A melodramatic recount of relationships past

Yesterday on my way home from work, an old song came on the radio. It was a song that I knew too well, one that I have listened to too many times. It was one that reminds me not only of a certain time of my life, but of the person who I was with at that time. I hadn’t thought about him for a while—I rarely think about him at all—but hearing that song took me back to another time when I was somebody else.

Excluding a couple of boyfriends in high school, I have had three real relationships, including the one I’m in now. While I would never choose to be in any of my past relationships again, there are times, like yesterday in my car, when I can’t help recount them, overanalyzing the good and the bad, what I could have done differently, and what I should have seen from the start.

I dated someone for two years at the beginning of college, and it was a relationship that became the only bright thing during one of the darkest times of my life. Our relationship may best be characterized by our shared obsession with Elliott Smith (need I say more?). We drove down empty LA freeways at two in the morning, either tearing up or arguing over the meaning of “Pitseleh” or “The Biggest Lie.” We would stay up late on weekdays playing intensely competitive games of chess and chinese checkers, and he would worry about my mental and physical health. We rolled our own cigarettes and sat on stairs, smoking to curb my headaches and my appetite. I look back on this time with a weird sense of excitement; it was stubborn youth at its finest… that unhinged recklessness that comes from a combination of overthinking your mortality and flirting with the idea that you just might be invincible.

My relationship didn’t last past my treatment, as I discovered that the happy-and-sane version of me was not cut out for such recklessness. I don’t miss him in a romantic way and I certainly don’t wish that I were still with him, but whenever I find myself listening to Elliott Smith or reading a Kafka novel, I can’t help wonder how things would be if we had fought through the rough of it.

Eight months or so later, I found myself in the arms of a much different guy. The beginning of our relationship was marked by his pining, as this has been the only time in my life when I’ve attempted to date two guys at once. To be honest, I both enjoyed and agonized over the responsibility that came with feeling so desirable. I chose one over the other because it was the first time in my life that I felt needed by somebody else. I felt that his happiness was something that I had a say in—and, at this time in my recovery, to be needed was to have value.

I don’t want to write off our relationship by saying that it was “just a stage” of my recovery. At the time, he was everything that I wanted on more than one level. But our relationship was on the wave of his moods, of his decisions and his needs, and I realized, albeit a little too late, that I was just along for the ride. He would play guitar and I would write poetry by the light of amber-scented candles (looking back, this poetry is best characterized as a series of laments on being so powerless over another’s emotions—perhaps I’ll share another time).  We would eat at fancy restaurants that we couldn’t afford and watch his favorite movies and I would try to fix him. Late at night he would read me portions of his high school journals, and I would listen with heavy eyes about lies that he had been telling for too long.

I loved him.

We broke up when we both realized that, as much as I loved him, I could not fix him. I was done putting up with things that I should never have had to put up with, and he was done knowing how much pain those things were causing me. I know it is for the best that we are not together, but I still cry when I hear certain songs that we used to play together (him on the guitar, me on the piano, both singing in a slightly out-of-key harmony). I still worry, “what if he needs me now?” But I know that he does not.

If you asked, I would say that I am “over” both of these relationships; I have moved on and am with somebody else. It is easy to talk about getting over someone, about moving on from a past relationship, as though doing so is just another step towards that far-off, dreamy future that we continuously envision for ourselves. What we forget to mention is that, in getting over somebody, we must also get over a part of ourselves. We must give up the person who loved someone so deeply and figure out how to exist without that love, and, eventually, how to love somebody else.

I do not listen to Elliott Smith or smoke cigarettes with my new boyfriend, and I certainly never try to fix him.  I am a different person, and in the making, I have left many other versions of myself behind. I’ve left the girl with anorexia and PTSD in the backseat of an old parked car, crying as she speaks about the feeling of hopelessness that she just can’t shake. I’ve left the girl with the need to fix the one she loves in a room where time does not exist and memories are recounted in the forms of songs and tears.

These girls aren’t with me anymore, but I know that they exist somewhere. And though I believe that I’m somebody different now, somebody who I think is better, who I know is happier, and who I hope is here to stay, I can’t help wonder how those girls are doing from time to time, and wonder if the men who once loved them ever wonder too.