In kindergarten, he told me I looked like an angel. First grade, we ate mac-n-cheese at his family’s house, and called it a date. Second grade, he proposed with a plastic ring and we planned our futures together with the kind of fairy tale innocence that inevitably fades with age. In fourth grade, he moved away and I got pulled into the abyss of home schooling. Then, sometime in the middle school years, we caught up with each other via mail forwarding and pen-pal’ed it up, old school. Email came to be, and we traded lengthy letters on an almost weekly basis.
Years later, a job transfer returned his family to GA and to a girl who had changed quite possibly more than he could have known. No longer the church-going goody-two-shoes who agreed with her parents that “crap” and “dangit” were bad, bad words, I was (am) a sarcastic, unapologetic heathen with a psych ward record, a truckers’ mouth, and a pack of cigarettes in my purse (though I’m not sure why, as I never smoked with any regularity and don’t at all now).
My charming online suitor was replaced by a shy, painfully awkward boy who had yet to figure himself out and still believed our future was planned and waiting. Welcome to phone call after phone call with no real purpose. Welcome to clingy, to socially unsure, to overly-polite, and ultimately, to puppy love gone wrong in the form of possessiveness and jealousy. I was his Inky and was reminded of this several times. I told him his fixation on me was unnerving, that he needed to tone it down, back off, broaden his circle of friends to revolve around someone other than me. I was still brainwashed enough that I lacked the dismissive “fuck you and your neurosis, too” attitude that I have now, unfortunately.
So I gave it time. I played chauffer since he didn’t yet have a license, I fought tooth and nail to keep conversations going, I bent backwards, sideways and upside-down to bring him out of his shell. I was eighteen and a fucking doormat, in other words. All to no avail, and to yet more talk of our future, despite my repeated response that I didn’t ever see myself settling down and getting married.
I tried one last time. We watched a movie, he stayed the night at my house, and the next morning I returned him to his. It was an awkward, exhausting ordeal of trying to keep someone who could do little more than sit and smile at me dreamily, comfortable, if not engaged. Dropping him off after a long, teeth-gritting conversation, I thought we’d finally reached an understanding that really, there ain’t no future in this.
And then his little sister cheerfully asked me if her brother was going to move in with me, and I said no. He questioned my response, looking like a small child who’d just seen his most heartfelt prayer overlooked by God. He was so stunned, so completely blindsided by the statement. He looked so utterly crushed…it was as if I hadn’t said it twenty times that morning already.
I left him standing in the foyer, with “I AM A PEOPLE-PLEASING, HEARTBREAKING, SPINELESS BITCH” stamped across my guilt-ridden face, and I walked myself to my car. Driving home, I burst into tears at some stupid song on the radio and turned it up until my ears screamed for mercy, because it drowned out the screaming in my mind. I felt like shit. I had just turned his world upside-down and he didn’t, couldn’t, understand why. Still, I told myself that it was the right thing to do, that I belonged to no one, and that the hurt he was feeling then was nothing compared to the hurt he’d have felt years down the road if I had waited to shatter his dreams. He’d move on.
Then came another job transfer for his family, another move to another state. A chance link to his Deviant Art page later revealed countless red-headed-themed drawings (a few in the nude, no less). His parents asked to friend me on Facebook. And then finally, silence – he had moved on at last, it seemed. Until now. It’s two years later and yesterday my brother walked in and asked me,
“Guess who friend requested me on Facebook?”
My stomach churned. I wondered how often the guy had looked at my profile, yet I refused to change its privacy settings because of him. I wondered how many of my photos he had printed out. I wondered if he knew about the Puddle, only to see his random city suddenly appearing here on my Feedjit list. I shook my head to know that he was still holding on, and I was tempted to respond to him, but realized there was nothing I could say or do that would make him understand any more than my previous attempts had. I tried.
Now I just have that weird feeling of being watched. I’m tempted to feel guilty that he’s still holding on to me, but then I shake myself back to reality and refuse to take that responsibility. I can’t make him move on, and I can’t make myself feel something for him that I don’t.
Still sucks to be the heartbreaker, though. And to know he’s keeping tabs on me even now. Damn.
