Someone I didn't want to let go

There are probably only two real candidates for today's post about not wanting to let go, but one person affected me longer and more profoundly. I have managed to let him go, but it took me a very, very long time. Five years ago--when I still wasn't exactly over him--I wrote a letter to him that I never planned to share, and in the course of writing the letter, I discovered that instead of our on-and-off relationship being poisoned by conflict between us, it was more affected by me not being ready to let go of something in myself, or more accurately, part of myself.

This man may stumble upon my blog, although I hope he doesn't. If he does, I encourage him not read what I say in too flattering a light. As he knows, I was young and very sad then, and I really did care for him with pretty much all I had. He was a good guy (mostly), but not worth all the angst I put into imagining that my life would be perfect with him in it.

Here is the letter.

I have long wrestled with my feelings for you. I want to tell you why things were so odd and complicated on my end, and I have struggled to figure out why our being together never worked out well.


We met when we were six. My memories of this are mostly faded now. I remember sharing a friendly rivalry about who was taller, and that you were incensed that Mrs. Scott measured me once when I was wearing my Easter sandals. I remember competing with you in spelling test scores. Mrs. Scott had our names on the wall, and we'd receive a star for each test on which we scored 100%. You and I were tied for first place for quite a long time, but then you missed a word. I was thrilled to surge ahead, but found myself tied with you again not long after when I unbelievably forgot the "r" in "first." Most of all, I remember that you asked me to marry you one day. I went home to ask my father, and he said that we could get married when we were 22 and out of college. I came back the next day, reported the news, and we were happy.


The next year we were in different classes. You decided that I was "uncool" and distanced yourself from me. I was sad, but it was not heartbreaking. I was too young and distracted by Barbies and Brownies and ballet. 


The next year I moved to England. There I found myself in an alien environment, but I soon settled in. One of my classmates was a boy named Simon, a near clone of you in looks and interests. Over the next three years, Simon and I went through various stages of "liking" each other and "going out," in as much as elementary-school-age children understand such relationships. 


Before I knew it, it was time for my family to return to St. Louis. I was once again ripped from what I knew; I lost my social stability. I was not English but in many ways had become more English than American. 


The return was traumatic. My family moved back into our old house. The neighbors were the same. I, on the other hand, was indelibly not the same. One day in August of 1980, my mother took me to school to enroll me. We were walking down the sixth-grade hallway, and lists of students' names were already outside classroom doors. I saw many familiar names, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw yours. Mrs. Stuckmeyer happened to be in her classroom and came out to see if my mother and I needed help. My mother explained our situation, and we went on to the Principal's office. I hoped beyond hope that I would be in your class; somehow your name was comforting to me in a world that had become foreign. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stuckmeyer decided that she wanted the "English" girl in her classroom, and so it was. 


Socially, this time in my life could probably not have been much of a bigger disaster. There was incredibly painful adjustment as I found myself firmly relegated to the bottom of the food chain. That aside, I did manage to make some good friends. I remember in the first few days of the fall semester Parisa asked me if you and I were "going out." I had no idea where this rumor started--certainly I hadn't said anything, but maybe my transparent attention to you had triggered it. I doubt it came from anything you said. I simply remember smiling to myself when I saw you each day because I so wanted the rumor to be true. 


I knew nothing about you except what I remembered and what I was able to glean (your being an excellent soccer player, for example). I thought you were crazy but brave for wearing shorts in the Midwestern winter, and I remember two of your t-shirts from that year. You seemed to avoid me most of the time, but somehow in the vacuum of not knowing you, I created an ideal version of you in my head. I imagined that the ideal you, like I, wanted to get out of St. Louis to explore the world. I imagined that if you took the time to know me, you would appreciate things in me that others didn't understand. When I did get the occasional chance to talk to you, I was overwhelmed and awkward because I was too immature to see the difference between the you in my head and the you in front of me. I know that you found me very intense. 


I was forever optimistic about getting to know you because I believed that over time you would like me for who I was. I couldn't accept that your regard for me was beyond my control, or if I did think that way, I chose to repress it. I can say that I was terribly unhappy that year and desperate for someone in whom to confide. I wanted you to be that person. I sincerely believed that you would never intentionally hurt me. The strangeness of this, as I see it now, is that I never really had the chance--and perhaps didn't want--to know the real you.


My daydreams along this line went on for years, and the compassion of my imagined you became ever more elaborate. I became feverishly attached to this phantom as my great unhappiness with life in general took root. Over the years, my friends were alternately stymied, amused, and disgusted by my single-minded faith in and defense of you. I retrospect I can see how you must have been thoroughly put off by my presumptuousness, and I do not blame you in the slightest for wanting to steer clear of me. Although there was definitely some cruelty on your part that could have been avoided, you apologized for it when we were young adults.


The academic year of 1984-85 marked the nadir of my teen-age mental health. You saw a fragment of the depths, and I am sorry now to have involved you. That was when I began to verbalize my suicidal ideation. We actually dated that year, and the time we were together was short but significant to me. You could be very kind, but also cruel. I ceded you way too much power, and you used it to manipulate me and play with my feelings. I could always overlook what you did because despite it all, I had my ideal. It also didn't hurt in the slightest that you were exactly what I found handsome: very tall, dark hair, green eyes, athletic.


Late in the spring, several months after we'd broken up, I was very ill with mono and you came to visit me and help relieve my boredom. We were making an honest attempt to be friends. I was grateful that you were so supportive. I wrote to you from England that summer, as well, not really expecting anything, but I had the most pleasant surprise when you wrote back. My father picked up the mail one morning and gave me your letter when we were on the train to London. I read your letter at least 25 times that day. I thought we had turned a corner. But when I returned to the States and contacted you, you completely withdrew once more, without a word.


That fall I started at a private high school right down the road from yours. I slowly and gingerly began to build myself a new identity while finding positive reinforcement--at last--for my academic success and future goals. I occasionally went to football games at your high school to try to find you. I began to grow up, however, and came to see that pursuing you would lead nowhere. I never forgot you, of course, or stopped thinking about you. 


Somehow I managed to avoid contacting you for three whole years. I found myself back in St. Louis in a transitional moment one summer during college. I was bored and curious, and in a moment of impulse I called you. We had a lovely conversation, as I remember. You invited me to a baseball game, and I was thrilled to be able to spend an evening with you, perhaps this time to be friends. I tried hard to ignore the churning in my stomach as I sat next to you in the car and in the stadium. We had a great time--or at least I did. After the game, we went to my parents' home to hang out. We sat and talked for hours, looked through yearbooks, and laughed. I apologized for being crazy in the years before. Then you threw me off balance, physically and mentally, by saying, "Crazy enough to do this?" and kissing me. The floor fell out from under me, and I melted. I can still recall how I felt that night--it was very physically intense. The bad news was that in being physical with you, I ignored the barriers that I had built in my mind to separate the real you from the you I spent time with in my dreams. I scared you away by saying things I didn't mean, things that were part of our script. The mental fallout from that night gave me ongoing anguish.


Again you withdrew. I left St. Louis again. I was feeling annoyed rather than hurt by what you did, and I returned to college determined not to speak to you again. I talked with my therapist and friends about my feelings and found lots of support. One morning I woke up and simply felt free. I said to myself, "I am over him!" Not that everything made sense, but I was certain that I wouldn't again make the mistake of conflating you and the you I had invented.


Ah, but how little I knew. That very afternoon, I opened my mailbox to find a letter from you. It must have been more than two months after you left me that hot summer night. My hands trembled as I opened the letter. I think now that you must have been lonely at your new college, or maybe you did want to strike things up again. I couldn't resist this opportunity to try to make things right, and I replied. Our correspondence began anew. You met with my friend Rachel, who traveled to Chicago to see her then-boyfriend. You raised real concerns about me in talking to her. I know that I wasn't even remotely stable in my sense of self back then, but I was also not the same girl you'd known years before. I was irritated by your seeming inability to see how I'd changed, but I was drawn to you as I'd never been drawn to anyone before. Eventually, you asked if you could drive up to visit me at Bryn Mawr. I was thrilled but suspicious. What was different this time? I'd like to believe that you really wanted to see me, but perhaps you were bored at your parents' new house in Atlanta and wanted to be company for your brother on his drive to New York.


When you arrived on campus, I was so afraid to be alone with you that I invited another friend of mine to drive with us to New York. It was a very tense, long, uneventful trip. We returned at some painfully early hour of the morning and got ready for bed. I still couldn't believe you were there, in my world. I sincerely thought that you wanted a platonic friendship, and I suppressed any other feelings I had. I set you up in the guest bed, gave you a chaste peck on the cheek, and said good night. Your response was "Is that all I get?" and you pulled me down to you. The floodgates were open. Again I said things I didn't mean and that were damaging to our fragile friendship. I felt as though I was watching myself as part of a train wreck.


You met my friend Elizabeth during your visit and became her friend, too. I was happy that you seemed happy. I remember studying Greek with Elizabeth in a classroom, with you as company. You drew the Arch on a blackboard, told Elizabeth about St. Louis, and we all laughed together. I remember climbing with you to the top of one of the towers of Thomas Great Hall one night. We sat in the cold, looking down on campus. I can't recall what we talked about, but I can vividly remember you sitting across from me. I was in shock that this man I had wanted to befriend for nearly all my life was right next to me, in the place I'd always hoped he'd be. I remember you kissing me and wishing me good luck as I went to take my Calculus exam. I remember how it felt being with you on campus. During my remaining time at Bryn Mawr, I would always think of you when I walked across Merion Green. (In fact, I still thought of you at my 15th reunion.) I remember that it snowed while you were visiting, and that I got drunk. I went to talk to some friends down the hall, but you were concerned I was outside, engaged in some variety of self-mutilation. We were again sinking into that script. I really *was* a strong person then, although you couldn't see it. 


I don't know quite what led to the final breakdown between us, but we were once again at an impasse, seeing each other as people we weren't. Perhaps you were afraid of me never letting you go, and I suppose I was afraid of that, too. 


I finally saw that our patterns of interacting were fixed, ruined, and sad. I wrote and mailed you a letter several weeks later, attempting to stand up for myself at last and telling you that I could no longer abide your hot and cold ways. But of course, that didn't mean it was over--at least not to me. Several months later I had a friend call you to see if you had received my note. You had, but there wasn't really any more to say. We were blind.


Years passed. I slowly gained perspective, set goals and achieved them. From time to time I would dream of you; the ideal you and I became great friends. I mourned the real friendship that didn't exist, but I grasped at last that there was no way I could get you to see me as anyone different than a very insecure, mentally ill, intense fifteen-year-old. That continues to sadden me. Maybe the real you would or could never like the real me, but then again, perhaps that's beside the point.


I would hear echoes of things about you and ask occasional strategic questions of people who might know things about you, even third-hand. I found out that you had studied in England, and I wondered if you had thought of me at all while you were there. 


After college I lived in Ireland, in Galway, and thought of you daily because your family's surname is everywhere. I traveled to Spain to follow the Camino de Santiago, going to mass each day and enjoying the landscape of Asturia and Galicia. I wondered what it would have been like to meet you on your own pilgrimage. What would I say to you?


Each time I traveled to a different city, I casually searched the sea of faces for yours. I did this all over the world. I don't know what I would gain by meeting you, though. There seems to be no real closure to achieve, no way forward. You made it clear long ago that you are at worst indifferent to--and at best ambivalent about--me. 


Perhaps that's the most difficult thing of all for me to accept.