We only spent one Christmas together. He gave me a dozen yellow roses and a card that read (in part):
I have never felt so close, so comfortable, and so warm around anyone else but you. It has been those mornings when I woke up before you, next to you, and looked over to see you peacefully sleeping. So I turned my head so I could watch you breathing and think to myself how someone as beautiful, intelligent, and funny could end up lying next to me.
I was a junior in college, and he was the man I was convinced I would marry — not right then, but one day. Because isn’t that what we do? We imagine a future even before the present has turned into the past.
He came over to my parents’ house and we sat by the Christmas tree and exchanged gifts. I gave him a flannel shirt and he gave me a bracelet. We ate strawberries and whipped cream and pretended we were older than we were. We dreamed about having children one day. We gave them names. We talked about how we would do Santa when we were parents.
“I knew, in my heart, he had found someone else. Single guys don’t put up Christmas trees, I thought.”
A few months later we broke up, but we came back to one another again and again. We never had a typical linear relationship: meet, fall in love, break up, move on. What we had was of the on-and-off-again variety, a tug-a-war of love. He pushed; I tripped over the line. I wrote; he wrote back. He called; I came running. We fell out of each other sometimes as quickly as we fell back in, over and over, sometimes with long silences in between.
It lasted until my late 20s, but never during the holidays (perhaps that should have been a sign to me, even then, that we were never as serious as I wanted us to be). We never shared another Christmas.
Instead, eight years later, I found myself driving by his condo one evening in early December. He lived on the third floor, a place I had come to know well the year prior during a summer of “on.” Through the long rectangular windows, I saw the white lights of a Christmas tree sparkling against the glass. And I knew, in my heart, he had found someone else. Single guys don’t put up Christmas trees, I thought.
Top Comments
I think he wasn't that into you, but you couldn't let it go
Don't you mean: I turned a typical adolescent first love that (of course) didn't work out, one that sensible people get over, into a massive drama for too many years beyond my adolescence? Fooling yourself that you had a Shakespearian love experience does not make it so. You simply wasted a heap of emotional energy.