"Don't You Feed Me Lies About Some Idealistic Future"

Some of you might remember that about six weeks ago I met this guy, who I deemed “the love of my life,” slightly overdramatically. What followed after that night was the most incredibly romantic week of my entire life. I was going to post about it for a while, but since then tables have turned and I never got to divulge the details of what I considered to be the quintessential DC romance.

He called when he said he would, invited me to half price wine in Georgetown. We spent hours (and two bottles), staring at each other, blushing, telling details to each other about one anther’s lives. The amount we had in common was mind-blowing. After the wine we took a walk along the waterfront, I lay in his lap in a parking lot staring up at him and kissing him. He held my hand, walked me to the canal where we sat with our feet dangling over the edge, asking each other questions like, if you had 20 billion dollars what would you do?
-Buy a condo in my favorite cities – San Fran, New York, London…
-I’d buy you plane tickets so you could travel the world.
-I’d buy you one so you could come with me wherever I went.
-I’d buy you a theatre so you could do whatever you want with it.

I never believed in love at first sight until I met this kid. There is not an explanation in the world for this kind of meeting, this kind of connection, this kind of trust in the universe. I stayed at his place that night, and we passed the time lying in each other’s arms talking and talking until dawn.

Each day that followed was similar. He’d call me for no reason, he text messaged me out of the blue to say he hoped I had a good day. He invited me out for seafood and we had a lovely dinner, laughing, being goofy. He told me he’d invite me to Redskins games – where I could use his family’s box seat tickets, he invited me to future promotions the company for which he works would host where we could eat free food and drink free booze. He asked for my help planning his dad’s birthday party, he said I need to meet his family dog, his brother, that we would have a night where we’d stay in, drink wine, watch the Godfather.

It was overwhelming to say the least. How could I, overnight, meet the one person I only ever dreamed about? I told my friend Kelly about him and she said to me, it sounds like he’s read your blog, has heard things you’ve said your whole life then stepped in and personified them. He was smart, hilarious, witty, charming, a gentleman, well-traveled, in to sports and artsy things, he was loyal, a ton of fun, full of energy, spontaneous, he talked of the future and in the present, when I’d look into his eyes, he was completely and totally into me. I knew it. I knew it, and I was terrified.

When he drove to my house late one night after work and ended up staying the night with me because he didn’t want to leave my side (although he had plans) it was the last straw. I started to panic, could this be happening for real? For real, was it happening, was it my time to meet this person? He caught me at a time when I was looking for something just like this, something that fit, something I always wanted, something I deserved more than anything, especially at this time in my life when I feel like I’m constantly putting myself out there and waiting for the universe to send me something in return. I remember that night my itunes playlist was on random and Nothing Better by the Postal Service came on. I love this song, he said to me and I smiled. “Me too…”

I couldn’t sleep that night as I was slammed with ultimate clarity: that I needed to quit my job at the Corporate Coffee Shop, that I needed to fold my life in yet another direction, that these were things I needed, that I deserved.

The following Saturday, after a week of not sleeping and being sick (which only added to the surreal ness of the situation) I met up with him and his friends in Georgetown. I posted about that night – a DC summer night where the air conditioning in every bar is broken, it’s a million degrees out, your friends are going back to the various stations around the country, and the glass in your vodka tonics melts a little too fast. It seemed his friends loved me, as I had a really nice time. He told me it meant so much to him that I met them, as they were his world. This was understandable, as my friends are my world as well.

I don’t know what happened that night. Maybe it was the heat, the lack of sleep, the sickness, the one drink too far from being completely sober yet not close enough to being euphoric, or the overwhelming feeling that… I still don’t know, but something happened that night. Something didn’t feel right, something didn’t fit.

The next morning we woke up and I sensed something was up. “Do you think we’re moving too fast?” I asked. “Only when I think about it,” he said. Then don’t think about it, I wanted to say, but I’m not really one to talk. I guess when you get two philosophers in bed together it’s easier to be the logical one, to be the one who says, I think we need to slow down, rather than be the one to say, don’t think about it because that in and of itself is completely impossible given the circumstances at hand.

So that’s what I said - I said, I think we should slow down. I do too, he said right back to me and then drove me to the metro so I could get home. I felt sick to my stomach on the ride home, sweaty, still in the same clothes from the night before. Something wasn’t right, something was off. If the world had been so clear to me just over a week earlier, when everything felt right and good and perfect, then here I was feeling the complete opposite.

I called that day but he didn’t answer. Later that week I left a text message to which he did not respond. I had never felt what I felt that week. I was confused, really hurt, curious, and… numb. I went to the beach that weekend and thought about my options:
-never call again
-call and leave a message or tell him what a jackass he was for saying things like that then never calling me again
-calling and saying that “taking things slow does in no way mean stop”
-calling and acting all chipper, happy, saying I want to see him.
After years of stupid dating, of making bad choices, reliving certain patters, and going through all those motions we do in high school and college I came to the conclusion that the most mature, grown up thing to do was the last option. It was the most honest, the most sincere, and what – from the gut – I really wanted.

So that’s what I did, I called and left a happy little message saying that I was home, that I wanted to see him, that I hoped he was well and to call me back. The next day I completely broke down sobbing on my couch in front of my mom who could do nothing but say to me over and over again, you really need something positive in your life, don’t you?

That was a month ago. The last month has been nothing like the first few months of this summer. I joke with my friends, telling them “I’m dead on the inside” because when it comes to life constantly only throwing you crumbs of the proverbial bones, the only thing you can do is maintain a sense of humor. That’s my chosen MO.

My friends fed me the typical clichés, which are the only ways people know how to handle situations like this – just dish out the clichés. I got “he’ll call,” “you haven’t heard the last of him.” They told me, maybe he’s really busy, maybe he’s scared, maybe he didn’t want you to be the one to say anything, maybe he had another girlfriend and she broke up with him then she came back and he got back together with her, maybe he’s in love with someone else, maybe he met someone else, maybe someone in his family got sick, maybe his phone broke. I believed none of that.

I thought, maybe he went off with his brother to open that restaurant he told me about. I thought, maybe he’s scared. I thought, maybe… … … I had nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. Me, the over-analytical philosopher/writer could come up with nothing.

“Why do you think he hasn’t called you?” people would ask.
“I have no idea. NO idea.”
And I still have none.

One night that first week while I awaited his call I stood on my friend’s balcony in Adams Morgan. She asked if he had called. No, I said.
“Well….” She said, “That’s really weird… Maybe he got hurt.”
It was all I could do to not laugh out loud. “Yeah!” I said, “Maybe he got hurt, maybe he died. Maybe he’s dead and that’s why he hasn’t called.” Everyone around us laughed.

Is that what we have come to? Have our clichéd statements of sympathy become so meaningless that now we have to resort to the fact that maybe our Other is dead?! I turned back to my girl friend and said, while she still chuckled, “But the thing is, Chlo, if he died, I think I still would have gotten a phone call. Someone would have picked up the phone and called me had he died, if everything he said was true.”

But I guess it wasn’t. It was just a bunch of bullshit I suppose.


When we met for that seafood dinner I mentioned earlier – the dinner before the walk around, before he kissed me on the bridge, before he held my hand as we strolled around, before we fell asleep kissing each other – he asked me, “What is your biggest regret?”
“None,” I immediately replied.
He raised his eyebrows. “None?”
“None.” I said again. “I don’t believe in regrets. I don’t live my life that way.”
He smiled. “Beautiful.”

It would have been easy for me to say while I sat on my couch sobbing with my mom, “I wish I had never met him,” or said it again later that week when I still hadn’t heard from him, or last week when I watched the Redskins opener and thought about how he was there for every second of that and perhaps I could have been too, there, in person, that I had never met him. I think it too, when I walk around Bethesda, or in Adams Morgan, that I wish a small part of me wasn’t on the lookout, terrified as to what on earth I would say or do if I ever ran into him, it would be easy to think that I wish I had never met him.

But, like everything in life, you just have to think that you’ve learned something. Maybe, even though it felt so perfect, it was absolutely wrong. Maybe all those traits are not what I’m looking for at all. Maybe, all this time, I have been wrong. Maybe I need something else. Maybe I will never get married, never fall in love, never had kids. Maybe that’s just not going to be my life, but something else will. Maybe it will make more sense in time, that you will only understand certain joy and loss when it has passed you by. No regrets.


For two weeks I woke up every morning and checked to see if he had called. I did so at the beach, one week after I had last heard from him, the beach where I’ve gone for 19 summers with my absolute closest family friends, my blood, my spine. I lay in the sun, I drank beer, I read my book, I left my phone at the house so as to not check it every four minutes.

One morning I woke up, walked upstairs to get my cup of coffee and sat down at a table with a few grown-ups who have been my life for years. A puzzle lay before us, one of those atrociously complicated ones of the Grand Canyon where every piece looks the same. I couldn’t put a single piece together and I’m good at puzzles. My brother and some of his friends sat across the room watching a DVD. I turned to watch them together – 15, young, learning, their cell phones scattered across the room, their long hair hanging in their faces. I thought, what was it about then when everything seemed a little easier? I turned back to the puzzle and looked down at the few pieces sitting in front of me. I looked to my left and back in front of me again. I picked up a piece, reached over, and snapped it right into place. I finished my coffee, got up, went downstairs, changed, and headed straight to the beach. Since then my tan has faded – as has my anger and confusion - though I’m not sure I’ll ever forget how it all felt.