The outline is supposed to be:
Complication: Relationships consume Ellen
Development:
Ellen breaks relationship
Ex rejects Ellen
Ellen fears loss
Resolution: Ellen releases control
If that doesn't match up, then I've got something of a problem.
I’ve never been what you would call “boy-crazy,” though maybe you wouldn’t know that from the moving in and out of relationships I’ve been doing during my three years of collegiate life. I’ve loved video games and reading ever since elementary school, though these days Kalamazoo College’s hectic academic schedule keeps us apart for protracted periods of time. I’m not the type of girl who planned her wedding out in third grade, or tried to figure out what the name of my future husband would be. I didn’t have my first boyfriend until freshman year of college.
Now I’m a junior and I’m on number three. So I have some experience with this boy thing. Maybe it’s because of my inexperience with dating and love until so recently that when I fall for someone, I fall hard. I’ll cling to a relationship like there’s no tomorrow. Friendships in themselves mean a lot to me – I don’t make friends easily, so when someone ends a friendship with me, my stomach flips along with my world. I wrap myself up in relationships, platonic or romantic; I’ve often had the thought that they matter to me more than the academic aspect of college. So when I found myself, in November of my sophomore year at Kalamazoo College, forced to choose between two potential suitors – my ex-boyfriend of freshman year, Stewart; and the freshman guy I’d been dating since around October, Shafer, I knew that I was making an important decision regarding relationships. What I failed to realize was how far this would impact my friendships, and how tightly I myself would attempt to cling to the now cold corpse of a formerly vibrant friendship.
It begins what seems now far back in the spring of our freshman year, now two years ago, when Stewart and I decided to end our relationship. Politeness abounded on both sides – the whole idea began, of all places, in a facebook message that he wrote to me. In that logically thought-out message thread, we revealed our fears about the “long-distance relationship.” Never mind the fact that the great insurmountable obstacle of distance was being located two and a half hours apart, he in Chicago and myself in the small town of Niles, Michigan. Stewart wrote of his past problems with this kind of relationship, and I recalled the hard time I’d gone through in the month-long separation we’d had over our school’s winter break. In the end, we decided that it was of benefit for us to break up at the beginning of summer instead of subjecting our relationship to the stresses of distance, so that we might avoid a possible implosion later on – our already crumbling social group could not endure an explosive falling out on the two of our parts.
We entertained the idea of dating come next year, come close proximity again. I fell in more with this idea than he did, and clung to that raft of an idea over summer as the distance grew hard on me, as I realized that I still had feelings for this guy. I texted him a long message about how I missed him, how I hoped we could be together again, about how I loved him. He told me that maybe I didn’t really know what love was, a crushing blow.
But this wasn’t really where our relationship broke. Despite this, I cherished thoughts of a reunion come fall, hiding them deep down inside. For summer and much of fall, we stayed friends, hung out, remained close. A mutual friend of ours, after seeing us over summer, actually thought we were still together. Mentally, psychically, we may have been – we acted the same way we always had, without the physicality and formality of a relationship. The experiences of fall and winter of sophomore year were what worked to tear us apart. I pined after Stewart – I saw him nearly every day, we got along the same as we always had, we played the same games. I wanted our old relationship back, but I couldn’t tell him. After all, he had told me no. He would have to be the one to bring us back together.
Every weekend, often during the week as well, I made the lonesome nighttime trek from his dorm room suite – a place of gaudy, goofily arranged Christmas lights, stadium seating featuring two (2) couches (one on a homemade wooden platform behind the other), and copious amounts of video games – where he and many of our friends congregated, across campus to my single dorm, and loneliness. As I walked back night after night, fantasies of Stewart running out of his dorm after me, realizing that he really did want me after all, ran through my head. But it never happened, and slowly but surely I began to realize that it probably wouldn't.
Then I fell into the second of my college relationships with Shafer. After five months I was finally moving on from a guy I’d pined over all summer and part of fall to a potentially great new guy. However, Stewart didn’t end up seeing it that way. Being the game nerd that I am, I met and began to get to know Shafer at a Super Smash Brothers Brawl tournament, where we played the card game Magic: the Gathering. We ended up back in Stewart’s six person dorm room suite that night hanging out with all of my friends, Shafer’s head of Greek/Syrian, massively fluffy shoulder-length hair conspicuously in my lap. Stewart saw us together, and now he wanted me back.
I took him back – for a day. I remember that day of golden sunlight on the suite couch, my head in his lap, his hand stroking my back. It did not last. Shafer protested, shouting my name across upper quad, writing persuasive message about how “Stewart had his chance” and that I should come back to him. And I did. Something probably broke in Stewart when that happened, and I still regret having wrenched someone’s heart from joy to despair like that, all in one day.
Stewart and I tried to remain friends in the face of this. Over the course of months, we still hung out with the same people, played the same games, ate in the same cafeteria together. But in the end it couldn’t work out that way for him. We held many a discussion on the artificial plane of facebook, and eventually decided to grow up and actually talk to each other in person. One winter night in January, he came to my room. He sat in my chair. He told me, “I love you.” Tangled up in my desire for Shafer, I could no longer have any of that. I felt no reciprocal love. I wanted his friendship and nothing more, and I couldn’t see how much that simple fact hurt him.
When all this failed, what he did next was logical. This turned out to be the real world version of “de-friending.” He completely cut me out of his life, a surgeon excising a cancerous tumor, a doctor cauterizing a wound. Out of nowhere he simply stopped social interaction with me. The texts, the friendly bandying-about, even seeing each other over dinner – they were gone and my world began to flip.
Another winter’s night, I pinned him down to find out what was going on. He sat in the green and white striped club chair on loan from my parents’ house, I on my bed, the room dimly lit by my small decorative silver lamp affectionately named Horatio. He didn’t meet my glance when I looked at him.
Distinct memories of our conversation that evening do not survive. Emotion clouds it. Nor do I want to put things he didn’t actually say into his mouth. He told me that he connected me too much with the person he had been freshman year, a person he wanted to move away. That our connection was tainted, that he knew no other way to act around me other than as a lover. Complete severance of our friendship would further his attempt to move on from me, something he had found impossible to this point.
I cried. I told him that even if he came back to be my friend after finally working through his issues about me, I would always remember what he had done to me. I told him I hated him.
Why couldn’t someone I had considered my best friend look at me with a friendly face?
Why had I lost him, and how could I get him back as a friend? Because despite my assertions of hate, that was what I really wanted. Moving on I could understand well enough, but my feelings of rejection and loss were overwhelming. Why wasn’t I good enough? How could he remain friends with everyone else from last year, and not me, the person he’d been closest to? I didn’t know what to do other than fight, and fight I did, with more tears and angry words. To no avail.
Where Stewart’s friendship had been, there was now a vacuum, a black hole, pulling in feelings of happiness and spewing out hatred and rejection. At one point, Shafer, who strangely became fast friends with Stewart, invited myself and Stewart over to eat some leftover pasta and play cards in his room, without telling either of us he’d invited more than one person. I showed up first, heard that Stewart was coming, and then my stomach plummeted. Stewart showed up, saw that I was there, and almost promptly left, staying for a few short minutes to have some of the pasta and converse with Shafer.
I lost Stewart, and he’s not coming back. He’s moved on: while we still have some friends in common, he has a new girlfriend, and a new set of friends. A year later, I still haven’t talked to him. Just last weekend, he was invited over to a friend of mine’s apartment to play cards. I looked forward to the prospect of maybe becoming friendly again. Stewart came, but not when I was able to be there. He pointedly avoiding being around me because of group “politics,” a friend later told me.
At this point, however, I think that I’ve finally come to grips with the matter. Dealing with loss of this kind is difficult, and extremely frustrating – it’s like having lost your keys. You search and search, wishing that your keychain had some kind of tracking device on it that beeped, anything to help you relocate that most precious of objects. In this case, however, it’s like I put my keys on a conveyer belt and expected them to be there again when I wanted them. It wasn’t reasonable of me to expect Stewart to simply sit there and stay being my friend, keep being there for me, while I carried on my new relationship with Shafer right in front of his face – trying to do so probably broke part of his heart. He needed to act, and so he did, in the most reasonable way he knew how.
He doesn’t want to be my friend on account of a number of painful associations our friendship has, and that is understandable. My attempt to hold onto our friendship when he no longer wanted was the opposite of how a friendship should be; it’s a mutual contract, and once one person has signed off on his or her part, there is little the other party can do about it. One must simply relax and let them go, difficult as that may be. It’s not worth it to chase after those that don’t want you; time spent in the company of those who want you is time much better spent.
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