A Philosophy of Love

Clay. I will always remember you as the one with the big, sky blue eyes always brilliant under that wavy shock of brackish-blond hair. I will always remember you as the one whose voice had the exact resonating frequency of my chest. I will always remember you as the one with the lanky, boyish grin, as the one whose arms went all the way around my back and made me feel safer than I’d felt since I was young. And most of all, Clay, I will remember you as the boyfriend who dumped me on my twenty-first birthday.

I know, it’s dramatic – how such a thing can come to dominate an entire seven-month relationship filled with countless experiences of both bliss and heartache. I don’t care much for birthdays anyway, so I shouldn’t have thought much significant about Clay’s choice of the day, but this one birthday, being my twenty-first, being my twenty-first birthday on the twenty-first of May, the Golden birthday, the College birthday, the intoxicated birthday, the thing that all decent American teenagers yearn for from their first forbidden sip of alcohol, makes that birthday into a thing that social convention implies – no, convention insists – should be great. And that was when I was dumped. All things are judged not by the way they were, but by the way they end.

To be fair it didn’t happen on the birthday itself. I got the email that closed the deal on the morning after my birthday, when I was still hung over from fourteen free birthday drinks I accumulated at the bars the night before and the lingering toxic residue of the seven drinks I downed after midnight on the night preceding, the moment the actual legal birthday began, and on the first night Clay was there with me. But I read the breakup email right before that post-weekend reflection hour, and you know what I’m referring to: it’s the hour when you sit back and consider all the events that just took place and decide how to rank your happiness those days among the abstract records of all your long-term memories. The breakup was now an intrinsic part of those memories, staining their colors irreversibly dull and gray.

And it may as well have happened on my birthday, because that debaucherous evening was the night I committed the crime that initiated the breakup. It all started with a text-messaged invitation to the boyfriend who recently declared he, quote, “needs his space.”

“Come to the bar,” I said, while my boyfriend’s excuse was that drinks were too expensive. “It’s happy hour,” I argued, “a pitcher of beer for six dollars, and I’ll pay for yours.” I eliminated his excuse and insisted he come. He responded that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go out, and I replied, exactly as follows, “Well it’s free for you and I’d love to see you but if you don’t want to come, don’t.”

That’s when I was called “the king of guilt trips.” I didn’t think the accusation was a big deal then. I found it a little off-base, in fact, and I put it away to continue my night of chaos, abandoning any expectation that I would see my emotionally-exhausted lover that night. Only the next day did I realize I had somehow broken the last straw and would be duly punished.

There are two sides to every story. I make Clay sound cruel, but there are unmentionable things going on in his life unrelated to me that are tumultuous and heart-wrenching enough to excuse any moral turpitude that ends a relationship. And I, as I was first told by Clay in a text message just before the terrible email was sent my post-birthday morning, am a, quote, “dramatic person.”

I am hard to break up with in person. Clay tried to do it a week before, on the night I cooked him a crab dinner and he started speaking of us in past tense, saying we’d be better as friends because he feels so much guilt when he can’t fulfill my needs. I threw such a fit that night that Clay had no choice but to recant, and soon after our argument we took off our clothes and fooled around. I was savvy, I knew how to play my cards, and that night I won.

Yes, I am dramatic. It’s not my fault, mind you – weeks before the breakup I was sent to the hospital with chest pains, psychological, yes, but seeded by a real, diagnosed accumulation of fluid around the heart and brought to searing emergency when anxiety, in the form of panic attacks, drove me to the doctor’s office to complain. The doctors made me stay under observation that night, against my will but without much protest, and released me healthy the next morning after more tests and said I had an anxiety problem. Essentially my heart hurts bad when I get upset – it’s causes are psychological but its sensation is as real and physical as an anaconda gradually tightening around my rib cage. And that sort of thing can be hard to deal with in a partner. Imagine this; Clay telling me something I don’t want to hear, and then suddenly me, clutching my chest, gasping in a way that the movies insist should mean I am about to die. Now we understand the meaning of Clay’s comment, that I am, quote, “the king of guilt trips.”

There are two sides to every story. Our two sides faced off regularly in bi-weekly, charged heart-to-hearts that were supposed to fix all our many conflicts but almost always ended in me pleading and one of us giving in. And suddenly our two sides were cut apart, Clay’s side spinning off into increasingly-distant space, and my side alone in a darkened room. I no longer had an excuse to demand Clay’s attention, no longer had the ability to say, when Clay wanted out, “can’t we just wait until they give me Prozac and see how things are different then!?” I’d never been to a psychiatrist before, but I was sure they’d give me something when I went, considering my hospital experience still so recent and the declaration that much of its cause was in my mind. Clay was under no obligation to help me now, which was why he broke it off – to be free.

There are two sides to every story. And after the break my side was left alone in bed at nights in the midst of the suffocating darkness, the quivering, the relentless unlocalized body ache, the soon-to-be-diagnosed clinical depression that Clay didn’t want to be responsible for anymore. When you’re alone like that you have only your own two hands and shaky breath to soothe you. When you’re in that place you scream apology for everything you did wrong to mess the relationship up, you scream apology for everything you did right but got punished for anyway, and you scream apology for everything about you that anyone wouldn’t like; any time you stuck up for yourself, any time you made your thoughts known, anything that makes you a real human being. You demean yourself to absurd levels, and you’re willing to beg and plead for mercy from any person, as long as it comes this moment. No attention is paid to consequences – you ignore the fact that your incessant pleading might be ruining the future of the relationship that soothes you. Anything to quell the searing, agonizing pain of depression right away, when only the present matters.

“No one can make you happy,” Clay told me many times when we were still together, “I can’t do it for you. You can only do that to yourself.” But he had made me happy, for moments, I was sure of it, and I thought I knew better than he did that I felt good when I was with him.

Well, I thought to myself smugly after reading Clay’s email, then teach me how you manage to make yourself so happy. Because during the months I knew Clay, he clearly was not.

He said he loved me in the breakup email, many times. I love you I love you I love you I love you – if I’d counted the phrase as it had appeared in the lengthy message I’d have run out of fingers and toes. It was something he rarely told me before, indicating a degree of guilt and the moment of my final weaning from him. It was sweet to read the kind words, and when I first read Clay’s message I was overwhelmed with joy and acceptance by the soothing and compassionate tone, in spite of the awful conclusion. I needed the breakup as much as Clay did and phoned him right after the email to let him know I felt ok. But hours after my last love-fix, the crush began to build around me. Too late to do anything about it, this time I refused to beg for return. It’s time to get back to yourself, Matt, live in your own head again. I finally admitted that Clay was right. There was nothing to do but step into a new world and move on, to slowly begin to paint the dingy, faded colors until they looked, again, brilliant, like they were during those few good moments, when our love was perfect, when Clay was standing beside me.