1985, Part 2

The other major thread running through 1985 was the woman. I met her in early February, at a party hosted by myself and the other residents of the brownstone dorm where I lived. She came as the guest of someone else I knew that I had run into that week and invited.

I was in charge of the music for our house parties, and I think that's what caught her attention initially: we liked a lot of the same music, stuff that wasn't necessarily popular. We danced and talked about music, and I thought she was interesting and attractive; after the party I thought maybe there was something between us, but I had never had a real girlfriend before, so I didn't think much more about it.

Several days later, I again saw the person who had brought her to the party, this time in the cafeteria. It turned out that they were roommates. She said, "She's been talking about you all week, will you please just call her?" This was difficult to comprehend. She was tall and voluptuous, with striking features. She had a punkish haircut and dressed with attitude. She had lived in foreign countries and spoke fluent Spanish. I had never met someone as worldly and sophisticated as her, let alone had someone like that be interested in me. But while I've done at least my share of stupid things in my life, I'm no idiot; I called her that night.

It was just before the Presidents' Day weekend, and she was going home to visit her family, so we made plans to go out the following weekend. I thought I had won some sort of dating lottery. I tried not to talk or think about her too much, afraid that I might jinx the whole thing. For our first date we went to see Stop Making Sense at the Harvard Square Theater. We were both big Talking Heads fans, but she was really into them. She told me she had already seen the movie, but wanted to see it again. It was unseasonably warm for February, so we took a long walk after the movie.

The following weekend was the start of spring break, and I was heading for Florida with a few friends, not to run amok in Fort Lauderdale but to relax by the pool at my friend's house outside Miami. So it was another couple of weeks before I saw the woman again. We dated regularly through March and April, frequently going out to see bands on weekends (once even taking the bus to Worcester to see Prince at the Centrum), but things didn't get serious between us until the semester was nearly over, mostly because I was nervous and unsure of myself. She was finishing her sophomore year and was headed home for the summer to Maine. She didn't really want to go home, but she couldn't afford to stay in the city for the summer. She left a few days before my graduation, and we were faced with sustaining the relationship while apart over the summer.

We wrote many letters to each other, talked on the phone as often as possible (long distance calls were still kind of expensive then), and managed to see each other about every other weekend. Most of the time I would take the bus to Portsmouth, where she would meet me and we would drive the rest of the way to her family's home. I felt strange around her parents, not having been in this sort of situation before, but they made me feel welcome and seemed to like me well enough. A few weekends she came down to Boston and stayed with me.

As the summer went by, I fell deeply and helplessly in love. At times I literally had stomach aches from the pain of being apart from her. As the end of August approached, my anticipation grew for her return and the beginning of the school year. (Although I had graduated, my brain was still very much on academic-year time, and knowing her and other people who were still juniors or seniors kept me in that mind-set.) She returned on a Friday, which happened to coincide with my birthday, and we spent the weekend celebrating.

We fell into a pattern: during the week I would usually stay with her in her dorm room (she had a single). From there I would go to work in the morning. After work I would go home to my apartment, eat dinner, and pick up a change of clothes, then head back to her place. On weekends we would stay at my apartment; she loved to cook and was happy to have access to a kitchen. It wasn't domestic bliss, but I was feeling blissful anyway.

Through my various ordeals with housing and jobs that year, she was a great source of strength to me, always able to say the right thing and help keep me optimistic. When I moved into the house in Allston in early December, I thought everything was falling into place and started allowing myself to think about a long-term future with her. But about a week later, she broke up with me.

It happened at a holiday party back at my old dorm, where we had first met. I had become too dependent on her, or something along those lines. What I wanted her to understand was, this is my first relationship, so I don't exactly know what I'm doing and I'm sure I'm going to make mistakes, give me a chance. But it didn't seem to matter what I said. She had had other boyfriends. She knew what she wanted, and I had been what she wanted, for a while, but no longer. That was probably the worst night of my life.

Naturally, we had already bought each other Christmas presents. Logic takes leave in situations like this; I was still so much in love with her that I wanted to give her the gifts anyway, mostly because I wanted her to see how much thought I had put into them. I had paid attention to things she had said about books, music, jewelry, things I knew she liked. I had chosen wrapping paper in her favorite colors. I had wrapped everything so carefully (I've never been much of a gift-wrapper). I naively thought these gestures might be enough to win her back, but of course they weren't.

I went home for Christmas and never said a word about any of it to my family. I pretended everything was normal and great between us. After I got back from my family visit, she called from her family's home: did I have plans for New Year's Eve? I hadn't made any specific plans, but before all this had happened, I had assumed they would somehow involve her. She was bored, and invited me to come up and spend it with her. Was this a mere olive branch, or a real reconciliation? She didn't give me a clue either way on the phone. It turned out to be a reconciliation. She had had time to think, and had realized that she hadn't been fair to me. She wanted to come back. I wanted her to come back, more than anything. Happy new year.

It lasted about two weeks. At least the second time, it wasn't as much of a shock. Ultimately we would go back and forth this way for months. Eventually it wasn't painful anymore, and when it finally ended for good, it just ended. Nothing was said, but I knew it was really over, and to my surprise I found that I was relieved. It had become clear that there wasn't going to be a happy ending for us, regardless of how well things might have been going at any given time. I did love her, and I knew that she had loved me as well, but she needed something I was simply unable to give her.

We attempted to remain friends, but she had been moving away from me for a long time in many ways, and then she moved away for real, to the other side of the country, with another man. In looking back, I am certain that even if she had not broken up with me that first time, we were not destined to be together. I can't explain how or why I know, I just know. But when you're in the middle of something so intense, you can't see it that way. You can't see in from the outside until you've been turned inside-out. With the benefit of hindsight, I was able to see that she had given me something very important: the ability to see myself in a different way. She showed me that there were other choices, other possibilities for my life. She helped me find myself, my real self, the one I didn't yet know existed.