It’s so weird when someone has kissed your eyelids, has been inside you and looked right into your eyes the whole time, directly, the whole time, never flinching; how someone can have their legs intertwined with yours in your own special, particularly unique leg-tangle that no one else has, knows about, or could ever hope to replicate, and then you run into them in front of the Thai Food buffet line in your work cafeteria, and act as if you are just casual acquaintances, as if not talking or emailing at all for three months and two days is normal, as if this whole thing – this, talking about the Pad Thai, and about the merits and shortcomings of a hot food buffet in a work cafeteria in general – is not totally, completely, and undeniably, weird.
When I ran into Eli* in front of the Pad Thai, I could have not said anything. He didn’t see me, I could have backed away quietly. But I never really can back away with him, it is never really an option. I always dive right in, and curse myself after, or during even, but it always feels so good – he does – like a drug, that even that bad afterwards coming-down feeling doesn’t really matter.
I was so nervous I couldn’t stop chat-chat-chatting the whole time we were getting our respective, and non-shared, food.
“I’ve had many good experiences with the hot food line!” I said, assuringly, comfortingly, too enthusiastically, when he expressed concern, pushing a pile of mushy vegetables to and fro, expressed that he doesn’t eat in the cafeteria often, and I remembered how, on our first non-date date, before we were even friends, when he was still married, and happily so I’d assumed, when he was just supposed to be my even-less-than-platonic mentor, an objective advisor, offering stoic, obligatory inspiration, and maybe the occasional sincere, and possibly even heartfelt, encouragement, how he had taken me out to lunch at Bar Americain – he picked the place, I would have never suggested anything that extravagant, and had been thinking of something more along the lines of a quick cup of coffee at Starbucks, or at most, lunch at the work cafeteria – and how I had gazed at him over a three-course meal that had started with my first time ever eating a raw oyster and ended, three hours later, with scraping crumbs from a plate of what had been a stacked peanut butter and chocolate cake dessert, and sipping a cappuccino that I didn’t ever want to finish, and included elaborate entrees and cocktails named Dark and Stormy in between, already starting to fall in love with him, or at least giddily in crush with him, without really even knowing it yet, just knowing that I felt hyper, and super-alert, and buzzing with a pre-attraction that would grow and grow and grow over the next year and a half.
While paying for my Styrofoam container of mushed-together scoops of Thai entrees and sides, I thought I would drop my wallet, and it took me an unreasonably long amount of time to count and present my money to the cashier. I was shaking so hard - could he tell? - and here he was, still next to me, having already counted his money, and paid, but waiting for me anyway, holding this sanctioned, accidental moment, for a little while longer at least, before we would have to separate, and go back to rigorously not talking, and I kept staring at his smooth hands which I had always loved, and had told him so, at his long fingers, and the soft blond hairs tracing his arms, wanting to reach over and touch them, touch him, but I can’t touch him now, anymore, whenever I want to, because he’s not mine anymore, he never really was, so it would just be…weird.
At the elevator he looked awkward, and I felt awkward. I shook his hand, awkwardly, not wanting to part without some kind of physical contact, however minimal. Then I stepped into my going-up elevator, leaving him to wait for his going-down elevator.
Shaking, but safely back at my desk now, I took one bite of my Thai food mush and then emailed him, and he emailed me right back, instantly breaking our mutual No Contact agreement, that I had never really wanted to abide by anyway. I apologized - the hot food buffet food sucked, and I had confidently assured him it would be good; he didn’t blame me, or hold it against me. He made his bed, he wrote, and now he had to lie in it/eat it.
Still shaking, the thought entered my head: What am I doing? I quickly deleted both emails, ‘cause I want, one day, someday, to be happy, and to do that, I have to be free. I can’t start accumulating even more emails from him to obsess over, when I already have close to 300 emails that had been exchanged between us, waiting, in a separate, special file in my hotmail account entitled “Untitled,” waiting for me to do the thing I have not yet been able to do – delete them, and him, and move on. Towards, hopefully, happiness. With someone else. Which I was in no way ready to do.
I stepped away from my computer, inhaled a deep breath, took myself out of the office and to Starbucks, bought myself a strong cup of coffee, and, still shaking, tried hard to read my book and couldn’t read a word, stuck as I was on the same sentence, the same email, the same exchange, over and over and over again in my mind. But I stayed there for my full lunch hour to shake and breathe because I want to be happy, to learn how to be happy. To let go, and start over. Or try to, at least.
That night I cried so much and so hard I scared myself, shaking with pain that I thought time would heal when really, it hadn’t done a thing; shaking with missing him, and with the fear that I would go on, missing him, unable to delete his emails, unable to meet anyone else, unable to be in a relationship with a real live man, instead of with the scrappy shoddy unreliable idealized memories of a relationship that took a year and half of starts and stops, and then more tentative starts, and even more painful stops. Of overcoming tremendous, unthinkable obstacles so it has to work out, right? In the end? You know, triumphant togetherness and laughing knowingly at all we had been through, over shared peanut butter chocolate stack cake, while sipping cappuccinos, in slow-motion, to an adult contemporary soundtrack. And all that brutal emotional work and fragile honesty and soul-searching and wound-baring and aching and longing and moments of ecstasy and glimpses of bliss, and shards of safety, security, serenity even, mostly in post-orgasmic moments when my mind could finally be quiet and I could just lay still and rest, and release my held breath and hope that it would always be like this, legs intertwined, him gently kissing my eyelids, only to ultimately end, with rules about having No Contact that had to be strictly observed and enforced, and that I would continue instead like this, crying alone in bed, in pain, shaking and crying myself to sleep from a five-minute fluorescent-lit interaction with, and one brief email from, him, unable to be happy, forever.
I missed him so much and it is so hard every single day, when it is supposed to be getting easier but really, it is not at all, to remember to expend the effort to not be in touch, to not let myself read his old emails as a second-rate substitute for actual real-time communication, to not let myself think, and then linger on, good memories of him, or even bad memories, or even any memories at all.
I cried so hard my eyes were bright red and weirdly poofy the next day, and I had to wear my black thick-rimmed glasses to work and even that didn’t hide it. People kept looking at me, sympathetically, and then quizzically, their heads cocked, and I just kept repeating monotonously, “I’m really tired. Didn’t sleep well last night,” squinting my eyes tightly to try to hide their poofiness. They shrugged their shoulders and looked…anywhere. Down. Away. So I tried to smile harder, to show them that, really, I am okay. See? I’ll be fine…
Three and a half interminably long weeks later, on my first date with Seth*, he kept asking me questions; he wanted information about me, wanted to get to know me, know everything about me. I kept saying: “I’ll tell you in time,” or something like that, and then finally I said, now serious: “You’ll have to earn that.”
And he stopped questioning me, looked at me hard and said: “Ok. Earn. I can do that.”
And I thought: He really can. And then: Maybe I should let him.
And then I thought, I can’t believe I was/am confident enough to say/mean/believe that. But guess what? I am. And I did.
I like the idea of a guy rising to a challenge for me. I like the idea that I am a challenge, something to be won. A prize. A reward. For treating me in a certain careful way. For having the kindness, and patience, to coax the trust, and love, out of scared, trembling, hurt girl.
I was tangled up in my mind, contemplating whether or not I should kiss him at the end of the night, and if so, if that kiss would be:
a) cheek
b) lips
or c) with tongue,
when he dove into me, kissing me, his hands all over me but not in a gross way, just gently, and like they belonged there. So I let him, because suddenly, and surprisingly, kissing someone else not-Eli, I didn’t feel grossed out, sick, and sad, like I thought I would. It was so weird, and unexpected, but I felt like I belonged there and like maybe, I could one day, someday, be happy.
*Names have been changed