M’s Thoughts on Discovering her High School Sweetheart is Married

Found out tonight in my 26th year what I have known since 17. That the first love of my life, the one who took my virginity, and I would not get married. We would not live out the stereotypical clichéd story of high school sweethearts, together until a ripe old age when one of us dies only to be followed by the other, killed by heartbreak, two weeks later.

Why is this bothering me? I have always known you will not belong to me. I didn’t want you to. In fact, the brutal truth is that I haven’t even thought of you since sometime around 2000 when I saw a picture of you in an old yearbook. Sure we remained friends, peripherally. Geographically serperated with you in Colorado and me in New York, mountains and skyscrapers, was little reason for the verge. We were for a moment and that was all that we were meant for.

So why is this bothering me? Is it because you knew her for four weeks, just one month, a mere 28 days and then just jumped the gun shotgun style and married her in a hurry? Is it because I am worried about your future happiness with a woman you barely know?

More than likely it is because, in the true un-altruistic nature of my personality I have inverted it into a definition of how alone I am. Your marrage is a magnification of my place in life. My singular, solo place, in which I date, I latch on to a three year-and-going love-affair and give my heart to someone I know in the back of my mind will never ever belong to me. Is it because I see myself as I waste away into spinste hood carrying my status of ‘alone’ like an albatross around my neck weighing me down.

Your marriage makes me want to go out and buy orthopedic shoes. Big, chunky, ugly brown shoes which my 101 (for good luck) cats will fight over, devouring the leather in hunger as my rotting corpse decays in the corner to be found only months later when the smell becomes overbearing. My last thought will be of the children I never had.

Or worse I will marry out of anticipation and fear of being alone. I wil marry because the pressure of age becomes to great and I will have to fight the sadness everyday of my life knowing that I made the wrong choice, regretting what my life could have been. My husband will be fat and cruel and lazy just because I was too afraid to be alone. I will live everyday a dual life: what exists and what I wish was reality. I will go mad with angry remorse and kill myself, to be found bya fat, cruel, lazy someone who doesn’t care.

Found alone or found without emotion. They hover in balanced equilibrium. The weight of each representing my grand failures which your marriage has placed upon the scales..

Do you remember the first time we had sex? That was one cliché we brought to fruition. A twilight lit summer night, the drive in movies, me sixteen and unaware of my own flesh. In the backseat of your car,my shirt pulled up and pants pulled down, three quick pumps and it was over as if it never happened. I remember thinking “It should hurt.” When it didn’t I didn’t blame the quickness or size of your endowment, instead I answered with the idealism of innocence “It is because it is right.”

Do you remember how I kept looking in the mirror on the way home. You thought it was vanity or maybe just nerves. I wanted to know if I looked different, if sex had changed me. Would my parents know, was sex written on my face?

They didn’t know. That was the only time. Shortly after we broke up. You ave me the first experience of heartbreak. The first in a long line. It tastes bitter in my mouth. Like metal and limes. I remember when you told me I thought “your voice sounds too sad, like chicken soup,” and I hated you for that.

For a year after we barely spoke. You graduated and began to stalk me. You pulled a gun on me, stole my car and house keys, wuld leave little gifts in the vackseat, filled the entire interior compartement with roses. I cried constantly.

Then I left for college and you were no longer near enough to matter. But your father died and I came back. We hugged and somehow everything was okay. We still, to this point, talk occasionally. But this is most likely the final chapter.

Maybe that is why I am sad. It shows time, it shows my age, your age. It excacerabtes the flow of time and my inability to hold on to my youth. I no longer know you and you no longer know me.

You called my dad second. You two always got along and after your father passed you held him in high regard. He became your second father. He was the second call after you mother, before even your brother or sister. I wonder, when will you call me? What should my reaction be?

I know this answer. Ths one is clear and obvious. I will be happy and congratulate you. I will wish you a happy future, together with someone, not alone, passing time until one day you will be found by her and she will be distraught. Your children will be distraught and a million prayers will go to you and all of the happy. You will have lived a happy life. And me. Always un-altruistic me-I wil cry with my cats and trudge to the garden in my orthopedic shoes to plant you a flower that blooms annualy.

M Grapples with Time, Learns Ways to Say Goodbye

Today I accidentally wrote 2008 on a fed-ex slip. A Freduian blip, it was the written manifestation of my mindset since the weeks pre and post January 1st, in which I feel like I am constantly moving forward with a velocity not my own making, mouthing lost words of “Slow down,” and “wait” while I feel a sense of loss for that which never really existed but could have, as things pass by without my will or consent.

The New Year has never affected me before, especially two weeks into the new month. My only concern about its arrival was what sex-kitten outfit I would deck myself out in to watch the ball drop and who I would kiss during those first few seconds of fresh possibility. I would annually make and break my light-hearted resolutions with a sense of youthful invincibility. “I’ll get around to quitting smoking next year” may as well be tatooed on that space in between my index and middle finger where a burning cigarette perpetually resides filling my lungs with tar and nicotine as I try an hide with subtle deft behind a smoke screen of my own creation.

Goodbye optimistic attitude, sense of my own personal magnitude and feeling of control.

This year, I am feeling saturated in the disbelief of being a late-twenty something and still unsure, insecure and unable to financially afford basic necessities like rent, soap and toothpaste. The passing of time is frightening, huge and unbearably heavy. It feels as if when the ball dropped it landed right on my back.

An uncooperative Atlas, I am not ready for 2007, yet alone 2008 and beyond. I am not ready to check off the box identifying myself as a part of the demographic of 25-30. And the frightening thing is I don’t know if I’ll ever be, but each year will keep on coming without my will or consent and I’ll have no recourse but to mutter Goodbye with defeat.

I’ve known this. It isn’t a new realization. Goodbye is not an epiphany that came yesterday. But its bigger, more unstopabale, like a snowball accumulating mass and form with each passing second ready to crush me. Send me to my grave, cold and frozen with disbelief, because my life was just not what I hoped it would be.

The game we played while when we were younger of “What do you think so and so will be when they grow up?” no longer applies and people are now defined by their profession. But I am not my profession, the bubbly publicist with an agenda for everything. I’ve been many other people before this moment of Now and hopefully will be something more in the Future.

Those people I thought would be losers have somehow outrun me, bettered me even though years ago they were cheating off my paper in English class. Now they work for Esquire and I still dream of being published as my babbling endorsement of some new product or promotion falls on their deaf ears.

Goodbye a portion of the dream, a piece of my already withered self-esteem and a large portion of ego.

The rational part of me knows that I am still young, but the emotional side of me refuses to listen citing the in-ignorable fact that my skin is not as radiant, my belly is getting rounder and my ass is curdling like expired yogurt. With all the comparative failure and missed opporutinites I can’t imagine what I will feel like at fifty, watching my kids leave for college and wishing it was me while patting my round belly and suffering menopausal hot flashes. I can only hope I will still not be paying for my meals with change and wondering how to pay the mortgage.

I hate seeing things, the goodbyes, the the ones that creep up on you like the passing of time. The big ones magnify the fact that the earth keeps turning without permission and events happen to you an don you rather than because of your will them to whether that be the goodbye to a year, a piece of the child within you, a portion of life, a friend or a loved one.

The past few weeks all of the above have happened. The unwelcomed arrival of 2007 and my ability to age gracefully in a city that does not grant apologies nor cater to shortcomings are just two notes in this melancholic dirge.

An old college roommate recently called to tell me she is getting married, illuminating with her shiny platinum ring the huge Goodbye to the safety of that fun-filled portion of life that I fear I will always be stuck in. That age-appropraite portion called “flings” “dating for fun,” “going out every night drinking and meeting someone new to have a meaningless one night stand with and then regret the next morning only to go out and do it again the next night.” That portion which is deemed appropriate because “Your too young to think about marriage,” has now morphed into “Why aren’t you married” with the additional subtext being “What’s wrong with you.”

Goodbye carefree revelry, sexual immunity and a piece of hope of finding Mr. Right.

Another Goodbye is to a dear friend of mine who is going to Washington to work on Capital Hill. We met nearly a year ago, hang out only occasionally, yet talk to on the phone and on email everyday. I consider him one of my best friends and his leaving makes me feel several things at once; one being that I can not believe he is leaving, two is that I should have spent more time with him in person, three is that I passed up the chance to have a real, meaningful relationship with an amazing guy because I am too scared of getting hurt, and four is that he will forget all about me once he is off this island. He will now be added to the roster of people I talk t occasionally as if things haven’t changed, but really know that I no longer know them. He will now be added to past and the present will just continue into a future of...

Goodbye open possibility, understanding as I voice my insanity and that feeling of not being so alone in the center of this chaotic metropolis.

The last big Goodbye that has been screwing with my mind is experienced peripherally in the form of one of my best friends breaking up with her boyfriend. I had set them up a year and half ago, she had basically moved in and they had plans of marriage. I found out he was cheating or attempting to cheat when he called another friend of mine and left a message stating to call him so he could show her “just how bad” she makes him want to be. I had to break the news about his indiscretion and the next day we got a van and moved her stuff out of his apartment. I watched her heartbreak as she said Goodbye to misappropriated love, Goodbye to hope and to a future that was smashed by voicemail and bad judgement.

So many things wrapped up in Goodbye. Things that you know but don’t think about unless forced to because things happen to you and on you without your will and not because you will them to.

How many Goodbyes do we have to go through? Is there a quota or is it never ending? Does the saying “One door closes and another opens” hold any truth or is it that when one door closes we go back the way we came and it only appears different because we have seen what is beyond that space and we are changed by each Goodbye?