I’ve thought about sharing my story with B, and then I saw the Sunday Scribblings prompt this week, title “How I met my…” and decided now that B is here (yay! and more on that in a subsequent post), that the time was right.
We met in college our freshmen year, through our friend Christopher. I used to sit in Chris’ dorm room and listen to he and B strum on guitars, or we would listen to music from the Violent Femmes. I liked him, but he was seeing someone, so I didn’t think much of it.
Our sophomore year, we started spending more time together, when B was on campus (he didn’t live on campus like I did). By this point, I really liked him. He was so fun and silly and always made me laugh and was always up for crazy adventures. But I was unsure and didn’t know how to indicate that I liked him. We walked back to my dorm one night and he kissed me for the first time, and it felt like yes, this is what I’ve been looking for, and it felt like where I was supposed to be.
We dated most of the rest of the year. The girl who always thought she would never find someone to love her, who thought she was too different or odd somehow, she found someone she fit with, and laughed with and talked about anything with.
But I was young, we both were, and I didn’t know how to have healthy boundaries or healthy space. I know now that I was clingy. And I was preparing to go off to France for my junior year, and a year separated by 3,000 miles seemed like an impossible distance and time apart. And B thought so as well, and one afternoon, he came to my dorm room and told me he was breaking up with me. I watched him walk away, his long coat flapping behind him, with my heart crumpled on the ground, bleeding and feeling like my whole world had shattered. I felt like I didn’t even remember how to breathe. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, not when I could see a future with him so clearly.
I went off to France, and as the heart is wont to do, I got angry finally, because it was easier to be angry than hurt. But living apart from everything you’ve ever known, in a completely different world, well, it helps you to heal, it teaches you about yourself, and you can gain a better perspective on things as a result.
I returned to UNH the following year, no longer angry, but still feeling very much drawn to B. The first time I saw him that year, my heart leaped the same way it always had when I saw him, the distance and time apart had clearly not changed that. But again, I didn’t know how to tell him what I was feeling, and I wanted him to be the one to come back to me. He still didn’t live on campus, so I learned the days he was likely to be on campus, and would often go looking for him. He always seemed happy to see me, and we had as much fun together as we always did, but he never reached out to me the way I wanted.
After graduation, and after I returned from my trip to Ireland, I saw B again. I went up to NH for the day, and we went swimming in a quarry and talked and laughed. And my heart just ripped out of my chest again, because I loved him so much, and I thought he felt the same way, but he never reached out to me. That was the last time I saw him. I couldn’t take the pain of seeing him and loving him and not having him love me.
Time passed, years passed, but I never stopped thinking about him. I would look for him every now and then on Classmates or Myspace or other sites. I would find online listings for Brian S in NH, and wonder which one was him. I started dialing the numbers countless times, but I never completed the calls. Whenever I was in NH, I was always looking for him, feeling like I would see him again. But I never did.
But one day, I found a Brian S through Google, but there was no contact information for him. There was a contact for someone else (his manager, I learned later), so I debated back and forth, and wrote out an e-mail and gulped and hit send.
But I never heard back, so I didn’t know if I had found the wrong Brian, if my e-mail was never passed on or if it was, and he just didn’t want to contact me. It had been years since we had last spoke or seen each other, so I tried to put it out of mind. And I was mostly successful.
And then in November of last year, almost 10 years since I had last seen or spoke to him, I saw an e-mail come in from Brian S, with the subject line of the phrase I invented to say when someone hiccups — odd squat. I wrote back to him almost immediately, pretty much saying “Holy Sh*t.” We talked and started getting to be friends again. The connection we’ve always felt was as strong as it used to. I saw him in January and found that all my old feelings were still there, even stronger.
After some hard and major decisions, we began dating, me in North Carolina, him in NH, and somehow I was back to feeling my heart rip out on a regular basis, being away from him often left me feeling like I didn’t remember how to breathe. But we both knew it was worth the pain and the challenges and worth fighting for.
And now he is home. And it absolutely was worth everything.
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Flying Mermaid 