I'll Wait For You

Fado fado.

Zhili byli.

Once upon a time...

I was fifteen and I had a sweet wonderful boyfriend, My first, named John. (No, not Chloe's john.) We met at Debate Camp and saw each only on fortunate Saturdays when our school buses had taken us to the same debate tournament. We talked on the phone, not local calls. I ate Jello pudding pops sitting on the basement steps with the door closed, and furtively described exactly how the pudding pop was sliding in My mouth, what My tongue was doing. He crocheted Me a scarf for Christmas and gave Me a little necklace, and shared his notes with Me from tournaments I didn't attend and those notes helped Me get to the State competition, where My partner showed up hungover so we lost. He called in songs to the radio dedicated to me.

One of maybe only 3 or 4 times John was at My house, My parents were there, My dad home from the road. John and I took the sofa cushions outside and laid on the ground fondling unsupervised while My parents had sex upstairs little realizing their oldest was in danger. The next time, I visited him, Getting Myself all the way 45 minutes into Milwaukee on pretext of doing debate research at the university library. Then quite terrified I followed his instructions to get on a bus, first time. Alone, unsupervised, off the radar, in a major city with no money, no phone. I nearly cried when he got on the bus one stop after me, knowing I was scared. We played on his bed in the attic of his home and the only reason we didn't go all the way was his ever interrupting sister.

That spring I was in a music competition and he took the bus across the big city. He said he didn't need Me to talk to him, he knew I needed to be in competition headspace and couldn't do that. He just wanted to see and hear Me play. He wanted to be there. And he was. And I indeed did My own thing that day. And I won. And he was proud of Me.

The rest of life in My junior high school year was not good, it was disastrous for reasons way out of my control, that I very possibly never thought to share with him, but he was wonderful. The memories are luminous. The way first love should be.

Then one day toward the end of the school year, he told Me he loved Me. He wanted to marry Me some day. I said...

...But I'm going to go away to college.

And he said...

...I'll wait for you.

And then I'll go to graduate school, maybe law school.

I'll wait for you.

And then I might have to move, and I will need a couple of years to start a job and build a career before I'm ready to get married.

And he said:

I'll wait for you. I'll wait as long as you need me to wait.

And I thought: Holy shit. I'm gonna be 30 and this first boyfriend of mine from 15 is gonna be following me around, and I'm not gonna want him any more but I'm never going to be able to tell him after all that waiting that I don't want him anymore.

At that time in My life, there was literally no one I could turn to for advice. And I had the crushing realization that it would be so easy to get knocked up at 16 by my first boyfriend in the sticks of Wisconsin. And I realized my only plan for surviving my life was to throw myself body and soul through the escape hatch of college, away from my dysfunctional family. I was suddenly terrified that the boy I loved and desired was a ball and chain, going get me pregnant, and I would never, ever escape the hell that was then my life without him.

So I dumped him.

No warning. No explanation. Just cut him off. Froze him out. A door slammed shut inside of me and crushed him. 

It was all I knew how to do. I had no words for the desperation to escape. Couldn't name the dysfunction. Couldn't explain the inchoate terror. I was a mountain climber fallen into the crevasse who calmly cuts off an arm to live.

I had the sense to feel badly about it, but had no clue what could be done.

A few weeks later, we were at the World Affairs Seminar representing our schools and avoided each other in the classes and dining hall. Friends of his came and asked me as envoys what had happened, he didn't understand, he wanted to understand. I had no answer to give them. Much later, I heard he remained devastated and unable to move on for years. It's possibly the worst thing I have ever done to anyone.

So as I walk around Summer Camp this weekend, and see Tarin occasionally, see him spot Me, and make an immediate hard turn to avoid Me, working hard to stay hundreds of feet away as if I were radioactive, I am reminding Myself of John, and not just because of karma. 

I am reminding Myself that once I felt an inchoate terror for which I had no words, and all I knew how to do was slam the door on the one person in my life that made me happy. I panicked precisely because they had made me happy, like Icarus flying to close to the sun. And back then, it wasn't John's fault at all, just as it isn't Mine now.  I did that once, or at least, a version of Me so far away now that it feels like a movie character, did that once.  I even regretted it terribly in the moment, but the only way out seemed to be through.

It gives Me compassion for Tarin despite the pain he is causing. I have been in that place, and it is very lonely. No one could help me then, and it was at that time in my life that I stood in a bathroom and seriously considered chugging a bottle of pills. I didn't. I soldiered on and I did make it to college  and much more, far, very far away. I escaped and healed and grew into someone else. Decades later I found John and apologized, and though he forgave Me, I'm not entirely sure I forgive that version of myself. We do the best we can. As Hawkeye Pierce tells Father Mulcahey in an episode of MASH:  Best is best.  But sometimes it's hard to believe.