Five or six years ago I was in the back of an Uber with a friend, driving up into the Berkeley Hills, when the driver pulled over on the side of the road. He had been overhearing our conversation about a guy I was involved with who, in common parlance, “wouldn’t commit” and wanted to give me his advice. He put the car in park and told me that a real man will do anything he can to change for you. He and his wife had been divorced for several years but recently gotten back together, he said, and he was making it work. He’d quit his job and gotten a new one. He had new hobbies, ate the kinds of foods she liked, came and went only with her permission. He went on like he was reading from a script. When he’d pulled onto the shoulder I’d thought I was about to die, then I’d thought I was about to receive some wisdom, but by the time this man was done talking I felt just as miserable as he sounded. In fairness, he didn’t claim to be happy.
I loved S. I love him still; I’ll love him forever. But I also kept asking him for things I knew he couldn’t give me and then being disappointed when he showed up without them. He showed up with plenty else, but to my mind he might as well have been empty-handed. I wanted things to be certain, and squared-away, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t as decisive about his life as I was about mine. I wanted clarity and sureness and I demanded those things like I had a right to them from anyone but myself.
I also did a lot of great things. I was supportive and loving and careful and I gave him space when he asked for it even when it was the hardest thing in the world. Looking back I’d say the good and bad behaviors existed in equal measure, especially toward the end, which came, incidentally, because I couldn’t take the uncertainty anymore and abruptly cut off our relationship. I was housesitting for a friend, eating a dinner of assembled random items bought at the 26th & Guerrero Market in San Francisco, and I literally sent a fucking text message. What the fuck was wrong with me. I think it said something like I was tired of rationalizing my expectations away, and that I guessed he had other things going on, but I couldn’t be the only one trying to make things work. I don’t think he ever replied. How could he — I’d just accused him of every relationship cardinal sin without asking a single thing about how he was feeling.
After that I started doing this thing where I would punish myself every time I thought about him, which is hilarious to think about because my “punishment” was usually just some self-insults so this only resulted in my being miserable all day long and processing approximately 0% of what had happened.
I listened to the following five songs almost exclusively during this time:
“The Waiting” - Angel Olsen (“And now I’m fruitlessly waiting for / someone not thinking before they start rushing to my door”)
“Take It as It Comes” - The Vivian Girls (“You've got to take it as it comes / you'll never get a guy, now / if you chase a guy down, too”)
“Best to You” - Blood Orange (“I can’t be the girl you want but I can be the thing you / throw away”)
“La Loose” - Waxahatchee (“I know why you would run away so fast”)
The cover of “Sleep All Summer” (Crooked Fingers) by The National and St. Vincent
I was incredibly sad and kind of stupid and absolutely unable to stop singing “WHY WON’T YOU FALL BACK IN LOVE WITH ME-EE-EE-EEE” in the shower at 11:30PM. I thought about dying, a lot. One time I was lying down for a nap and briefly had the thought “hm, I might die during this nap.” I saw it cross from one hemisphere of my mind to the other and thought “wow, that’s a fucked up thing to think,” then chuckled, rolled over, slept and did not die. This level of pretty much entirely unhelpful self-awareness struck me as hilarious, so the next day I told the story of the Death Nap at Rosh Hashanah, and later in the night a friend of a friend who I’d never met before pulled me aside to ask me if I was okay. I was fine! Why didn’t anyone laugh at my story! I am very funny!!
I did a bunch of stuff to pretend I was “over it.” At a New Year’s dinner I told someone I was sort of friends with that I was simply not interested in thinking about men when I was thinking about S literally every day. At some point my landlord called to tell me that the downstairs neighbors had complained about noise and I needed to stop stomping around or he was gonna come install wall-to-wall carpeting, and I pretended not to know what he was talking about even though I was highly aware that sometimes right after I got home I would play “Only Son of the Ladiesman” on my earbuds and dance around singing “I'm a leading brand, I'm one-night stand” without bothering to take my shoes off first.
I did a bunch of stuff to pretend I was “over it” and then listened to very little music for about two years. And often when I did listen, I listened uncharitably and closed-mindedly. Cut off from the truth of my feelings — I was in love and heartbroken — I also couldn’t connect to feelings outside of me or their expression in music.
If I had really copped to what it meant to have what S and I had, how rare and special it was, I wouldn’t have been so quick to toss it away. I would’ve had more confidence in it, believed it would last even if we had to take a break for a while, believed it could evolve instead of simply ending. I would’ve seen that life-changing love means that your life actually changes because of it; that there was no way to shoe-horn our relationship into the path I thought I was on before we met; that I could, instead, let this love open a new path; that by trying to keep control I gripped on so tightly that I strangled the whole thing to death.
I was too scared to see this then. I am not scared anymore. I surrender to my life. I don’t make demands or issue ultimatums. I let people go away. I don’t minimize, and I see things for what they are, and I never ask “why won’t you fall back in love with me?”