Day One

THIS IS A BLOG ABOUT MY ATTEMPT TO OVERCOME A SHITTY BREAKUP IN 30 DAYS.  It's going to be brutally honest.  At times, I might seem collected...perhaps even wise.  At others, I might seem unhinged...perhaps even utterly crazy.  It's real...I'm real...and this is sometimes just how it goes.

I wouldn't need this if I could get the one thing I need: closure.  However, when your ex refuses to take your calls, answer your texts, and blocks you from facebook...it's kinda hard to achieve closure.  At least in the sense that I need: a brutally honest conversation about what happened, from beginning to end.  The story of why we came to be, and why we fell apart: but from his side.

In the beginning, it felt like a fairy tale.  I hadn't been that swept off my feet in years.  The last person who made me feel this way had been on the order of 10 years prior.  For the past 7 years, I'd been avoiding relationships, and I was terrified to follow him into the unknown.  He knew this: I made it perfectly clear.  When I stalled at his proposition of exclusivity less than a week in, he told me that he would be patient.  I was worth it.   However, his boyish charm, the way he looked at me with adoring eyes, and the ear to ear grin he couldn't wipe off his face broke down my walls.  Before I knew it, I caved, and I was officially his girlfriend, he was officially my boyfriend.  I even came up with an utterly cheezy nick name for him, my way of saying "you can't call me hon, but you can call me something unique with the same sentiment."  It was Butter Chops.  Yes, I called him Butter Chops.  And each time, it made us both smile.

He was the kind of guy who would reach over and take your hand randomly.  And it was the kind of hand  you just didn't want to let go of: or at least, I didn't want to let go of.

At first, we were practically inseparable.  


The night before I agreed to "us," we consummated the couch at my work.  Now, whenever I look at that couch, it  makes my stomach churn...and whenever I look at the hand towel (washed, of course), I think of how we used it to clean up our wet spot.  That night was perfect at first.  We explored the tunnels beneath my work...something he had done numerous times before me...something he will do numerous times after.  We fondled, kissed, and even had sex up on a grated ledge.  The Magnum wrapper likely is just where we left it, if not perhaps a few feet below on the ground.  Fueled by PBR, it started out as the fifth best night of my life in who-the-hell knows how long.  The others were the nights leading up to it, from the very first time we met in person.  This night also turned out to be the night of the first red flag, and like most of the others, I tried to pay it little attention.  


I had picked up a 12 pack of tall boys on our way to the tunnels.  I think I had 3.5 down there, and was feeling pretty damn good.  He had 6, maybe 7 or even 8.  When we got back to my house, I had another, and he finished off the rest of the 12 pack.  He ended up so drunk that night that he stumbled out my back door, onto the porch where we smoked.  Standing in front of the wooden flower pot, I called him out for having got so drunk, and, of course, he got angry.  Not like he screamed at me or anything..he just loudly proclaimed that he did not have a drinking problem.  He was NOT my stepfather (I had grown up with an alcoholic stepfather, and as a result, am sensitive to what I perceive as alcoholism).  In fact, according to him, he didn't (and doesn't) have an alcohol problem.  After calming down, we hugged, kissed, and made love.  Okay, I'm the first to admit that "making love"  is hokey.  But, honestly, that's what it was with us.  He was the first person I had emotional sex with since my heart had been broken 10 years earlier, and the only person who wasn't just fucking since my failed rebound relationship had ended 7 years prior.  With him, sex was gentle, passionate, and it swept me away.

That night I took a photo of him in the tunnels.  In that picture, he has a half-drunk grin, and looks cute as shit.  Behind him, there are orange pipe-covers.  I love this picture, and when I told him how cute I thought he was in it, he immediately made it his facebook photo.  To this day, it still is his FB photo..as well as is his primary photo for a number of other sites, including Scribbed and Planet Infowars.  Now, when I see this photo (although blocked from his FB, I can still find my way to his main page, and obviously, I have not been above seeking out other means to try and track his activities), I just feel sad.  It's my photo, of my night that started out so wonderfully, bottomed out around the time the 10th tall boy was finished, and ended in a sweaty heap of utterly satisfying sex.  Point being, the photo has sentimental meaning to me, and I can't look at it now without crying.  It is an image that I took of a man I had emotions for that I hadn't felt in years.

I'm not going to lie and say it was all roses.  The flag that night should have made me walk away, but I couldn't.  I mean, part of me wanted to...but the parts of me that were ignited with lust, infatuation, and aflame with emotions that I still am unable to name were too dominant.  


A few days later, on the way back from my monthly trip to Costco, he gave me a tour of his hometown.  I saw where he grew up, where he rode his bike with his friends, where we went to high school until the ill fated day he fought back against his abusive father, and was carted off to juvenile hall, and released into the group home he ran away from less than a month later.  As a result of his openness and vulnerability, I honestly though that maybe this was going to be it; that he might actually become the love of my life.

 Despite having never finished high school, instead earning a GED, he was (and still is) one of the brightest people I  have had the chance of knowing.  I have no doubt in my mind that had he been born into a different family, he would have been recruited by the likes of MIT.  We would have never met, and he would be a successful journalist somewhere based out of DC, traveling the world uncovering stories of people standing strong in the face of political injustice.  Had he been born into a different family, the ghosts that he can't shake would never have arisen from the dead, and the amazing person that I have seen inside of his darkness would be the only him there is.

But, he wasn't born into a different family, and that amazing person he was born to be was never allowed to become fully actualized.  Instead, he and I were two lost souls who collided into one another while stumbling toward the light.  Except, now, I'm not so sure if he wasn't standing in the darkness while I was (and am) still scrambling to get out.