There it was. The end click. Static. Nothing else. Two months and all I had to show for it was a 10 cent used book I was probably never going to read and a handful of awkward telephone conversations. Eighteen years of waiting, and this was all it amounted to.
“Wait, so that’s it? I mean, I still want to be friends. I still want to talk to you.” The obsession with friendship. Everyone always wants to be “friends.” But why? Is it to ease the conscience? Is it an actual desire that just never comes to fruition? Or is it just the by-product of movies and television?
“You need to give me time.”
“Fine then.”
“Fine.”
I don’t want to be friends. I don’t want anything. I’m hurt. And more than anything, I’m pissed. I feel like he dragged me along a four-lane highway with my shirt attached to the bumper of a car...for a month. Typically, I’m not too keen on having friends who bruise me repeatedly.
I had waited 18 years for my first “relationship.” That meant 18 years of building up expectations and waiting for a relationship similar to Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally. I had waited 18 years for this brief glimpse into the reality of a relationship only to come out feeling like I had been cast in a B-rated romantic comedy.
So what happened? His name was Pat. I met him in the seventh grade when we were pickleball partners and I accidentally whacked his face with the racket. For some reason he got to me. Maybe it was the fact that he was only 5’3” so he was the first guy my age that could meet me at eye level. Maybe it was because I thought he had a decent-sized brain beneath the goofy laugh and massive quantities of Illini apparel. I don’t know, but for some reason, every time I had a class with him, my stomach began to feel like I had the beginnings of food poisoning (in a good way).
I liked Pat on and off for six years. We would become good friends, my stomach would get the “flippies,” and then we would drift apart for another year. Finally, in July, the summer before I went off to college, he told me he liked me. It came after an awkward double date of badminton and mini golf and a lie that he had watched the whole first season of my favorite show, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. I told him I liked him, and we started dating. Simple enough. Unfortunately, he had to leave for school in August, but, rather than breaking up, we decided to see what happened. After a month our nightly phone conversations become bi-weekly, and I was pulling out my hair trying to just “go with the flow.” I wanted answers. I wanted to pe in, no holds-barred. I wanted a real relationship. He didn't. He saw me as a burden. But he didn't have the guts to tell me.
“Do you want to break up?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I want.”
I had seen it coming. I knew it was going to happen. But that didn’t help. I still felt it.
After that phone call, I was 50 percent devastated and 50 percent furious. I wanted to grab his shoulders so tightly my knuckles would turn white. I wanted to shake my body till the anger that was solidifying in my body shook off. At the same time, I wanted to cry for hours and take my heart out of my chest and keep it on a shelf for a while. I felt like I had slammed my leg in the car door, and now it was throbbing. Only the throbbing was on the inside.
For a few weeks I wondered how I could be heartbroken. I had only dated him for two months. I hadn’t been in love, neither of us had been wholly invested in the relationship, and, in retrospect, we weren’t compatible at all. But that’s what the silver screen doesn’t tell you. Heartbreak comes in all shapes and sizes. It comes at all different points in your life. You don’t have to be in love to be heartbroken. Someone you care about just has to let you down. Someone you care about just has to decide to extract himself from your life.
It’s been several months, and I’m fine. We don’t talk, and I don’t plan on changing that. We aren’t friends, and we never really were. Looking back I would say he left a scratch on my heart. It wasn’t a fracture or a break, just a scrape from a rose’s thorn…a rose I never got. I’m still waiting for that break, that crushing, that shattering of the heart. I am looking forward to it, ironically. Now that I survived the first scratch, I am ready to start running again. That’s what makes running wonderful. You always surprise yourself with the distance your legs can carry you; it’s exciting and completely frightening at the same time. Heartbreak makes you human. Heartbreak lets you know you have felt. Heartbreak is a reminder that you’ve experienced life.
