Posts tagged with "relationships"

Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend: Ashley

The lovin is a mess, what hap­pened to all of the feel­ing?
I thought it was for real; babies, rings and fools kneel­ing
And words of pledg­ing trust and life­times stretch­ing for­ev­er
So what went wrong? It was a lie, it crum­bled apart
Ghost fig­ures of past, present, future haunt­ing the heart

—Belle & Sebastian, Another Sunny Day

Our rela­tion­ship has always rep­re­sent­ed the inno­cence of my youth.

The Friday nights, play­ing with can­dle wax in the dark, learn­ing how our bod­ies worked. Or the rush of wor­ry and excite­ment about par­ents walk­ing in the door. Olfactory sense has come to mean a great deal in my rela­tion­ships. From those nights we made love with Beth’s voice com­ing through your tin­ny speak­ers, I get turned on when I lis­ten to Portishead.

I kept the bot­tle of Gap Earth you used, some­thing dear to me since it was dis­con­tin­ued. Every time I smell the noz­zle, it brings me back to the time we were togeth­er.

Out of all my oth­er girl­friends, I thought you would be the one to end up in a D/s rela­tion­ship. I nev­er real­ized it until my own intro­duc­tion to the lifestyle, but the things you did were the most nat­u­ral­ly sub­mis­sive. The way you want­ed to be tied up with our belts, the enjoy­ment you got from pain, your desire for me to be in con­trol, the way you would take my hands is yours so you could kiss my knuck­les. To this day, I won­der if you still like these things.

I’ve always tried to fig­ure out why I’m nev­er sat­is­fied in my rela­tion­ships. It’s usu­al­ly not the fault of the peo­ple I date. Sometimes I blame my par­ents for their failed mar­riage, and how this has made me feel that’s it’s nec­es­sary to find the per­fect per­son so I don’t end up like them. Sometimes I think it’s because you were the first, and you came to define what was “right” or not.

Why then, did I break up with you?

I wish I could explain. I thought things would last, because you nev­er hurt me in any way. In fact, you did noth­ing wrong. Maybe we were just too young. They say you should­n’t mar­ry the per­son you can live with, you should mar­ry the per­son you can’t live with­out.

And I knew that I could live with­out you.

The Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend series

  1. Introduction
  2. Ashley
  3. Michele
  4. Christie
  5. Jackie
  6. Louise
  7. Bronwen

What To Accept?

They always say time changes things, but you actu­al­ly have to change them your­self.

—Andy Warhol

Many of my rela­tion­ships, roman­tic or oth­er­wise, are often approached, at least par­tial­ly, based on the hope that the oth­er per­son will change. This change can take the form of some­thing as sim­ple as prompt­ness, as frus­trat­ing as tidi­ness, or as grand as self-cen­tered­ness.

Change, syn­ony­mous with improve­ment, has been the basis of my life. It takes a self-aware­ness of my faults, com­bined with a desire to change these faults, to improve. Assuming that oth­ers are the same way has been one of the biggest mis­takes I’ve ever made. When the veil is lift­ed, and I real­ize that some­one is stuck in their per­son­al­i­ty, I lose my faith in human­i­ty. For the frac­tion of peo­ple who are con­scious enough to know that they need to change, (and I mean this in an absolute sense, where almost any­one would agree that some­thing needs improve­ment, such as tem­per or closed-mind­ed­ness) only a frac­tion of those are actu­al­ly able to do so.

It’s not that some peo­ple have willpow­er and some don’t. It’s that some peo­ple are ready to change and oth­ers are not.

This means that when I meet some­one, I either have to accept or reject them for who they are, because that’s most like­ly who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. I have to stop accept­ing some­one based on the hope that they will get bet­ter.

Acceptance, which has always been a dif­fi­cult thing for me, thus becomes the most impor­tant thing in my rela­tion­ships. It also remains one of the most hard­est things for me to change.

So should I learn to accept this about myself, the way I should learn to accept things of oth­ers?

Sex Drugged

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that some­times he has to eat them.

—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

It’s after din­ner, and while her par­ents are putting the dish­es away down­stairs, she’s going down on me, lying on her pink sheets, pants pulled down to my knees. Her broth­er’s in his room next door, and I’m pressed up against the wall that sep­a­rates us. In my quick­ened breath she hears that I’m on the verge of moan­ing, and keeps me in check with an embar­rased shush.

Without a means to express my plea­sure, all I can say is that I love her.

It was­n’t true. I was just lost in the moment, addict­ed to the heat of her tongue.

A week lat­er, we broke up.

This is why they have the insan­i­ty plea. When you catch your wife in bed with anoth­er man. When you tell some­one that you love them, because you’re intox­i­cat­ed, get­ting the best head you’ve ever had in your life.

And to this day what I regret the most was­n’t the con­flict I caused in her fam­i­ly with my even­tu­al absence, or the tak­ing of her vir­gin­i­ty, or dat­ing some­one else the day after we broke up.

It was that I could­n’t con­trol my words for those ten lit­tle min­utes.

Show Me Which Constellations You Know, A Denouement

Eternal Sunshine 1

Eternal Sunshine 2

Eternal Sunshine 3

People always say that this song or that book or some movie is a sto­ry about them­selves in some way. One of my friends is tru­ly deter­mined that his life has been proph­e­sied in the eight and a half minute rock-opera Paradise By The Dashboard Lights. My sto­ry was told in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but it was­n’t any­thing with as much grandeur, it was sim­ply about a girl.

Interestingly enough, it’s not the sto­ries them­selves, but the details of each sto­ry that give them such relat­able con­vic­tion. In Paradise By The Dashboard Lights, Meatloaf sings about a coerced com­mit­ment lead­ing to an even­tu­al eter­ni­ty spent with the wrong per­son because of a stub­born, but more impor­tant­ly moral, refusal to break a promise. The prog­nos­ti­ca­tion of these par­tic­u­lars sends my friend sweat­ing when­ev­er he hears the song.

For me, it took the form of pangs, from the details of Clementine’s char­ac­ter. The fucked up girl look­ing for her own peace of mind, who applies her per­son­al­i­ty in a paste. A per­son who keeps you off bal­ance, always guess­ing, and con­stant­ly frus­trat­ed. A girl who sends off sirens in your brain telling you to run as far as you can before you get burned, but you stay any­way, against all log­ic, resigned to the even­tu­al fate.

And here I was, wait­ing to be saved, think­ing she’s a con­cept, or she’ll com­plete me, or she’s going to make me feel alive. When it did­n’t work out, I used to say that it was for the best, that I was in it to have no regrets, but it was real­ly because I could­n’t leave. I was drawn mag­net­i­cal­ly, inex­plic­a­bly, to the last per­son to deserve even the effort of all the torn up thoughts.

To the one that got away.

On the week­end, I dis­cov­ered that I could final­ly watch Eternal Sunshine with­out those pangs when I had felt them for so long, even when I already knew how impor­tant it is not to for­get these expe­ri­ences, as Joel fig­ures out while hid­ing Clementine in his sub­con­scious. All the resid­ual emo­tions have passed, and now I can talk, and laugh, and think, and share the expe­ri­ence like an embar­rass­ing ado­les­cent mem­o­ry. It only took two years.

Everybody’s got­ta learn some­time.

Show Me Which Constellations You Know

Forget what went wrong. The tiffs, the tantrums, the tears.

Remember every­thing we had. The com­fort of cradling under sheets in the sum­mer, the quin­tes­sen­tial excite­ment of the unknown, the rush of being saved from a pro­sa­ic life.

Show me which con­stel­la­tions you know.

And we’ll walk along the beach for­ev­er.