I Don’t Love You Anymore
2006-12-16 | Filed Under Participatory Books |
Okay. Everyone has a break up story. Sometimes they’re dramatic. Sometimes they’re just sad. Sometimes in hindsight they’re sort of funny. What was your most notable breakup? Who did the breaking up? What did they say or do? What did the other person say or do?Tell the story and I’ll illustrate it …
5 Responses to “I Don’t Love You Anymore”
This is a mean story that I’m not proud of. I did the breaking up. I had a boyfriend in college and we were inseparable, though not entirely in a healthy way. He drank too much and I starved myself. Anyway, school ended and we went home for summer. We were both living in different parts of New Jersey.
The thing is that once I was home I realized that I sort of didn’t want to deal with negotiating my mother and having a boyfriend. I had never done that before. I knew it would be awkward to do under her roof. What would weekends be like? It would just be complicated and I just didn’t want to deal with it.
So, he called one night when I was having dinner with my family to talk and see if we could make a plan, and our conversation went like this:
Me: “Eh, I don’t know if I want to do that.”
Him: “What are you saying?”
Me: “Eh, I don’t think I can really do all of this. Sorry.”
Him: “Wait. So you’re breaking up with me? Just like this?”
Me: “Yeah, I suppose I am.”
Him: “You’re such a bitch.”
Me: “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
And then I went back to eating dinner. And I don’t think I was even that sad about it.
I only really ever had to break up with someone once (I was always the dumpee, and until I had to break up with someone, always thought I had it worse). We had been dating for over two years and it was the first really mature relationship I’d ever had, but he was British and his visa ran out and he had to go back to London. We had tons of fights before he left because I felt that he could have extended his visa if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to as he’d have had to keep the same job and he was tired of it. So, in a way he dumped me first when he got on that plane back to England in October. However, we were still technically dating and I was supposed to go visit him over Christmas in London, but in the meantime I met someone else, which was crazy because I had never been the “torn between two lovers” type. I had a hard enough time getting one boyfriend and suddenly I had two.
Right away, I called up my old boyfriend and told him I thought we should see other people and he was mad, but said fine (later he told me he never thought I’d actually take him up on it). I didn’t go to London for Christmas, and right afterwards, I tried to break up with him on the phone, but he said he wanted to see me and try to talk me out of it. I convinced him to fly to New York and stay with a friend of ours instead as I wanted to be on neutral ground (I lived in DC). He flew in a few days early and came to meet me at Penn Station and I knew right away that I was no longer in love with him. It was crazy. I just didn’t feel anything. So, we went for coffee and for me, here is the moment where he should have known everything, because right after we got our coffee I asked him if he wanted cream in his coffee and he looked at me like I was crazy, because he drank black coffee every morning and we had dated for over two years. That for me was like a movie moment, when you know the girl has fallen for someone else. Anyhow, I never really said anything, he could just tell by my body language that I really wasn’t interested anymore and we had a miserable weekend together and I couldn’t wait to leave. The highlight was that we got to sleep on the pullout couch together. Nothing could be worse than sleeping right next to the guy you have just broken up with. It was awful. I felt terrible, but I just didn’t feel the same anymore.
The happy ending to this story is that I married boyfriend #2 and my old boyfriend is happily married to another girl named Sarah and they have two kids and live in London.
I can relate to this story, and I wonder if a lot of people have a similar tale to tell. A case where you weren’t trying to be mean but it just worked out that way.
For a few months in the mid-90s I was dating a guy who I had very overtly picked up. He was my drawing instructor. I can’t recall what I was thinking when I decided to hook up with him – probably not much, really. But lo and behold he got really into the relationship, and at one point confronted me on my apparent (and in fact genuine) lack of concern about the whole endeavor. However, I insisted that I was into it as well.
My response was, at least in my eyes, an attempt to not hurt his feelings. More likely I was just too wimpy to deal honestly with how I felt. The consequences of my dissimulation may have been worse for me than for him, however. Not only did I end up spending more time in a relationship that I didn’t care about that much, but I also did not follow up on another potentially more promising one, just because I felt guilty about my desire to ditch the drawing instructor.
But of course the inevitable did finally happen. A few months went by and I got involved with someone else, went to NY and moved in with the guy, and ultimately got married. Fast forwarding a few years, I run into a mutual acquaintance of the guy I’d ditched, who makes it quite clear that he had said some seriously bad things about me. Learning this, rather than make me feel worse for ditching the guy, actually made me feel better. Perhaps once you start bad-mouthing someone, you lose any claim to the moral high ground.
I have a Polaroid picture of my old boyfriend Ed. It was taken on the day he moved out of our apartment. We had had some kind of argument and I had said (probably not the first time) that he ought to move out. When I got home that evening he’d done just that - moved out with all his stuff.
He left this Polaroid propped up on the kitchen table. It shows him in front of his packed luggage, kissing “good-bye” into the camera.
I look at this picture, trying to remember what led up to it. I have a vague recollection of arguments about money, and just a few scattered memories of Ed.
When I met him he was renting a “room” in an apartment on East 4th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. The room was actually a walk-in closet with just barely enough room for a folding cot and a pole full of hanging clothes. Two women lived in the rest of the apartment that consisted of a large bedroom, kitchen and living room. Ed was paying over half the rent.
We took Salsa dancing lessons together. He said I couldn’t do it and would never be able to because “it wasn’t in my blood.” His mother was Cuban and his father was Spanish. But he didn’t speak Spanish, at least not with anyone outside his family, and he was very all-American in his tastes.
He wanted to be rich and famous. Once we were driving in the desert of California and he said he wanted to be powerful enough to build a mountain out there with his name carved into it so you could see it for miles. Actually he said we should build two mountains, one for him and one for me.
In my journal from that time I wrote about his kindness and his gentleness, how he understands so much. This amazes me. I remember him as blunt and uncompromising. It’s startling to read this journal because I’ve forgotten most of the experiences I wrote about then - people I knew, jobs I had, movies I saw. Some of it comes back when I read it, most is just gone.
Apparently Ed gave me a parakeet for my birthday on November 13th. It died on January 14th and I thought it was a bad sign.
The snippets I remember from that time don’t add up to much, even though we were “together” for several years. There we were, living together, but it never felt like it was real. Or is that just what I think now, looking at the photograph he left behind?
No man’s land: part one: learning
So I’m sitting on the bed, sitting lightly on the bed because Betty, the inspector, the “minister of cleanliness”, could grace us with her presence at any moment, sporting that clean, spanking white glove. The glove she uses as she drags her fingers along the tops of mirrors and other hard to reach places… the glove she uses to basically fink on us if it comes up with a speck of dirt.
I’m concerned about the bed, having just made it, hospital corners and all, because in addition to the glove, Betty arrives with a pocket full of change that she drops casually, like a physics experiment, mentally measuring the trajectory of the bounce. I’m a soon to be second year college student, yet this is what my life has come to as I’ve chosen to spend my summer pursuing the life of a maid, deep within a national park, somewhere in the middle of California.
I’m sitting on the bed, waiting, while my teammate, maid Marilyn, completes her bathroom assignment. She is spraying the sacred maid juice around, getting ready to tackle the mirror. At six feet tall, Marilyn is the one you want on your team to ‘Betty-proof’ those little crevices…
We generally have this maid thing down to a science, but she’s moving a bit slow today. In the maid Olympics, (and believe me, there is such a thing), we came in first in the ‘outs’ category… 10 minutes per out. Jana and Kim took the Gold for the ‘overs’, in 5:50, they beat us by 10 seconds. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard about Jana’s pillowcase move. Changing two pillows at once. Totally amazing. And for those of you who don’t know the difference, ‘over’ is when our ‘guests’ spend the night, and ‘out’ is when they leave us for other maids.
The prize was one day off, but Marilyn was planning on visiting her boyfriend down in Fresno and wanted two.
“Don’t be so greedy” I said. “How anyone could live in Fresno yet spend two days there is a mystery to me…”
Fresno, Merced, Modesto, these towns that highways force your through to get where you’re going. And the people. They look at me funny when they’re the ones who all share the same last name.
Marilyn has heard this before and thinks that I am a snob. I need to relate to the ‘common folk’ as she describes them. And I tell her
‘I’m not a snob Marilyn, I just don’t like to socialize with potential serial killers, I mean, these are the kind of places where people who chose to go ‘off the grid’ might call home’.
But perhaps she is right. Perhaps I am a snob. I’m a nineteen year old freshman from the east coast and perhaps I don’t know any better. My most recent environment has been comprised of ivy coated brick buildings and friends named Chip and Butter. This summer I thought I’d broaden my horizons, further my education by making beds for a living. And I’m learning some interesting stuff. Wasn’t it Neil Young who said “ A man needs a maid?” This summer I’ve learned that a man apparently needs more than one.
Marilyn’s voice is unintelligible over the running water. She’s onto the tub, almost done.
“What?” I scream “ I can’t hear you”
I walk into the bathroom to find her on her knees bent over. Unaware of my presence she screams
“Why won’t you tell me what happened?”
I sit on the toilet.
“I’m right here for Christ’s sake, you don’t have to yell. Are you almost finished?”
“Yeah. These people were pigs. Dirty pigs. Look at this ring, I think it’s permanently embedded.”
I grab the comet and brush from my kit and begin scrubbing while she gets up and wipes the floor. We’re an interesting sight, dressed in our polyester brown & orange maid uniforms.
“It seems like we’re always the ones who get the dirty slobs to clean after. I thought those people stayed in the cabins. These are expensive rooms. These are rooms for rich people who bathe on a regular basis.”
“Look Marilyn” I say as I cautiously lift a used band-aid off the ledge of the tub. “This is a National Park. People come here just to get covered with dirt, you know, embrace nature so at the end of a long day they can feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth. This is good enough.
Let’s get out of here.”
She’s not leaving so fast. She senses trouble in the air.
“Tell me what happened last night”
“Nothing happened last night” I lie.
“Really? Then how come you weren’t in your tent this morning when I came to pick you up”
“I was over at Coney’s”
“No you weren’t because I knocked on Coney’s door. I woke him up.
He said he hadn’t seen you since last night.”
“Oh. You went over there?”
“Yeah”
“Was he alone?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t he have been alone? Who should he have been with?”
“I don’t know. Ramona Swenson maybe?”
“Ramona Swenson. Ramona Swenson the cashier?”
“Yeah”
“Ramona Swenson’s a lesbian. Everybody knows that.”
“Well maybe Coney didn’t know she was a lesbian when he disappeared with her”
“What do you mean, disappeared? I saw you guys at the party. You looked like you were having a good time”
“I was having a good time. We were having a good time. Or so I thought. We brought our good time over to Jimmie’s cabin. Mona Swenson was there with that front desk clerk, that new girl with the short hair. I don’t really remember her name. It sounded like an appliance.”
“Blond hair?”
“Yeah”
“Remington”
“What?”
“Remington. Her name is Remington”
“Right. What a dumb name. Who would name their child Remington?”
“It’s a family name. Dishwashers. Remington Dishwashers. Anyway, what happened?”
“Well Coney was playing backgammon with Ramona. I was talking to Jimmy and Remington was sitting next to Ramona, picking the split ends off of her head.”
“She was picking the split ends off of Ramona’s head? That’s disgusting”
“No stupid, she was picking the split ends off of her own heard. Jimmy and I were talking about Boston for a change when Coney got up and said he’d be right back. He was going to the bathroom.”
“So… people go to the bathroom all the time.”
“Thank you for your observations. However, three minutes later Ramona gets up and makes a similar announcement. Naturally I didn’t think anything of it until ten minutes pass by, then twenty, and no Coney. No Ramona either. After forty five minutes or so the three of us get concerned. I go off to the women’s room. Jimmy to the men’s but they were nowhere to be found.”
“You don’t think her and Coney… But Melissa, she’s a lesbian”
“I think ‘was a lesbian’ would be more appropriate. I think today, she’s bisexual.”
“But you don’t know if anything happened”.
“Well, something happened because I went by his window. Being the doting girlfriend that I am, I was concerned. So I went by his window. I heard them.”
“What were they doing?”
“Gee Marilyn… I didn’t stick around long enough to take notes. I merely picked up the largest rock I could find and tossed it through his window”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“Did anyone get hurt? I guess I really didn’t wait around long enough to find out. I didn’t stop to think about it because you know how it is when one chooses to throw a rock through a window. One doesn’t think about the consequences really, it’s only that particular moment that matters and then time basically stops. I remember feeling like I wanted to throw up so I ran to the bathroom, and splashed some cold water on my face. I looked at my reflection in the mirror but I didn’t see it.”
“She what?”
“Those words: ‘I’m an idiot. Please kick me’ revealed across my forehead.
“Melissa, when are you going to learn, he’s the idiot. That just proves what I’ve been telling you all along. He is the worlds biggest asshole and I’m sorry you needed Ramona Swenson to help you find out.”
Comforting words, I think, but what I really need is to get out of this bathroom.
“So what are you going to do?” She asks.
“What am I going to do? I’m going to get into my work. With this maid juice, and this vacuum, there’s nothing I cannot do. Let’s see, one more over, one more out, and then lunch. Let’s go.”