Help, I'm still at the restaurant

the curse of the first love

Sometimes, in the darkest and coldest days, I genuinely believe my love life is doomed.

I don’t usually say this aloud because I can’t stomach empty reassurances. People start with the obvious: You’re only twenty. As if I’d forgotten. They’ll go on to say that there is still so much time and end it with that sweet, aching question: Who wouldn’t want to be with you? At this point, I usually just pretend what they’re saying isn’t falling on deaf ears. I smile, politely say thanks, and tell them I love them. After that, though, I’m left to my own devices — stuck in the basement of my mind.

I’ve only truly been in love once. Sometimes, I’m grateful to have experienced it, and other times, I wish I never had. Maybe if I’d never known it, the absence wouldn’t feel so heavy. It’s been about a year since I’ve held the title of “girlfriend,” and I still think about how it’s been stripped away from me every day. Since then, I’ve had a multitude of almosts that I’ve tasted on the tip of my tongue, but nothing more. After they come to an end, because they inevitably always do, I mask it like I prefer it that way. As if actually feeling a spark would be a nuisance. As if being wanted would threaten my independence.

I think about how I used to look at him, how peace wrapped around me like a blanket. That feeling is foreign to me now — just a stranger I once knew so well. I used to lie beside him thinking, No one has ever felt this content. Now, I lie alone, hollow and cynical.

“I’ve had nothing romantic actually stick this year,” I said to my best friend, watching the second year of college slip quietly toward its end.

“Don’t you prefer it that way?” she asked. “You’ve said you don’t want a relationship.”

I nodded, realizing that I’d even fooled her.

“I say that, but if it were the right person…” I trailed off.

I thought of every too-long date I’d endured — like that cursed three-hour hiking date that I still see in my nightmares — and the rare ones I wanted so badly to work out. When those ended, it stung in a place I thought I’d made numb. Sometimes, in a twisted act of torture, my brain replays the final, agonizing conversations with the almosts. The ones who said the distance was too much. The ones who said it felt more like friendship. The ones who stopped replying at all.

I sometimes question if breaking up with my high school boyfriend also meant severing the part of me that believed in forever. Now, I can’t even stomach Say Yes to the Dress without feeling nauseous. We end things because we have the self-assurance at the time that tells us we’ll find better, but once you’ve encountered the void of nothingness, it makes you wonder if you had it all wrong. Maybe there honestly isn’t better. Maybe the flaws weren’t fatal. Maybe you could’ve been happy together forever. Maybe that was your person and you let them go.

I go through phases where I fantasize about my future. One day, he calls me after the grueling work of becoming someone new — someone finally capable of being who I needed all along. His voice on the line is steadier; his rough edges have been softened. He tells me he’s sorry for how it ended all those years ago, for how easily he turned to anger after it all messily crumbled. He says he’s thought about me every day since, that no one else ever fit quite right. He asks if we can try again, one last time. He promises we’re different now. We won’t make the same mistakes we made when we were kids. And for a moment, I let myself believe in that fantasy. I let myself believe in the possibility of something healed.

In the dark recesses of my mind, I wonder what would happen if I simply disappeared. If one day I ceased to exist, would he feel it? Would some thread deep in his chest snap under the weight of the news? Would he cry for me, wish for one more chance to say the things he never said? Or would he move through the world untouched, undisturbed, just as he does now?

It’s been about a year since I could say we love each other without it feeling like a lie. It’s been a year since I last heard his voice in any real way. Now, all that’s left are blocked numbers, empty inboxes, and a silence so complete it sometimes feels like a second death.

Victims of on-and-off relationships have dedicated years of their lives to know this feeling all too well. When something finally fractures neatly, resembling the first clean break in five years, it’s nearly impossible to believe it’s truly over. There’s comfort in the masochistic cycle, the limerence of it all — the dizzying highs and devastating lows. It creeps around you like a fever you don’t know how to break. And every time I think I’m ready to say goodbye for good, it creeps back again, as if to whisper: You didn’t really think it was over, did you?

Truthfully, I’m jaded beyond belief. Finding a good boyfriend feels like a myth — a unicorn somewhere out there lost in a forest of unread texts and emotional unavailability. I feel like I don’t require much, but we’re all chasing that feeling — that elusive certainty that it’s right. Even when someone ticks off every box, we’re addicted to that spark. And that spark is rare. I wish I knew how rare it was the first time I found it. Then, I would have captured it in a glass bottle, to keep it safe, holding it up against the light whenever I needed proof that it was real and that it happened to me.

Oddly, what soothes me the most is considering how the majority of my friends are single and I’m truly sure they won’t stay that way. It’s funny how I easily believe love for everyone else, and yet heavily doubt it for myself.

The relationships I do know are estranged high school sweethearts who seem to have an early case of Stockholm syndrome. They couldn’t break up now — not after being together since they were seventeen — because how could they even begin to approach the world alone? Those years can’t be for nothing. They’re an investment they can’t afford to lose. So they’ll stay together, get married, and become one of those couples you can’t stand to be around for more than thirty minutes. Because that’s love, right? Staying frozen as your high school self until death do you part.

I often think about the episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte and Carrie attend a seminar all about manifesting love. “I want to believe, but nothing is happening,” Charlotte says. “I did find love. I believed that there was someone out there for me, and I met him finally,” she continues. “I’m afraid that he took away my ability to believe, and I hate him for that, because I always believed before, and now I just feel lost.” This has always been my fear. Maybe when we’re unscarred, we attract love more easily. Maybe once we’ve truly known it, held it, and lost it, it’s impossible not to compare every echo to the original sound.

I’m sure years from now I’ll read this essay in the arms of someone I love and who loves me. Together, we’ll laugh at the naive pessimism of it all, each word drowning in melodrama. But today isn’t that day.