Okay, now that I am somewhat pulled together emotionally and entirely sober, here is the story of why the last two weeks have been rather hard on me.
Somewhat inconsequential things first:
1. Two Fridays ago, my mom decided that it would be nice to wash my jeans for me while I was in the shower. My cell phone was in the pocket. I lost my entire phone book and had to pay Verizon's insurance company a $50 deductible to get it replaced. The new one didn't come in until Wednesday. I hate not having a phone. Even more than that, I hate having 40 names in my phone book, compared to the old 175.
2. The next night, the Baton Rouge police broke up a party and told us that everyone under 21 was going to be arrested. They changed their minds eventually, but I was scared out of my mind for a good 30 minutes. This happened again the next Saturday, and yet again last night. I'm planning on staying in for a while.
3. Sunday morning, hours after the first terrible cop experience, my car was towed from Natalia's apartment complex, because I wasn't parked in a visitor spot. It cost me $130 to get it back on Monday.
4. I have missed a ridiculous amount of class lately.
Moving on, though, the real drama involved You-Know-Who.
Before last week, I had put him out of my mind - for the most part. I am absolutely positive that I have thought about him every single day since I met him - that's 773 days of thinking about him. And no, I did not know that off the top of my head. But for the past few months, it had been a lot more of him casually passing through my thoughts - no wishing things had turned out differently, no hatred for his girlfriend, no more heartache. The thought of him being with someone else no longer made my stomach turn. This was quite an improvement, because the first time I saw them together, I felt quite nauseous for a few days afterwards.
But the point is, I really was moving on. Until the same night as that terrible party, when he decided to tell me that he still thinks about me. That night was good for us both in a lot of ways, because a lot of apologies were involved, but at the same time, it re-opened the whole issue of what we were to each other. I remember that as I was drifting off to sleep, I whispered to him, "in the morning I'm not going to believe that tonight happened."
After that night, he was constantly on my mind again. Everything reminded me of him. I was reading archives at thisfish.com and came across this entry:
Have decided to ask J if we are going to permanently settle into "just friends" pattern so as to free myself to fuck up more potentially beneficial relationships because of irrational devotion to him. Would wait a hundred years if knew that's what he wanted. So pathetic. Am aware of this. But am also quite aware that there is no one else like him out there. Have looked. Been trying to replace him for a very long time. Would be more successful at it, if that was actually what I wanted. Alas. Things like that should not upset me as much as that did.
So I tried watching old episodes of Sex and the City. He's always reminded me of Mr. Big...
Listened to a lot of Something Corporate:
(could you let me go? I didn't think so...
and you don't wanna be here in the future
so you say the present's just a pleasent interruption to the past
and you don't wanna look much closer
cuz your afraid to find out all this hope
you had sent into the sky by now had crashed
and it did
because of me)
No luck there either...
I won't continue to list things. I just didn't know what to make of any of it.
So all of a sudden he was paying all kinds of attention to me again - when no one was looking, we were the adorable pair that we were two years ago. The laughing and the smiling and the sarcasm - I had missed it all too much.
And there were serious things too... it had been a while since he had told me things like, "You are a gorgeous girl with a great heart... you make me feel like my old self again." These things are not easy to ignore, even when you know that things will probably turn out badly once again.
I tried a few times to write here about it, spouting theories about how every girl has that one guy who gets under her skin and stays there, regardless of the outcome of the relationship. Like H's J, Carly's Pat (or maybe FDR?), Aja's Brandon, Carrie's Mr. Big, my Aaron.
(But he's not my Aaron. I guess he never really was.)
And then Saturday night happened. I was at Natalia's place, pouting about the presence of cops everywhere, when my phone rang. He was terribly drunk, and saying things like "I went home last night to talk to my dad about my life... just can't commit right now... things between me and [The Girlfriend] are pretty much over... want to see you, no need to see you. Please."
So I went. He had stayed late at work to drink beer with his manager, so I went back to the office with him and listened to the manager talk to his ex-girlfriend on the phone for a ridiculous amount of time. And while the manager talked, he turned to me and said that the managers relationship with the ex was a lot like our relationship - they had dated when she was 17 and he was 19 (I was 16 and he was 18 when we first met), and were on and off for quite a while. They lost their virginities to each other (also true in our case) and there the manager was, in his mid-20s, still unable to get the girl out of his head.
We laughed, we talked, we drank a lot of beer, we kissed... we went back to his room.
The next morning, though, was what prompted this whole emotional outpouring of mine. The conversation started with him feeling guilty about being with me when he hadn't actually ended things with her yet. It ended up being a really
emotional conversation about life and love and being young, and the entire nature of it was actually quite depressing.
He really broke down - he cried quite a bit, actually. He had really thought that he had turned things around with her, but it turns out that he still can't bring himself to be in a committed relationship. And just when it really started to hurt that he could be that upset about her instead of me, he looked at me and said, "You know, I was this upset about you, too."
Why does he always know what I'm thinking?
What I haven't mentioned here is that a few months ago, I consumed quite a bit of tequila after an LSU game, and started a screaming match with him in which I listed everything he had ever done wrong to me. I don't remember much of it, but I must have been quite a bitch, because it ended with him whispering "I'm so sorry, Nicole." So back to Sunday morning, he tells me that ever since the Tequila Disaster Night, he had promised himself never to get involved with me again because he couldn't stand the thought of hurting me the same way he had. He told me things he'd never told me before about how deeply he'd cared about me in high school, and how disappointed in himself he had been when he realized how he'd treated me towards the end of things, back in... March? April? Has it been that long?
He said, "I still care about you so much," and I told him that he should know by now that the feeling is mutual. And that's when he said, "Nicole, I don't want to hurt you again, but... you know that I care about you, but..... this girl [TheGirlfriend]...."
And I cut him off there and said that I knew. The truth is, a few weeks after The Tequila Disaster, he and TheGirlfriend got in a big fight and he showed up at Sean's apartment completely devasted. When I saw the look on his face when he thought that he was losing her, I knew that he really did love her. He admitted that to me Sunday morning.
So there we are, and we're actually discussing the fact that I'm helplessly in love with him even though I have known for a good while that he has most of himself at the present moment invested in her. I never thought I would have the strength to have that discussion with him. I'm surprised I have the strength to talk about it now.
From there he told me that he wished he could have met me a few years from now. We talked about how we could have been something great if circumstances had been different, or if the timing had just been right. We both agreed that at this age, the timing never seems to be right, with all of the changes we're going through.
It's a double-edged sword, you know? We're both unable to commit to anyone because we're changing so much, but going through these changes without someone... it really sucks.
He told me that he was unsure of whether or not he could ever think of me the same way that he used to.
I went back to my room and cried all day. I slept for a while, and woke up to him telling me that he broke up with her and felt like shit about it. He said that all he wanted was to go home. I cried some more. Elise brought me with her to the mall, and I kept ducking into dressing rooms and bathrooms. He and I used to have an inside joke about mall dressing rooms....
The worst part was that I didn't really have one big breakdown, like he had that morning. My tears came slowly, but constantly, for days. One moment I'd think I was fine, the next I'd realize that my mascara was running down my cheeks.
Sunday night, I stopped listening to sad, emotional music and only let myself listen to Britney Spears and 80s music. I told Elise that I had decided that things were going to turn around for me on Monday. "I'm going to wake up, be in a good mood, and move on with my life. I'm going to smile and do responsible things and be even more than the girl that everyone thinks I am." Things didn't work out quite that way... Monday was just as terrible.
The thing is, it's not just about him in particular. Of course, a lot of it is. But a lot of it is about the fact that his breakdown about young relationships stirred up a lot of issues of my own that I had been suppressing - there's a reason he and I are compatible. We're a lot alike.
What kills me is that I'm only 18 years old and I'm already this emotionally involved in someone. I'm already heartbroken and jaded in a lot of ways, and this is what I have to look forward to in the rest of my teenage years and the beginning of my 20s.
I'm slowly but surely doing a lot better. He and I are back to being friends. He apologized for Sunday morning, and I told him that it wasn't necessary. I apologized for Saturday night... he said it wasn't necessary. We're back to talking about inconsequential things like gay porn and working out and Natalia's promiscuity. Part of me still wants to believe that one day things will work out between us, but I can't let myself think like that. I mean, maybe they will, but why torture myself over it in the meantime? And maybe it's a mistake for me to stay so close to him, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.
That night when we first admitted that we still thought about each other, he said to me, "So many things are different, now."
I responded with, "Yes, but you know... a lot is still the same, too."
nicole: 19-year-old LSU sophomore. biochemistry, pre-med. native new orleanian. starbucks barista. borderline alcoholic. addicted to facebook, red bull and vodka, and college football. a little neurotic, extremely indecisive, and often irresponsible.
