Author and Columnist
| 1998 | Jesus Healed The Cripples »
This is a new writing experiment. Knowing my near-pathological fondness for writing, I expect I will keep it up. I will find it easier than strictly new material. As of this writing, we are into the four or fifth week of a statewide lockdown, so I have time to be reflective.
I am going to read back on entries in the past and comment on/respond to them. Before I do, we must acknowledge the levels of abstraction with which we are dealing. First, there is the event itself. Then comes my observation of it. Then what I wrote, which was accurate enough for me, but likely would not be for all participants. Even at the time, I was circumspect on some points because I did not wish to have people angry with me. Now, we are dealing with my memory of these events decades later. Plainly put, what I write here and what happened are not as tightly connected as I might like.
First, some ground rules:
I work and work at this perfect little relationship, the kind that girls should swoon over.
These are the first official lines I put to my journal. Technically, this is not true. I had a habit of writing long letters to my friends that I doubt many of them cared to read. I cannot recall if they responded much, but that never seemed like the point of writing them. These letters were easy enough to retrofit to this format.
Were my friends glad that I started writing directly online for them to ignore? It would not surprise me.
Still, I feel this line is telling. This was my inclination then, trying to create the perfect relationship in my own head and then being startled I had not manifested it in reality.
Was I a good boyfriend? Who is at seventeen? I liked Jen. I said I loved her and I did, as much as I could. I felt more desirous of her than many girls I had dated, which baffled some in my social sphere. One classmate berated me because I had left a girl whom he found far more attractive to be with a tomboy he thought of as plain and flat-chested.
Jen doesn't love me. I know it. She looks at me like I am saying I raped her cat every time I say that I love her.
This is true. She never loved me. She, too, liked me and felt desirous of me. I was her first kiss and, years later, her first of most other things. I told her I loved her at the winter formal. She expressed soon after that she wished I had not. I was too loose with that word, though I felt I meant it when I said it to her.
It may have been that it was a perfect moment to say that, so I did.
The number of girls to whom I said it and meant it to the extent I could before Jen is in the single digits. It may be three, and those few might not realize I did. The rest who lasted a month, I liked enough to think we had the potential of love. With some, we snogged for a few weeks before moving on, and that was enough.
Also, I do not remember if she had a cat.
She will lose me if she doesn't learn how to treat me. I simply want her to treat me as though she cares.
She left me by degrees, as is clear below, and all at once. I went to a two-week summer program. When I returned, she had possibly already cheated with our mutual friend, Nick, with whom she was in a relationship for years afterward. (So who was the serious relationship to her: the boy she first slept with or the one with whom she spent years?)
Once Nick bragged to me that he was dating her, I cut them both out of my life, feeling deep betrayal. I had my mother drive over to her house so I could push a box of her things at her. It was a pathetic scene, I was embarrassed that I had done it, and she was confused about why I did.
But if she keeps it up, I'll leave. I'd leave now but I'm scared. I'm scared she'll just go to Nick and fuck him. I see the bond the two share and I hate it because she submits to him.
So, I was aware. I tended to know things were up, even if I was not prepared to admit it consciously. I wrote this before we had slept together, which I considered a life-altering connection and she stated was "like kissing, but more so."
Since her, I have not ended any serious relationship, though I eased off beginning a few. I do not know if I had it in me to leave her. In retrospect, I wish I did. I dated avidly in the years between 14 and 17. If it were not for the threat of Nick, I would not have clung to a relationship that was apparently on its last legs.
Just treat me well, treat me 1/8th as well as I treat her, and I would continue to love her forever.
Younger Thomm (and any teenager reading this), you should want people to treat you as well as you treat them. A relationship should be of equals. I know it is hard to accept this, especially with your heads a tizzy of hormones, still not settled in the shape it will be, but begging people to care a small fraction of how you feel about them is soul-eroding. You deserve better.
If they are treating you this way, it isn't love.
Even her mother thinks she is heartless.
Jen told me as much. I recall that it was because her mother saw how Jen regarded me. I think Jen told me her mother also slapped her for some act of small cruelty against me, preceding this declaration, but I would not swear to it in court.
I don't think Jen was heartless, incidentally. She was seventeen and not close to ready for the relationship I thought we were having. A relationship with me was something she didn't want, not with the pressure I put on her, but she was not heartless.
I'm not just going to sit here and let Jen neglect me and ridicule me. Are any of those assholes she worships happy? Kev, Mark, Nick? They are depressed, sick children. I wish she would develop a personality of her own. Make time for me. An hour a day. A half hour. A kiss. She can't even give me a kiss. And whom is she thinking about when she does kiss me?
Reading this shakes some of the illusions I held about our relationship. I thought I was happier before the breakup. Clearly, our issues were mounting.
I believed we were happier, perhaps, because it let me feel more indignant that she left me for my best friend. But, no, we were not happy. At least, not happy enough that I didn't vent this way. We were lusty, but we were falling apart. When she went to college a few months after this, even if it had not been Nick, she would have left me. She liked him and he was a good enough catalyst.
I'm unclear who Mark was. Possibly one of Kevin's friends.
She will never find anyone who treats her as well as I do and she is willing to throw that away for nothing.
I'm certain that she found someone who treated her better than an emotionally incontinent teenager, someone who didn't project his insecurities on her because he was still 3/4ths a child.
She didn't end our relationship for nothing. She did it because she was more than ready to move on. She could have done it better, but she could have done it worse, too.
Does she mean the evil she spews at me? [...] Why does she sound so depressed to hear from me?
Kids (and adults): if you think anything like this about your romantic partner, reconsider the relationship. We were not right for one another. I invested too much of myself trying to convince myself otherwise.
I didn't push myself this much with other girls I dated. I don't know why I did with Jen, except that she went to my school. Most of my other girlfriends existed during frenzied weekends of fondling. Before Jen, I may have had two longer relationships, but I cannot be certain. She was not the first time sex seemed a possibility. I ended those because I was no longer feeling the spark. I was, I hope, kind to them at the end. I wanted to keep them as friends because I did care about them. Staying friends with the people you have kissed, then and now, is optional and often not preferred. Better to make a clean break.
This relationship, almost through no direct fault of ours, had become mutually toxic. We both wanted the other person to change to be the sort of person we could keep dating. Neither one of us could or should have.
Why doesn't she understand that once you love someone you can't stop no matter how much you grow to hate them?
Again, this is a major red flag, though, to be clear despite my self-pitying venom, I believed she was growing to hate me. I resented how she treated me, but I didn't hate her.
I still regard the core of who Jen is well. Jen-at-Seventeen was a fine foundation for the possibility of Jen-at-Forty. She is likely a good person, whatever that means.
Our last interaction was at a jewelry store where she worked. I popped in, full of nervousness during a lunch break from my library job. We talked about college and how she had worked for an erotic bakery. She seemed funny and warm. I thought she was glad to see me.
That was in the early 2000s. We'll get there.
Why doesn't it matter to her that I want to give her my innocence? That is the greatest honor and gift, aside from marriage, you can give someone and she doesn't care. I saved myself for her and have cared for her for years. I've loved her for nearly half a year, why doesn't that matter to her?
Then, Younger Thomm, you shouldn't have done it. You didn't save yourself for anyone. You refused offers of sex and felt self-righteous about it. Now, I wish you hadn't been so prudish. Not because you should have racked up more notches on your bedpost, but because you limited yourself and treated sex as something more meaningful than it always was. You stayed in the wrong relationships because they pushed you into bed. Though, if you were more liberal with sex, you might have felt that defined you. It would have dinged your self-esteem.
There was a girl--who I will not name--with whom you had previously discussed losing your virginity. It would have been a better experience for you to have had this moment with her.
You were not doing losing your virginity to Jen for her. You were doing it for you. The girl you had sex with in her parents' basement, interrupted by a call from her grandmother, during a Godzilla movie marathon, was an imaginary Jen. The real one was bodily involved, but you were making love to a ghost in your head.
Also, your fixation on purity and innocence is going to hurt you time and again. What the hell does it matter that someone performed an act with someone else if they are performing it with you now and for the right reasons? There are limitations to this, and a conversation should be had before escalation, but you will hurt women (and yourself) by fixating on their pasts. You may ignore other women with whom you could have had meaningful, positive interactions, though I cannot recall whom while I am responding to this.
She likes me well enough when I am going down on her, why can['t] she love me when I write a whole story about her?
Because her love language, such as it was, was physical. The two of you became a couple because she gave you a hickey days before you were going to see your actual girlfriend. (Those who cheat with you will cheat on you.) She didn't write you a love letter. She didn't confess herself to you in a fraught monologue. She made out with you and you mistook it for perfect love.
You thought girls liked poetry and prose, but that is something that got through to you. That, too, will trip you up in the future.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled and gifted. He is capable of crossing one eye, raising one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings. He likes when you comment.