Can we last through the winter?
Truth be told, it started in the fall. It was at the end of that three-month period when high school sweethearts pretend they can make it work after one of them goes off to college.
But, it was the winter that ruined us.
The water’s starting to freeze.
Actually, it goes even further back. He’d dropped out of his junior year with maybe two months left. I was a senior, spiraling out about our longevity the closer graduation got. We already had problems we were ignoring—namely, his (ab)use of substances and my desire to “fix” him—so parting ways truly made the most sense. We even went as far as scheduling a date to talk about it, debating the pros and cons of staying together versus breaking up.
Once you start treating your relationship like you’re comparing the durability of two laptops, you should probably just pack it in. But, we didn’t. We just let it sit, not knowing we were already over.
This heart is already frozen / I can’t remember the fall.
Maybe it was telling that I didn’t cry as the car pulled away, my dad in the driver’s seat, my mom and sister waving from the driveway, and my boyfriend leaning against his car, watching me go.
You’ll find . . . that gate’s been opened.
I will admit: I felt guilty when I started becoming attracted to other guys on campus. It was just hard to ignore that they were 1) my age, 2) didn’t think college was a waste of time, and 3) seemed to have a general sense of what they wanted out of life. I could’ve brushed it off—after all, it’s pretty natural to have little crushes on people, even when you’re in a relationship—except I regularly hung out with a guy I maybe-kinda liked.
I really shouldn’t have been attracted to this guy at all. He was a bit pretentious and had this wild, waist-length mane of curly dirty-blonde hair, and he seemed to rarely shower (or maybe it was that he didn’t wear deodorant . . . who knows).
Apparently my standards had been severely lowered thanks to my increasing unhappiness.
Will we last through the winter? Will we make it to see?
We were pulling away simultaneously, I think. He wasn’t that interested in my classes—which, to be fair, were uninteresting—and I was busy. We texted throughout the day, and we tried to chat online every night. But we were running out of things to talk about. Facing this tension, I did what I’d done for our entire relationship: I talked to someone else. Specifically, a guy I’d had a crush on since before I started dating my boyfriend.
Despite this, breaking up was strictly out of the question. After all, it would’ve meant throwing out the carefully curated plan I had for my life, which included dating someone for six years before getting married and having my first child by 25. My parents had gotten married after a year or so of dating, and since they were divorced by 10th grade, I wanted to protect myself from that same fate. So, clearly, I needed to ride it out with this guy—even if we’d never been that compatible from the beginning.
This was an objectively terrible and misguided plan, but I was sticking to it. Simply entertaining the idea that everything might come undone was enough to send me into a suffocating panic. I couldn’t admit to anyone that I was freaking out about my life falling apart, all because of some guy I’d known for less than three years, so I retreated into the “warmth” of emotional infidelity. It was a lifeboat in a storm, and I was clinging to the side, hoping I’d make it through with everything I wanted.
Did I mention this was a terrible plan?
I never loved you / Now you are free to leave
I suggested we go on a break. This was maybe around Halloween. Things were tense; we were fighting a lot. Despite knowing that a “break” heralded the death of a relationship, I STILL refused to concede. I made a rule that we needed to talk on the phone at least once a day because late-night calls had been a staple at the beginning of our relationship. It seemed like a good idea to harken back to better times.
Then, on the phone one night, I asked him if he still loved me. And he was silent.
Go home now.
I came back for Thanksgiving. We were still technically dating, but in a way that limped along, waiting to be put out of its misery. I’d made the mistake of getting in touch with someone I’d “dated” freshman year of high school, and he was bombarding me with texts every week, asking if I was single yet. So, I really needed to go back to school with my relationship intact.
I went over to his house. His parents greeted me on their way out as they always did: with warmth and the unspoken assumption that I was going to be their daughter-in-law one day. I guess he hadn’t told them anything about the problems we were having.
We laid on his bed, holding each other silently. (To be honest, I was trying not to comment on the moustache he’d been growing.) At some point, we began to speak, questioning whether things were going to be better from there. That’s when he told me that he had graduated from doing drugs to selling them as well.
In all fairness, he’d never done any hard drugs while we were together—that would come after. But his willingness to partake at all was, at best, a nuisance, and at worst, infuriating. Considering I battled suicidal thoughts and crushing anxiety while completely sober, I couldn’t fathom what he possibly had to cope with that required non-pharmaceuticals. (I’m not always the best kind of person.)
He told me this news with such finality, as if he’d purposefully done it to end us. I left the room to sit with my thoughts, and my arms were shaking uncontrollably. But I was sure that if I stayed long enough, we could find a way past this too.
Except he had a friend coming over in a little bit, so . . . were we cool?
Follow five footsteps through that open door.
I effectively broke up with him that night, even though I didn’t say the actual words, and cried myself to sleep. I went through the motions for the remainder of my stay, wondering if it was obvious to the world that I felt so incredibly empty.
It wasn’t a clean break. For Christmas, I made him a 50-song mixtape that told the story of our relationship and how I hoped it wasn’t over. We had sex in his car after I asked him to come over because I wanted a hug. (I wonder if we let it happen because we knew it’d be the last time.) In January, he gave me a birthday card that he signed with love.
We didn’t make any sense. We didn’t know how to be together anymore, but we didn’t know how to be apart. What were we? I knew what I was, at least—angry and desperate. I wanted to hate him. I wanted him to love me again. I wanted things to be okay.
Then, quickly and unexpectedly, I imploded. During a text chat one night, I accused him of never caring about me in the first place, to which he responded “Fuck you.” My heart stopped. I spent the next hour sending him fevered, nonstop texts in an attempt to undo how angry I’d made him. He didn’t respond.
I think that was really what broke us. I regret how unhinged I became, and I wish I’d realized sooner that it wasn’t even because I loved him and wanted him back. It was because the breakup signified something I’d been trying to ignore: that I couldn’t make my life fit into neat, little boxes. And knowing that eviscerated the already tenuous grasp I had on my sanity.
It took me six months to accept that the relationship was over but much longer to fully process that so much was out of my control, no matter how much of a perfectionist I was.
I swear to you now—I won’t call.
Eventually, I deleted his number.
But, it took far too long before I no longer had it memorized.
All lyrics from “In Fear and Faith” by Circa Survive
Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash
