Breakup Texts
He tells me that I don’t know what I mean, or mean what I say, or say anything that’s real. That truth is malleable for me, that I’m so afraid of people being mad at me, that I’m desperate for approval. He says I’m immature, confused, that he’s crazy, delusional. I think of the Paul Simon lyric, “I don’t want no part of this crazy love,” but that doesn’t apply. Because all I want is his love, no matter how insane the two of us are.
I thought, straddling him in our hotel in Las Vegas, that we really were crazy. Crazy to have found each other, crazy to want to stay together, crazy in love and crazy when we fight. I thought, sitting on the bed while he was at CVS buying a charger for his e-cigarette, that I don’t have to be a tragic figure. I thought, walking into dawn down the strip, that I would give anything to never hurt him again.
What happened was, I kissed a friend. It meant nothing, of course. But then feelings started to form, as my best friend insinuated that I might love this other guy, and I developed a crush. It lasted very briefly, and, when I was ready, I told my boyfriend. This wasn’t the first time something like this happened, though, and that’s the key thing. There’s always a “key thing.” There was the girl I kissed in the bathroom of the strip club on my birthday, the guy who kissed me in the sculpture garden who I wanted to fuck to express how much I cared about him, the guy I wished I’d dated, but in the past, like, I wish we had dated, I didn’t want to date him, but anyway, I could have fallen in love with him, in some alternate timeline.
And all of this wore on my boyfriend. And he was patient, eternally so. And I knew I was exhausting him.
I write poetry for him, often. Sometimes I read it to him. It isn’t very good, but he tells me that he likes it. When things are good, he can’t stop touching me, kissing me, texting me “fucking adore you” or “i want to do everything for you” or “can’t believe i have you.” Once we went to a Neutral Milk Hotel concert and sobbed, holding hands, and then went back to our tent and I went down on him and we were so happy. He said he wanted to mix DNA with me. I wanted to have his baby and name her after Anne Frank. And we forgot to remember that this was all insane.
I thought about killing myself in January, after the guy in the sculpture garden, because I felt like such an unfixable, broken fuck-up. I thought about killing myself last week, in May, because I couldn’t imagine life without him. I knew both times that I was overreacting, being dramatic, not thinking rationally. Of course I’m broken, but most people are. We’re trying to repair each other. That’s why we keep trying to meet and re-meet, in a forever-loop of ultimate futility, constantly looking for affection, acceptance, adoration.
I want to touch his skin until we are both dead.
I imagine, someday in the far future, that I will find his number written on a slip of paper, lost on the sidewalk of a street in a foreign city. I will have long forgotten his name. I will call the number and hear his voice. He won’t recognize mine, aged, hardened. But then something will click. And everything will rush back to us both. The night in the Airstream trailer playing Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan songs on guitar. Slapping each others’ faces and laughing, kissing between hits, trying to keep our composure. Sharing favorite movies and favorite songs. Texting wildly from across the country, while he was still living in New York and I was in Los Angeles, waiting. Splitting cigarettes. Clutching palms. Sitting on the kitchen floor drinking vodka and talking all night. Climbing hills and seeing cacti and redwoods and the ocean. Kissing him the night we met on the pier as we watched a Ferris Wheel, trying to keep track of the patterns of its flashing lights.
On Monday we walked into the Grand Canyon and I told him it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, but really the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen was his face when he first said he felt totally in love with me.
He told me he didn’t think he’d ever fall in love with anyone. Neither did I.
I wonder sometimes if I’m just undateable. I exist in a whirl of self-loathing, disappointment in myself, the gnawing sensation that, despite what my therapist says, I don’t deserve to be happy. When I talk to him, I sound erratic, terrified, reaching for whatever words will change his mind. Really, I’m just trying to explain the intricacies of a confused mind that I still don’t totally understand. I’m trying to draw him inside my brain, to show him that every time I’ve hurt him, it’s just because I’ve been trying to hurt myself. And I realize this now, that all those other people, they were outlets for some kind of self-destructive pain.
I think maybe the human condition is connected to feeling damaged. Or a crumpled-up piece of aluminum foil, and then trying to flatten it back out.
I have a dream that he and I are sitting in a shed at my grandparents’ house, watching a movie with Steve Carrell in it. We’re broken up and laughing even though the movie is terrible, and we have hope for the future. In the same dream, my friend who moved to a different continent calls me crying, saying she’d bought an opal pendant in the shape of a teardrop to remember everyone she’d ever lost.
I tell him about the dream. He tells me that we’ve created such a beautiful hell.
He’s sixteen years older than me, a real person, complicated, sure, but solidified. I’m still mush, magma, adrift and flailing. He sometimes questions whether he wants to be dating a 21-year-old. My friends all question if I’ve mixed up love with misery. We fight so often, and break up frequently. But I don’t know how to be in a relationship, really. Like Joni Mitchell, I really don’t know clouds at all.
I should include some context about my romantic history, I think.
I was old when I lost my virginity, almost nineteen. The guy tried to endear himself to me by saying that he at least “looked Jewish,” which doesn’t really make sense, but whatever. He played trumpet in the marching band and wanted badly to be a bro, but didn’t quite make the cut. He liked to call me “dude” and would high-five me after sex, and it all seemed very put-on and affected. He came over to my dorm one night to say he “wasn’t feelin’ it” anymore, which was a relief, because to be perfectly honest he absolutely disgusted me.
After that, I kind of went on a bender. I fucked a lot of people who kind of worked in entertainment but were also kind of just schlubby twenty-somethings with poorly fitting clothes and bad hair. There was the guy I blew in his dad’s car who told me that he wouldn’t fuck me without a condom because he had “powerful sperm” and there was the guy who pushed my legs up to my shoulders and told me to watch Downton Abbey and there was the guy who made me sit on his face and the guy who said my body would have been attractive during the Renaissance but wasn’t attractive now and there was the guy who realized he was gay after sleeping with me for a few weeks who would beat me during sex and there was the guy who realized he was gay after not sleeping with me and meeting a guy in Israel on Birthright and the guy who had a lazy eye who I gave a hand job in the botanical garden. There were boys at parties whose names I never tried to remember, international students wooing me with accents, people who took me on long drives and put their hands up my skirt. And after a while it all started to feel like nothing. Which was fine, because that’s all it was, really. Once you realize that there isn’t a point to anything, that everything is just arbitrary bullshit, you become a lot happier.
I met a guy who was about ten years older than me and slightly shorter and who worked partially for the Russian mob. He liked to insult my body and promptly moved into my dorm, which I think I realized was fucked up at the time, but maybe I didn’t, I don’t know. He did this thing where he wouldn’t let me hang out with other people, so I didn’t really make many friends freshman year. I was kind of assaulted at a party, and then went home, and things were over with him. It wasn’t real love. None of it was real.
But with him, with my boyfriend, or my ex, I don’t know yet, everything is heightened, everything is extreme, everything matters. When we saw Her together at the VICE screening at Cinefamily, we were struck by how much we related to it, to the relationship between Joaquin Phoenix and an operating system. You can guess who was who. There’s a part, I’m paraphrasing, where Joaquin Phoenix says that they taught each other how to love, or something like that, and the OS says, “Now we know how.” And maybe that’s what I’m getting out of this relationship.
I don’t want to look at it as a learning experience, though, and I’m resisting that with every cell of my body. I look through our texts. We collect them, and save them, and screenshot them, because we’re obsessed with communication. He’s shown me so much about how to talk, how to be honest, how to cut through the layers of bullshit I’ve built, all out of fear. I’m not a brave person. But I’m trying to be one.
Megan Lent writes poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction. She has been published online at sites including VICE, Metazen, and Thought Catalog, and in print in Keep This Bag Away from Children and Illuminati Girl Gang. She has written multiple ebooks, including the NAP-released Patron Saints. She is a student in Los Angeles.
