanted him to love me, and wanted to preserve the feeling of comfort I got from having him stay at my house, watch Walking Dead with my mom and I, sleep in my bed.
I look back at this relationship now, and I tell the same story again and again to people when they want to know what kind of relationship it was. We went to a concert, I explain, and I brought a jacket that he wore and wouldn't give back to me when I asked for it. MY jacket, I always make sure to highlight. But we dated for two years. We had lots of memories that were positive, funny, creative and silly. We cut down two Christmas trees together with my mom, he's the only person I've dated who has gotten to meet all of my pets before they died, when I used to dogsit he and I cuddled up together with three dogs that didn't belong to either of us, watching Narcos, me turned on by the fact that he could understand the Spanish parts without even looking at the subtitles. Of course I remember one time when I finished reading Portia de Rossi's memoir about her eating disorders, and how I went upstairs so he wouldn't see me, and cried because of a line at the end of the book. It was something that made me feel for a moment that I was in a relationship that would never be everything I wanted, but that I was terrified to lose. But I also remember how he was one of the first people to tell me that he gets lost while talking to me if he stares right into my eyes for too long, and how I really believed him. I remember when he said disposable thumbs instead of opposable thumbs, I remember how he and my mom and I had an easy existence together, how we all fit together like puzzle pieces in our own little family, how I wasn't afraid to leave him downstairs with her while I went to take a shower.
I say all the time that I'm still impossibly young, but I never realized how impossibly young then I was too. How much different my problems were, and how my overall summary of the memories with my ex tends to neglect what my actual experience was. I guess because our relationship didn't remind me of a Lana Del Rey music video, and because of how he wouldn't tell me he loved me, I try to discount it as a serious emotional period in my life. But it doesn't hurt anymore to remember moments when I truly felt I loved him; instead it feels refreshing to admit it in all its truth. It's nice to look back and remember being nineteen, feeling so comfortable being in a relationship that I was willing to sleep in a single bed in a room where I had to wait until his mom left before I could use the bathroom down the hall. To remember being so inexperienced at how I wanted to be treated in a relationship that I was perfectly content eating the frozen waffles he cooked for me one time in all two years of our being together. Even after he dropped the plate on the floor and made me eat those while he made a new batch for himself. We weren't good together, but we were happy, in our own way.
Comments
Post a Comment