Charming, but single

I’ve been slowly working my way up to joining my high school reunion Web site. I declined to be on the planning committee, citing work commitments, and never went through all of the people who joined the site. Facebook and MySpace were enough for me, thankyouverymuch.

But then I was talking with one of my friends about her high school reunion, which is next month. (Mine is this fall.) She’s beautiful and thin and married and successful. So I was taken aback when she announced that she was worried about her reunion. Because I – single and not so thin – am worried about mine because I am one of about 10 singles, it seems. Hell, I’m in the minority for not having kids. I’m sure it will be better than I expect, especially if I can get my Gay Boyfriend (who went to our brother school) to be my date.

“How could you be worried about your reunion?” I asked my friend. “You’re insane – you have a fabulous life.”

“Um, hello, you’re successful and you’re worried about your reunion.”

She made a very good point. The problem with high school reunions is that you’ll always be who you were at the end of senior year – everyone remembers who you dated or didn’t date or wanted to date or who was a brain or who was average or who so-and-so said did whatever with four guys that one night. The girl who was pregnant at graduation will always be That Girl Who Graduated Pregnant. We pretend to be mature as adults, but being around women from my high school turns me into an awkward 16 year old. Add drinks and it only gets worse. My point is, if you judged me by high school, I am just the third wheel, tagging behind my friends with their older boyfriends in college who bought us alcohol.

This Fall is going to be hard on me. Best Friend Ever is having a baby, College Roommate is getting married, my younger brother is getting married – all within a month or so of each other. Call me melodramatic, but if you need me I’ll be sneaking a cigarette out back. So parading around in a cocktail dress with girls from high school and their husbands and baby pictures is enough to drive me to get a cat and start knitting or something.

But for some reason, hearing from my girlfriend whose perfect life I envied because she wouldn’t have to show up dateless at her high school reunion and realizing that she was annoyed about hers because everyone would want to know why she didn’t have a kid got me thinking. In the contest of “Who has the best life” everyone has a shortcoming in their own mind. My friend doesn’t have kids. I don’t have a husband. Someone else doesn’t have the job she wants.

I’m more than the Third Wheel. So much more. I’m witty and successful and intelligent and, yes, maybe even a touch charming at time. Even though I don’t always believe it or act like it, I am. (Note to self: Still go to the gym.)

So I joined the reunion site and uploaded a photo and winced as I went through the profiles – so many moms, so many marrieds, so few singles.

I better book my Gay Boyfriend early before one of the three other single ladies snaps him up.

I am out of words.

For all of the good advice and caring I’ve received this week, I am out of words.

For all of the moody music I’ve listened to, for the pint of ice cream I ate, for the mindless TV I’ve watched, I’m out of words.

I am not depressed or terribly sad or crying anymore. I’m not bitter or rage-filled. I am out of words.

So I’m sitting, curled up alone in this bed without my words to comfort me, thinking about myself, thanking the heavens for my kind friends.

Grand realizations and cathartic outbursts deserve a moment or two to sink in. So I am marinating in my past choices, pausing in this slight melancholy and planning my next step.

Note from CBS: Writing this was incredibly painful. And I debated posting it and turning comments off because I alternate between feeling completely broken and completely pathetic. It is ridiculously long (almost 1800 words) and I don’t even care.

Saturday was a ho-hum sort of day. I ran some errands and relaxed after a long week. A bit of rain in the afternoon was enough to send me nesting under blankets with bad television to keep me company. I’ve been working more than 12 hours each day – here’s to getting the job you always wanted, warts and all – and had neither the energy nor patience to deal with the outside world on Saturday night.

Late in the evening He sent me a text. He was out drinking and looking to misbehave after he left the bar. I decided some nighttime company would suit me just fine. I met him at the door in a red nightgown with thin pink straps, a glass of wine in one hand (for me) and a beer in the other (for him). He wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss.

“I can’t believe you met me at the door with a beer.”

“You said you wanted to keep me company. So let’s have a drink.”

We curled up on the couch, and he started talking about putting the house he and his ex bought together on the market, telling me I should go check it out. I protested since his ex is the agent and he recanted, saying that she would know it was me and it wouldn’t be good.

“She knew I was dating a [Charming],” he said.

“She knew about me?”

“Yes, back when we originally dated she knew about you.”

“I didn’t know about her.”

He paused, realizing that I was one of the women in his harem who hadn’t known I was just one of many. I could see the wheels turning in his head as I questioned him and moved my body away from his, until I was tucked in right next to the arm of the couch, as far from him as I could be on this piece of furniture.

“This all is just such a [Charming] thing to say,” he said when I asked him about dumping me by not calling a few weeks before he knew I was having surgery.

“What does that mean?”

“You never stop thinking. It’s just so [Charming].”

He leaned toward me and wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me out of a tight ball of legs and nightgown.

“I should hate you,” I protested, as my body unfolded under his.

“I know you should,” he said, pressing his chest on top of mine and burying his head in my neck. My mind was racing, debating if I should push him off of me or just relax, stop harboring feelings from two years ago and go along with the physical relationship we’d started anew. He knew I was grumpy and that bringing up the woman he dumped me for wasn’t the best move. Not having words to allay my grumpiness, he pulled out all of the stops otherwise until I was literally putty in his hands, short of breath and placated.

And then something happened.

We were in my bed and I was underneath him, asking for him to hold me. He slid his hands beneath my back and cupped his fingers around my shoulders. I could feel my face flush and the beginnings of tears fill my eyes, which I squeezed tight. But as the tears piled up and I could no longer keep them in, I reached up with my hands to wipe my face and shield my eyes from him.

“Don’t cover your face like that,” he said, pushing his chest up from mine to look down at me.

But I pressed my fingers hard against my eyelids.

“Look me in the eyes. Look at me,” he breathed. “You have such beautiful crystal blue eyes.”

I let out a breathy no and he clutched my wrists and pulled my hands from my face and down on either side of my head.

“Look at me,” he said. And then he paused. “Are you crying?”

That was all it took and my tears broke through the invisible dam and ran down my cheeks.

I stammered that I was fine and he seemed to pause in place, unsure of what to do.

“Please, I’ll be fine in a minute. Just stay with me like this.”

“Why are you crying?” he asked, calmly. “Am I hurting you?”

I continued to repeat over and over again that I was fine and that I didn’t know why I was crying. He said that I obviously wasn’t. I begged him to just ignore it, to keep going, to be with me. He obeyed at first, listening to my reasoning that I would calm down. But when I didn’t he protested that he was hurting me and he just couldn’t hurt me anymore.

“I’m not crying because I don’t want to be with you,” I said.

“You’re crying because you do,” he said, his voice soft and fading.

And I just buried my face in his chest and sobbed. And he rolled off of me and I turned away from him because I was sobbing. He pressed his body against my back and wrapped his arms around me and held me so I couldn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I can’t give you want you want.”

He must’ve repeated it a million times in my ear. It became his mantra as he rocked me and held me tightly. My responses were incoherent or inconsequential or both. Never have I felt so raw and vulnerable and pathetic and desperate and alone. I wasn’t just crying for him. I was crying for every man who ever left, who ever lied, who ever didn’t want me, who passed the time with me even though he didn’t care about me. I cried for the college girl who drank and kissed too much to cover her pain. I cried for the adult woman who couldn’t trust men.

I cried because I’m 28 and feel too old to be wasting time with the wrong man. I cried because I wanted it to mean something. And because it never had. And because I was scared to let it. I cried because I didn’t know how I’d ended up here and because all of my friends were right when they warned that this casual fling was a bad idea.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t handle this,” he said. “And I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

“I’m not some innocent victim here. I’m an adult and I knew I was doing.”

“But I’ve been in your shoes and I know the signs and I should have seen them.”

“I feel like even when we dated the first time, I always liked you more, always wanted to be with you more, always tried more,” I said.

And then. Oh, and then.

“Look, you’re intelligent and funny and I love your company and talking to you,” he said. “But, you know, you just weren’t it and I knew that all along.”

He stammered over the last part. And as much as it hurt to hear and as ashamed as I was, I finally got the break up speech he never bothered to deliver two years ago. And for better or for worse, I finally knew.

He held onto me for a little longer and continued apologizing and stroking my back. I was struck by how calm he was. He said he was upset and hurt and taken aback. And I’m sure he was – no matter how horrible he was to me, he didn’t deserve my mid-coitus emotional breakdown. He just never seemed to show it. He gave me this pained, pitiful look, which I’ve seen only once before, on the face of the only other guy whose face I ever cried to. Both faces bore the same, “Oh God, I made a woman cry” emotion. Neither reflected the pain that I’d expect to see from someone who made a woman they cared about cry.

We got dressed and as he was getting ready to leave, I sat on the back of my couch in my nightgown. He walked over to give me a hug and I pulled him in for a kiss.

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Just one,” I pleaded.

And I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and tugged his hair with my fingers and pulled his body into mine. I could feel his body respond to me and his breath shorten. He pulled away twice but came back to kiss me.

The third time, he stopped me and told me no, that we weren’t doing this, that he wasn’t going to keep on hurting me.

“I’m going to disappear for awhile,” he said. “But I would like to be your friend.”

I bit my lip. And he grabbed my hands and pushed them to my sides and held them there so I couldn’t hold him. And he kissed me deeply and forcefully. And then he pulled away.

He couldn’t look me in the eye as he said, “If I don’t talk to you again, I hope you have a good life.”

And then he was gone. I collapsed on my bed in my cute red nightgown and pulled my knees into my chest and cried because I’d been willing to settle for a guy who I knew wasn’t right, who I would never introduce to my family and friends. Even he didn’t want me.

I felt alone and unloved. So I did what people who feel alone and unloved do: I cried some more. Until I was choking on my sobs. Until I couldn’t make any tears. Until I passed out from the exhaustion of being so vulnerable, so melodramatic, so emotional.

When I woke up Sunday morning, my eyes were almost completely swollen shut. I took a shower, put on a face masque to soothe my skin and warm tea bags over my swollen eyelids. As I washed my face and blew out my hair without any products or flat irons or round brushes, I stopped and stared in the mirror and my splotchy, swollen face. And I saw my big crystal blue eyes. I wondered who the next person who would gaze into those eyes under bedroom light would be.

As I shook my head, my unruly waves bounced and I decided that, for now, I just needed to worry about figuring out once and for all what was wrong behind those eyes.

I am not ashamed to admit that I just downloaded “Little Miss Obsessive” by Ashlee Simpson … I’m just not telling anyone other than, you know, the people who read my blog.

I’ll put it in my secret “embarrassing” playlist, right after “Low” by Flo Rida and “I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend” by Avril Lavinge.

Which of the following situations do you think is more frustrating:

Being unceremoniously dumped by someone and then constantly reminded that he treated you unkindly or being unceremoniously dumped by someone and being occasionally reminded that he possesses the ability to be sweet to you, yet chooses to harness this power sparingly?