Page 36 - the NOISE February 2014

Heartbreak
on the
Hill
story by
Jane Tigre
There’s a saying in our town that you don’t lose your girlfriend, you just lose your turn. When my new boyfriend warned me with those words as I was making plans to move there, I brushed them aside with the fervent optimism of budding love, that in hindsight would look like naiveté, blindsightedness, self-delusion, denial — the progression hope takes when it is held onto for too long. But in the beginning, or more like the middle, there was no end in sight. From my mountainside perch, our future was as wide open as the desert vistas we look out upon.
Fast forward three years, and there I was, confronting the undeniable end of a relationship, and trying to navigate the fall-out in a fishbowl town of 450 that requires nothing short of hiding out to avoid an encounter, and even then is entirely impossible. There is the one road through town, necessary visits to the post office, the gatherings that form on the town steps and outside the two bars; and the few restaurants we have to choose from when our pantries are bare and don’t feel like making the seven mile trip down windy mountain roads to the mar- ket in the bigger town at the bottom of the hill.
Truth be told, I had a premonition two weeks after we met that we wouldn’t last. After all, this man, or boy, was nearly 10 years my junior — 23 to my 33. I have the proof in my journal where I had tearfully written, as if already mourning our eventual parting, “this is like sand passing through my fingers and this one is going to be really hard to let go of.” But I opted to believe that it was just fear of getting involved, of letting myself love and be loved again, and the pain I might eventually feel. We lasted a lot longer than I thought we would, but we always know. As Morgan Freeman said in one of his cornier movies, “The end is always right there in the beginning.”
The final sobering slap came six months after I had moved out of the charming-turned-chal- lenging ramshackle apartment where we had cohabitated for over two years. During this time, neither of us had fully let go. He, when I’m feeling cynical, keeping the “sex door” open; me, clinging to the beautiful story I had spun, a fantasy long descending to earth like the hot air balloons that fill our skies at dawn.
He met me at the bar and with regret in his eyes said he had something to tell me that was going to be hard for me to hear. A girl who lived in another state, and whom he had apparently been romancing on the side, was coming to visit. In two days. It just so happened to coincide with a visit from my parents, which tended to be an emotionally fraught experience on its own.
I ran off crying hysterically (he should’ve known better than to drop that news on me after I had had a few drinks), and fell sobbing into the arms of my housemate, overcome with waves of disbelief. He had been showing and telling me for a long time this was the way things were going — or weren’t going — but I couldn’t quite get it.
There was the time he told me he didn’t think we were on the same page — that he imagined he’d have other girlfriends in his life. There was my mounting frustration with our living situa- tion and the fact that his adventures — hitchhiking all over the country, going off to that he- donistic (and in my mind orgiastic) festival, Burning Man — included me less and less, though they weren’t the kind of adventures I cared to take. I had done all of that in my 20s. Then there was the time, shortly after I moved out when we weren’t officially broken up, that I met him at a café where he was jotting down another girl’s number.
In the beginning of our relationship, when he took a seasonal job in Alaska, I was in full sup- port. Set him free, let him go, love is expansive, not limiting or possessive. I recited these kinds of phrases like a mantra because I wanted to practice love in the highest, purest sense. But somewhere over the course of our relationship, as I progressed from age 33 to 36, I changed. And what I wanted changed. What was enough in the beginning wasn’t anymore, and no mat- ter how much I tried to stretch myself to accommodate his needs, it just wasn’t working.
I wasn’t a total fool to keep hanging on. Post-breakup, during a few months he spent in another city, I received love postcards multiple times a week — “Can’t get you off my mind or out of my heart;” “you’re more beautiful than any work of art” — and small romantic gifts: a heart- shaped ring, a map of Arizona when I mentioned I missed his. He called just about every day, often more than once, and always sent an “I love you, goodnight” text before bed. I chose to focus on these sweet, surprising gestures, and his remaining in constant contact to offset the harder messages he was also sending.
36 • FEBRUARY 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
illus by Sally Murphy
The very things that were coming between us were also what I loved about him — his free- spiritedness, his full engagement with the people and the world around him, his need to do and see and experience as much he could.
If relationship karma does exist, I was certainly experiencing it. When I was 28, a man wanted to marry me and I ditched him pretty mercilessly, not ready to trade the seemingly infinite pos- sibilities and freedom of my youth for the monotony and monogamy of married life, a road I felt I could picture from start to finish.
I had never been on this side of it before, the one who desperately didn’t want it to be over. Was it because I was older and knew it could be years between relationships that actually gelled? Was it because, at age 36, I was finally ready for a partner who was fully “in it” with me? Was it the sudden realization that a particular phase of my youth had slipped irrevocably into the past?
I was in new emotional territory. I was feeling a new kind of pain and I turned it over in my mouth like a marble, sucked on it like a candy that was sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and chewed on it like a canker sore to feel the biting pain of it. In the end, it was the pain I was holding onto because that was all that was left, and once the pain was gone, that really meant the end.
In the early stages of our break-up, we tried to be friends but always turned into lovers. We didn’t know how to break the habitual displays of our genuine affection and attraction. Deep down I knew I would need a clean break in order for my feelings for him to reconfigure, but I was striving to keep an open heart and make our separation seamless, graceful, and loving. But there seemed to be no end to the ending.
I remembered not being able to understand how my aforementioned ex, after six years, wouldn’t speak to me after I left him. How could you cut ties with someone you supposedly loved? If he loved me so deeply wouldn’t he want me in his life in some capacity? What I was learning the hard way, which seems to be my way, was that it’s easier to segue into “just friends” when you’re the one who is ready to move on, and in fact, already has.
During the days the other woman was in town, I alternated between a nauseating dread of run- ning into them and wanting to. Word trickled down that he was hosting a party and my girlfriends were shocked to see him parading around another girl. I wanted to know everything — and noth- ing — about her. What was she like? Was she prettier than me? Did he seem really into her?
Lately, when the urge comes to ask people if they’ve seen him and what he’s been up to, I’ve washed it down with a big swig of pride and the wisdom that it’s better not to know.
I never had to see them together, but I did run into him while my parents and I browsed the galleries in our crooked, artsy town. Charming and gracious as always, he strode up with a big smile on his face and greeted us, giving me a hug that turned me to stone. After a moment of shifty awkwardness, I walked off with my parents, reeling from the encounter, and proceeded to drink heavily.
Back at my house, my father, ever a tough-loving, rational-minded New York lawyer, gave me a stern talking-to. He told me I was acting like a teenager, that it was obvious (apparently to everyone but me) that this young man was not “the one,” and, as his daughter, I should be stronger than this.
He didn’t understand. Love wraps a gauzy glow around the beloved that only the lover per- ceives. And the process of letting go and moving on takes as long as it does.
So here I am. All the things I was so terrified of happening have happened. I was devastated, but not destroyed. I love that I chose to walk the path of our relationship, despite my intuition it would be fleeting, for I am a better person, and lover, because of it. I love that I touched new depths within myself, for I have always equated feeling with being alive.
So what if it meant scurrying past my favorite café because that’s where he works, and hav- ing to check with friends to make sure he wasn’t at the bar before I went.
In a mere matter of weeks without contact, the pain evaporated into a memory of it, and has been replaced by an expansive spaciousness ready to welcome what’s to come — including the lucky guy whose turn it is next.
| Jane Tigre is a woman of many feats. jane@thenoise.us SHORTsTOrY