The Big One

Milestone birthdays and the heartbreaks that rewire us

Three years ago, just a few days after my 30th birthday, I was dumped—rather unceremoniously—over the phone.

It was the kind of break-up where you call your mom, and you sound so close to drowning yourself in the bathtub that she says, “do you want me to fly out?”

And you say, “yes, yes I want you to come.”

Even though the idea of your humiliation and suffering being witnessed by someone else is almost worse than the idea of the suffering itself.

When he broke up with me, he said, “well, goodnight,” escaping one last time into the untethered future of the east coast.
And I said, “goodbye,” my mind etching that moment, the exact cast of the light on the floor, into place. I needed to hear myself say it out loud. Goodbye—that silver blade of a word, cutting the cord I’d held taut between us.

In the crushing silence that followed, I found myself replaying a conversation we’d had before we started dating, when he would call me out of the blue to catch me up on his life.
“My mom is always trying to set me up with people,” he said once. “She’ll be like, ‘has she reached out to you? I told her to message you on Facebook. She was born in the same town as you. You will love her.’”
I listened, transfixed by the lilt of his voice, phone pressed against my cheek.
The whole time thinking, he knows, doesn’t he, how much I want him to love me?

“And she’s always asking me about this one girl, from years ago. But that’s never going to happen,” he continued.

“Why not?” I asked. I was always right on cue, keeping the story going. His eager, adoring audience.

“Because she hates my fucking guts,” he laughed. He was so rueful, so painfully charming, captivated with this idea of being a lone wolf—too stunted by his matriarchs to ever give himself over to another woman. Even then, I didn’t doubt that there were plenty of reasons to hate him.

But I wondered if this girl really did, or if that was just his way of assuaging his own guilt. Why grapple with the complexity of the pain you may have caused when you can just shoulder the burden of someone’s supposed hatred instead?

Later, I would wondered if that was what he told the next girl about me, that I “hated his fucking guts.”

My god, I wished it had been that simple.

When my friends texted, “boooo, I hate him.”
I would reply back, “I know right?”
But it was a performance, a manifestation.

I couldn’t unsee the good things. The summer hike with his elderly dog, a water soaked t-shirt sticking to his chest. The headlight he changed on my car, parallel parked on my narrow tree-lined street. His driveway, our dirt covered hands, laughing that I had flown all the way to the east coast just to help him pull weeds.

What I hated was the memory of the relief in his voice when he was breaking up with me, knowing it was the last time he would have to endure me. What I hated was the apparent ease with which he had jettisoned me.

I was seething, erupting, shredding long claws down the satin drapes. But it was more of a shaky, over-caffeinated rage than a comforting, indisputable hatred. I wanted to scream at him until my throat was raw and then tell him to call me in a year when I was over it so we could keep being friends.

I wanted to hate him.
But unfortunately, I loved him. In that eternal sort of way that you love your family.

I have never learned how to undo something like that.

What does it say about me that I was willing to give so much for so little in return? That I am caught, even now, in the sticky tar of empathy?

They say (‘they’ being therapists on instagram) that someone can only meet you as far as they’ve met themselves.

My relationship with him taught me a lot about my capacity for generosity, forgiveness, and optimism. It showed me how much room there was in my mind to conceive of unconditional love. By meeting him where he was, I learned something about how much more deeply I had already met myself.

I knew him a little.
Not as much as I pretended.
But more than he would have preferred.

And I sensed in him a huge chasm between who he was and what he let himself know about who he was. When I think about his capacity to love himself, I am plunged into the cold water of tragedy.

I am reminded why hating him will never feel satisfying—or even possible.