indiscriminate
tender square in kindergarten, there was carey, my chubby-cheeked neighbor. we got paired together for a school fashion show where he spun me around as i modeled a bathing suit to the beach boys’ “kokomo.” i mistakenly thought that because he had to hold my hand for the dance that it meant that he was mine. he got annoyed by my clinginess during recess and i remember going down the big red slide crying, telling stephanie when i got to the bottom, “carey, that jerk, broke up with me.”

*

in grade two, there was raphael. he was a polish boy with pale blue eyes and soft blond hair, so fair he looked like a doll. i use to sit alone at recess by an electrical pole that had a concrete lip like a seat and i’d watch people from there. he sat beside me one day, picked me a bouquet of white clover from the grass, and kissed my lips without any words exchanged. he returned a second day and did the same thing. i waited there a third day but he did not come. i have no idea what happened to him; he may have left our school sometime thereafter but i often wonder if he was a figment of my imagination.

*

in grade three, there was danny. we met at wheelz roller rink and he held my hand to michael jackson’s “remember the time” during the couple’s skate. like the aforementioned carey, i believed more had happened between us than what actually transpired, telling all my girlfriends that i had a boyfriend who went to a different school after, even though i never saw danny again. (not that anyone ever believed me.)

*

in grades four and five there was mike. he was obsessed with wrestling. he had a bowl cut and was really good at impressions, always cracking jokes in class. he was my family’s paperboy and sometimes i’d wait on the front porch just to see him, trying to act casual.

for his eleventh birthday, i walked to his house before school and asked him to be my boyfriend, asked him to give me his answer before end of the day. when he said yes, i was elated. but that quickly dissipated when i thought about how my older sisters would tease me, or worse, our classmates at school; how would we even go about being boyfriend and girlfriend, what did that even look like?

the next day, i tried to walk it back by telling him i had been joking, and he said he’d been joking too.

*

in grade six, matt started at our school, the first new person we’d ever had in our class. he was like a croatian kurt cobain with his long, blond wavy hair, and he played soccer. i wanted to get his attention before the prettier girls in my grade could, believing i needed to set myself apart. using my mother’s floral stationary, i wrote a secret admirer note to him, kissed it with lipstick, and sprayed it with her white diamonds perfume. i paid stephanie $5 to put it in his mailbox because i didn’t have the courage to.

in the letter, i asked him to tape a response to the bottom of the park bench by the playground. when i went to check if there was anything there later, the underside of the bench had only gum.

in the days that followed, his older sister talked loudly about the letter with friends as i sat nearby eating lunch, my cheeks burning. she may have even asked if i had sent it, which i denied. i was terrified that she was going to kick my ass. so, i penned another letter to matt that night apologizing for everything, recanting all i’d written, and somehow convinced stephanie to deliver that one for me too.

*

in grade seven, there was andrew. he was tall and lanky and was good at running. he had a beauty mark on his face and a smile like a lightbulb. i wrote him a poem for valentine’s day:

roses are red,
violets are blue.
will you go with me
because i like you.
i asked you before,
and i’ll ask you again;
please give me your answer
at quarter to ten.

when i turned to him in assembly for his response, he wordlessly shook his head no.

*

in grade eight, andrew again. at a halloween party we got paired for seven minutes in heaven. we sat inside an old plastic playhouse not knowing what to do, talking nervously to fill the time. we eventually kissed on the lips for a few seconds, since the game called for it. when i asked him out again that night, he surprised me by saying yes.

that weekend, i stayed up to watch all of “saturday night live,” that way i would have something to talk with him about at school. when i saw stephanie on monday morning she said casually, “oh, i meant to call you but i forgot; i was talking to andrew and he said he doesn’t want to go out with you anymore.”

*

in grade eight, there was casey. tresa knew him through her boyfriend dane and they both lived in kingsville, coming to windsor every weekend to sleepover at casey’s dad’s house. casey had hair like a hanson brother and a big, buck-toothed smile. i wasn’t getting anywhere with boys at my school so i figured why not.

one afternoon, we sat in tresa’s backyard overlooking little river, anticipating our first french kiss. when i was finally brave enough to close my eyes, i felt his teeth wrap around my chin, and i quickly pulled away. tresa crept up behind us to spy—i sensed she was there—and as i turned to catch her peeking, a huge stick she’d thrown, aiming for the water, cracked me across the bridge of my nose. i still have the scar.

*

in grade nine, there was max. we got paired in drama class for a warmup exercise where we had to mirror movements face-to-face. i started giggling because i’d never looked into a boy’s eyes for that long before and his were so warm it made me uncomfortable. i worried i’d get in trouble with miss harris-ladd because she was a serious lady who wanted absolute commitment to our craft. max mirrored my laughter back to me and i was so grateful for his kindness in that moment.

i remember going to the movies on our first date and taking pictures in a black and white photo booth but i don’t know that we ever kissed or held hands. i used to go to his house afterschool and listen to him play guitar, or watch him and john and paul play video games. after a month of this, i wondered where it was all going, and so i broke up with him.

*

later, it was john. i liked him because he came from a big family like i did, and for his dark brown eyes, his impressive drawing skills in art class. i don’t remember any of our time together; he cared for his siblings while his parents sold art across the province, so when we hung out it was usually with his friends.

during a party at ashley’s house, i revealed to the other girls that i wasn’t sure about what was happening between him and i, that maybe i should end it because i was uncertain about it all. ashley called him and broke the news when i didn’t have the heart to. i can’t believe john stayed my friend for years after that.

*

then, there was scott. he was a year older than me and went to a different high school. we met through a mutual friend and began talking on the phone every night for hours, long after i should have been asleep.

he bought me the smashing pumpkins’ “adore” as a gift once, and i listened to the album five times in a row after receiving it, unable to shake the lyrics “you make me real.”

scott wore glasses, had severe acne, and was quite the racist now that i look back on some of his old notes i kept for some strange reason.

he was my first real kiss and the meeting of our tongues felt like a revelation.

once, we were lying nestled on his bed together and i felt our hearts matching time with one other, just like my older sister said they would. for christmas, i gave him a photo frame with a picture of us, and around it, glued the words to a poem i’d written, a poem about our hearts synchronizing. in exchange, he gave me a xl gap sweater, the kind with the brand name in huge letters across the front, saying he’d described my size to the saleswoman; it was three sizes too big for me and he knew i hated brands.

it took me a long time to figure out that we were no longer an item; we kept talking on the phone each night but he was repeatedly bringing up the name of another girl. weeks later i realized he’d been telling me it was over.

*

in grade ten, it was adam. i don’t remember how it started, maybe we flirted when we were drunk at a party. i’d go to his house afterschool and he’d ask incessantly if he could go down on me. i told him i wasn’t comfortable with that, that i wanted to be able to reciprocate but i wasn’t ready to. i didn’t ever think to leave when he wouldn’t stop pressuring me, day in and day out; all i wanted to do was be held by him and watch “the simpsons” together.

he cheated on me with marnie at a party i didn’t attend. john was the one who finally told me.

*

later, it was richard. richard, who i’d pined for since i saw him that first day of grade nine. at the time we started dating, i actually liked his friend tj more but didn’t want to miss my chance in case i never got a second one.

we’d gone to ann arbor to see smashing pumpkins at hill auditorium—me and richard, and tj and paul, and john and scarlett. during “stand inside your love,” richard turned to me and asked if i’d be his girlfriend. it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened in my life, it felt surreal.

he was the first boy i let use his hands on me when we’d makeout in his bedroom. but because he was a serial dater, all i kept wondering was how many other girls he’d done this with before me.

once, we were fighting over the remote in his basement and when he wouldn’t give it back to me, i called him an indian giver, and when i saw the look on his face, i realized the gravity of what that phrase meant and was mortified.

during an assembly sometime thereafter, he sat behind me and started talking shit about fiona apple with his friends, saying that female musicians sucked and i was so angry i wanted to punch him in the throat. i had played “tidal” when we made out in my bedroom days earlier; i got the sense that he was trying to get me to break up with him.

when he stopped asking me to hang out with him after school and i confronted him about it, it was over.

two months later he started dating my little sister.

*

after richard, there was tj. i liked his whiskers and his strawberry blond eyebrows, and that he loved the pumpkins and radiohead just as much as i did. i’d hang out with him and paul afterschool, would listen to them play music or joke around, not knowing what to do with myself in these situations, always observing.

tj worked at kfc a lot, so i didn’t get to see much of him and we didn’t share any classes together. once, he biked all the way from his place in walkerville to hang out with me in tecumseh. somehow, i convinced myself, even after this gesture, that he didn’t like me as much as i thought he did. we broke up after about a month too.

*

then, there was mark. he asked me out at the drive-thru window when i was taking orders at mcdonalds, which caught me totally off guard. he said he was a teacher’s aide in my nighttime art class but he didn’t look familiar to me at all. i said yes because i worked with three of his younger siblings and they were good people, but also because i didn’t know what else to say.

he took me to a fancy restaurant on erie street and i felt so awkward about it all. he was sweet but he was a lot older than me and i could tell he put me on a pedestal for some reason. he gave me a birthday card with doug as quailman that he had impeccably drawn because i’d told him i’d loved the cartoon growing up. we went to corn fest together but didn’t end up riding the tilt-a-whirl because his ms was acting up and he was unable to climb the stairs. after a couple weeks, it annoyed me that no matter what i did he wouldn’t get angry with me, and so i began acting immaturely on purpose, hoping his idealism about us would burst.

*

sometime after, there was jon. we had our first kiss while taking out the garbage together, standing in front of the trash compactor as it crushed the bags into a single mass. for some reason nothing ever came to fruition with respect to our interest in each other, even though i really liked him. we were a two-week fling and after it fell apart, he dated a different coworker who became his serious girlfriend.

*

in the summer before grade eleven, there was rob. i sort of knew him because he was my hookup for smokes with his fake id. we’d gone on a school trip to vancouver together and ended up in a coffee shop, just the two of us, smoking and talking for hours. he was sensitive, and moody, and wore tie-dye shirts, bellbottoms and hemp necklaces like he was a flower child. later that night, i tried leaving my dorm room to go to visit rob’s because i wanted to keep talking, but mr. v caught me en route, made me turn back around and go to bed.

when we returned to windsor, rob and i started dating. he lived about a mile away from me and we spent all of our time together, driving around the city in his taurus and going to coffee houses so we could keep recreating that first conversation. my parents called him roberto. i’d help him dj weddings, and we even worked at the same mcdonald’s together for a period of time. i lost my virginity to him three months before my seventeenth birthday and cried when it hurt, cried when i felt like the exact same person i’d always been afterward.

at some point in our relationship, we went on a “break” because messy things started happening with other boys: after rehearsing our makeout scene for that year’s musical, frasier told me i was a good kisser and gifted me my favorite chocolate bar, even though he was dating my friend erika, and it confused the hell out of me. when rob brought me a bouquet of daisies for the closing show, i considered us officially back together.

when he went on a vacation to mexico with his family for a week, it was the longest i’d ever been apart from him. the day his flight landed in detroit i kept waiting for his call. he brought me back a beautiful braided silver necklace and bracelet set and promptly fell asleep on the couch, where i photographed him as sunbeams lit his face like a cherub.

we dated for almost two years, and because he graduated before me, i felt completely alone in my last semester of high school since he was my only friend.

there were a lot of times we didn’t get along; his moods were difficult to parse out. he was often angry and directed it toward me and i didn’t push back, probably because his mother was incredibly cruel to him. i watched it play out during family dinners, not knowing what had provoked her or why, and i tiptoed around it like everyone else in that house did.

the final straw for us happened when he got annihilated at the loop. i had tried to get him to pace himself but he refused; i couldn’t get him inside his house when i dropped him off and he passed out on his front lawn. i was terrified that he was going to get sick and choke on his vomit and die. he argued with me to leave him, so i drove home to make curfew. the lawn sprinklers woke him next day and he laughed it off like it was nothing.

a few weeks after we broke up, my coworker christine asked, “isn’t he gay?” she was thinking about dating him and i warned her not to, saying she should avoid him at all costs because he was an “asshole.”

rob came out not so long thereafter; i tried seeing a therapist when i’d heard about it second-hand, and i remembered asking the social worker who’d been assigned to me for advice on how to evaluate that relationship—hadn’t it been premised on a lie?—and she dismissed me and said that it was none of my concern, like i was a complete waste of her time.

(i wish i could say there wasn’t more to come in this list, but there is so much more to come.) 		210904
...
tender square it pains me to admit that i have not really been single really since i was 20. maybe for a few weeks here and there i’d be on my own, but some new guy would always appear in my life to take up the mantel the previous guy had left behind. it is not a quality i like in myself, this constant searching.

as an extrovert, i know that i get my energy from being with people, and as an enfj, i know that my relationships with others are a high priority (sometimes to the detriment of the relationship i have with myself). recently, i heard extroverts be described as a personality orientation that responds to external stimuli, and suddenly so much of my life made sense: my attention is often out in the world rather than being balanced with an internal attention within. so often, i’ve felt compelled to respond to said stimuli because i thought i had to. so often, i’ve taken in energy from others without asking whether it was the type of energy i wanted or needed in my life. so often, i harmonized with other people’s values without asking myself if they were reflective of the values i had within. this behavior has occurred in my family, in my friendships, and in my romantic relationships for decades.

and so, with every love interest, i approached new possibilities like an actor stepping into an improvisational scene, where i was given a random set of circumstances and i followed the most important rule of that artform saying, “yes! and…” all in the name of gathering “experience.”

there were times in my life where i know i was not seeking, where i was needing to recover from another failed relationship, and yet, new people continued to come to the fore. i have a magnetic presence about me, i’m aware of when it’s activated because i see the response it generates in others. i know when that energy is not on; men still came toward me when that energy was off. and anytime i was confronted with those situations, that test to see whether i’d go within myself and reflect like i needed to, i’d abandon it in the name of “experience.”

*

in the months before i turned 19, there was shawn.

my boyfriend rob and my friend brian got me into the loop one friday with my older sister’s id. brian told me i would love “stereo fridays,” because the djs were playing all the up-and-coming indie acts of the early 2000s. i did love it—i danced all night long.

after rob and i broke up, me and brian, who became my best gay friend, would go to the loop together every friday we could—the only times i missed was when i was working shifts at mcdonalds. brian called me over to his place one saturday after i’d missed out at the bar the night before. “i have something for you,” he said. it was a mixtape, from shawn, one of the djs of “stereo fridays.” “he is smitten with you,” he told me. i was floored.

shawn was several years older than me. i don’t know what it was about older guys, but they always made me feel flustered, like i couldn’t understand why they would be interested in me but also that their attention made me feel special at the same time. (oh, the things you learn as you get older, ladies.) i had recently left high school a few months prior, and with that, my first serious relationship had ended. the way shawn looked at me made me feel like he saw the woman i was becoming before i could. and because i couldn’t define what kind of woman i wanted to be, i turned myself into this blank canvas that reflected nothing. shawn’s stare was so integral for me, but paradoxically made me feel like if i was to be myself, i’d lose it somehow. so, i became a cipher.

i could barely talk to the guy. it took all the nerve i had to go to the dj booth and request songs. each week was a new cycle of agony and ecstasy; if i ran into him at milk and said a few words, or if we played pool together, or if i felt him watching me while i danced, well that would carry me through an entire week before i could see him again. conversely, if i felt ignored by him, i would plunge into despair, thinking about the ways in which i could get him to gaze at me in that way again. it was horrible. and i wasted a year of my life swinging between these poles.

nothing ever happened between shawn and i (though he will come back in this story later). he got a serious girlfriend and that’s when i figured out that i had to put my pining behind me and move on. the only way i was able to do that, was by destroying the mixtape he made me.

looking back, i see this as me symbolically ridding myself of the stimuli that was causing me so much internal distress. it set me free.

(sidenote though: there was one benefit i reaped from this entanglement. going to the loop every friday to see shawn made me realize how much i knew about music, and that awareness gave me the audacity to go into cjam, my university’s radio station, and get my own show. i worked in radio for seven years after that.) 		210911
...
tender square when i was nineteen, there was kyle. we met at the loop even though he was straight-edge. he was the lead singer and guitarist for a band he’d formed with friends and he had full lips, soulful eyes, and curly hair. he was shy, but let me pull him out to the dancefloor, held my gaze as i moved him with me in time to the beat.

no one had ever treated my body like he did, he was so generous and attentive. we never had sex because he was saving himself, though i’m pretty sure there were times i tried to pressure him. i told him i loved him far too early, confusing a physical connection i’d never had with an emotional one, and it was not a feeling that he reciprocated.

once, while on his computer listening to music together, he showed me where he kept his digital porn stash, unprompted. he also began telling me about his ocd, confessing every time he looked at another girl’s breasts at work, even after i said, repeatedly, that it was unnecessary. things unraveled further when he was standoffish with me and my mom as i picked her up from a party because he didn’t want to be around “drunk people.” after i ended things, he left me a frantic letter on the front door telling me he loved me in return, and that he wanted me back. i never responded.

*

then, there was danny. danny and i had gone to high school together but hadn’t known each other very well. somehow, we crossed paths in a new friend group i had made during my first semester of university. brian kept telling me that danny liked me, and that it was something i should pursue even though i didn’t know how i felt about him. i knew that my girlfriend kim was crushing on danny, and for some cruel reason, i pursued him in the midst of that just to see if i could.

danny invited me over for dinner at his house and when i arrived, i realized how much i had miscalculated the situation of “us.” he’d made a candlelight dinner, and the magnitude of his romance made me deeply uncomfortable—here i was with a boy whose feelings for me eclipsed whatever i’d felt for him. looking back, i wonder if the intensity of his feelings startled me because i saw something of myself in him, and if this is how other men reacted when confronted with my own emotional intensity. after dinner was finished, he led me to his bedroom, where rose petals had been scattered everywhere, and i had sex with him because i felt like i owed it to him to fulfill this fantasy he had carried in his mind for so long. i didn’t return his calls after and offered no explanation.

*

sometime later, there was kevin. he came up to talk to me at milk as i was studying, when he noticed barry glassner’s “culture of fear” on the table, saying it was a great book. and i agreed even though i still have not read that book to this day. kevin was in grad school for mathematics, wore his hair cropped, and wire-frame glasses. he liked to smoke as much as i did and had good taste in music.

when he took me to see “kill bill volume 1” at the palace, i couldn’t believe that someone like him was interested in me and i was afraid of messing it up, afraid that i wasn’t smart enough to keep up with him. for so much of my life, i never asked questions about things i didn’t know, i just pretended like i understood for fear of looking foolish or naïve to people. and my heart was hardening at this point, i was acting like i didn’t care about things when they mattered a lot to me.

after dinner at the mini one night, we went back to his apartment to watch “grosse pointe blank” and started fooling around. in the midst of it, i worked up the courage to ask if he even liked me, because in that moment i was unsure of so many things. when he confirmed that yes, he did like me, i wanted us to sleep together immediately, but we didn’t because he didn’t have protection.

i ran into him at the loop a few days later, and when he approached me, i was sitting in the lap of another boy i’d been flirting with that i’d just met. kevin was curt with me and that’s when i realized what i’d done: all that time we dated i believed he wasn’t that interested in me because he only called once a week, when here he was trying to fit me into his stressful life. after that incident, kevin never called again. 		210915
...
tender_square after kevin, things get fuzzy. i thought i had kept a list of these flings and relationships, not as some kind of belt-notch list, but rather as the beginning of a series of interrogations into how i could be so careless with my body and my heart over the years. i can’t find this document and my memory is unreliable.

what i sort of remember: reading my mom’s copy of dr. laura’s “ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives.” in one of the chapters, dr. laura advised women to avoid getting physical with men too quickly. and while that’s all well and good, i also recall her saying in that same chapter that “women should never be teases” and my twenty-year-old brain took that to mean that i was somehow responsible if i turned a guy on, that i was then obligated to release them of their sexual tension because i had caused it by making out with them.

i can’t tell you how destructive this was.

there was craig, a coworker of brian’s that he suggested i hang out with because craig thought i was cute and we were flirty when i met him at value village. “we should watch a movie” is always code for “we should hookup” and yet i went over to craig’s house anyway while his mom was out. i was comfortable with making out, but then he invited me into his bedroom. i don’t think i followed him in right away, i may have gone to the bathroom first, but i remember when i did enter his room that i was shocked that he was suddenly very naked. i didn’t know how to extricate myself from a situation like that; i had just met this person. i measured my options. i didn’t want to embarrass him so i didn’t say how uncomfortable i was with the scene, and instead i acted like everything was fine. i knew i didn’t want to sleep with him, and so i used my mouth when i really didn’t want to and fled shortly thereafter, angry and ashamed as i drove home.

looking back, i wish i would’ve just left. because what he did to me with getting naked like that was fucking brazen and wrong.

i remember talking shit about craig’s body afterward to brian and to another couple that knew him, while we were at a concert a few weeks later, saying how strange it was that he was fully shaved and that he looked like a big baby. and i think i did that because it was the only way i felt like i could take back the power i had lost in our sexual encounter. it was not my finest moment.

later, there was aaron. i met him at the loop when i was really drunk and he claimed that he knew me, that we’d had several communications courses together at the university. i didn’t recognize him at all. when he asked me for my number, i gave him six digits. he read it back to me and i said, “yep, that’s right” because i wasn’t sure how i felt about his eagerness.

the next day, i was on the loop’s unofficial facebook page and saw that he had posted about me, wanting to know if anyone knew me because he wanted to message me and get that last digit to my phone number. seeing him go to these lengths i felt flattered and i messaged him.

we hung out a few times and things were friendly enough between us. i drove with him to see interpol in london at cowboy’s ranch and we had fun, though i made sure to invite a third person so it felt less like a date. i wanted to like aaron because he liked me so much, and yet i couldn’t bring myself to get there though i tried. maybe i was lonely, i don’t know. the only night i hung out with him at his parent’s place, we began kissing. and because i believed i was the world’s biggest tease for getting physical in this way, i used my hands to bring our interaction to a close and left shortly thereafter, upset with myself again for behaving this way, for doing things i didn’t really want to do.

aaron messaged me a few days later to say that his parents were going away for the weekend and would i want to come over again? i knew he wanted sex from me. i messaged back that i didn’t think that it was a good idea, that i wasn’t ready for this arrangement. his response to me was, “we don’t have to go any further, we can do what we did last time.” no, aaron. we can’t. i didn’t see him again.

at some point, i also got it into my head that having a one-night stand was a completely normal thing for young woman to experience, that it was a rite of passage (maybe i was watching too much “sex and the city” at the time? i don’t know). and i set my sights one night on a guy named bruce i met at the loop. he was an american who played bass in a punk band. he was lanky and had tons of tattoos, a shaved head, and he wore glasses. he seemed bookish and shy. after we flirted and danced all night, i invited him to follow me back to my parent’s house, then i snuck him into the basement entrance where i awkwardly slept with him on the sofa, as the tv bathed the darkened room with an anemic glow.

we repeated this dance the following week and it was just as awkward. how did people do this so casually? how did people share something as intimate as their bodies with someone they barely knew? i thought i was the problem.

after our second tryst, he came to windsor to meet me for coffee during the day. as he walked me back to my car, he asked about making us a relationship. i didn’t know how a two-night stand could develop into something serious, especially with someone from another country. somehow, it was easier to let this stranger see me naked than to show him the depths of my heart. i didn’t like that we had started from this accelerated place because it felt like there was a built-in expectation that i created between us for sex to always occur. and so i lied and told him my mother found out what had happened in the basement over those two weekends and that i couldn’t see him anymore. 		211012
...
tender_square one friday night when i was due to hang out with theresa, she told me we were going to a house party at a guy named mike’s house, someone she knew through mutual friends. i pressed for more information because i suspected it was the same mike that i went to grade school with, the one who i had crushed on for forever. it turned out it was the same mike; i knew i was going to be reuniting with him before he did, he had no idea i was coming to his party. it had been seven years since we had last seen each other.

the attraction was there immediately, mike was thrilled to see me, and i him. we flirted all night, our bodies in constant touch with each other. i smoked a cigarette while lying on his trampoline beside renee, looking up the stars and felt the night unravel its destiny. (turns out, we burnt a hole through the fabric with our ashes. perhaps that was a sign i missed.)

i’m pretty sure mike asked me out on a date before i left the party and we had agreed to make one another mixtapes.

we may have seen a movie and ate dinner for our first date. as he drove me back home, my mixtape played for him and i remember making out to the white stripes “ball & biscuit” before he suddenly asked me if i wanted to 69. i was put off by this but i tried not to let it show. i liked him so much and a part of me worried that if i denied him, the idea of us would be over before it started (why was it always like this?). so i agreed, even though i didn’t want to; i agreed even though i knew it was his veiled attempt to get a blowjob rather than to try and please me.

we were together for almost three years after.

what i can remember: a lot of laughter. watching new episodes of “corner gas” on ctv every week, and “the office” on nbc. asking him to take down the posters of wrestling babes that hung all over his bedroom because they made me uncomfortable. lying to him about smoking weed with my friends because he didn’t approve. seeing a lot of concerts and movies together. never being sure which mike would manifest when he drank, and anticipating that an argument would arise (when it didn’t happen between us, he’d often lash out at brea if she was late as i drove us home for curfew, and i didn’t defend her or tell him to back off because i was pissed too). the time he called me a “cunt” when i wouldn’t share a beer with him and then allowing him to sleep in the same bed with me afterward even though i promised myself i wouldn't. the way he tried to be happy for me after i landed a job in commercial radio, when i knew he was upset that he wasn’t using his acting degree, when i knew that he was upset that he was in hvac school when he didn’t care about it. acquiescing to sex because i was tired of arguing about how little we did it, not realizing my heart was trying to protect me.

there wasn’t one thing that contributed to the end of our relationship, more like it was a slow awareness that it wasn’t going to work anymore and that it would be up to me to say so.

breakups are the absolute worst; i agonize over them. i don’t want to hurt anyone and i feel a responsibility to deliver the news with honesty and tact. but i remember feeling free when i drove away from his house after, even though i still loved him and wanted the best for him. i remember going to phog later that night by myself to listen to lindy play, and crying into my beer when he sang about a love that couldn’t last.

mike and i still talk through email on the rare occasion, catching up about our families when there’s so much history between us (the last time he reached out was over the summer when my sister went missing). but there’s often this underlying sense i get from his messages that he’s trying to impress me. at a wedding a couple of years ago, i ran into a girl i used to hang with when i dated mike and she said to me, unprompted, “he’s still in love with you, you know.” and i think there may be some truth to that statement, that he may view me as the one that got away.

brea made a comment not so long ago that mike treated me like absolute shit when we dated and that i let him do this, that it hurt her to see; and while there are instances of this treatment that i remember, it makes me wonder how much of myself i lost those years, slowly, in small moments that i can’t even recall between us now. 		211117
...
tender_square after my breakup with mike, i started hanging out with my girlfriends with greater frequency. amanda and i used to frequent the fish market on thursdays to watch jazz. i think the bartender she had a relationship with worked those nights. i had a crush on andrew, the guitarist in the band, for a short period of time, but i never had the courage to approach him. i was content to keep it one of those watching-from-afar scenarios, especially after leaving my relationship with mike.

but on a break in the band’s set one evening, andrew walked up to the booth amanda and i were sharing and struck up a conversation, asked to sit with us. no man had done that so casually to me before, and i knew then that he liked me too, that he recognized me from the earlier weeks i’d been in, that he’d probably caught me staring. to say i was in disbelief was an understatement. i couldn’t believe he was talking to me. the night took on this magical quality which is why i chose to extend it for as long as possible when i shouldn’t have.

as the night wore on and amanda grew tired, i told her it was cool to leave without me. i decided i would not make curfew, breaking it for the first time. i was twenty-three and did not want to tell the guy i liked that i had to be home by 2 am, it was embarrassing. and so i stayed until the show was finished. and i offered to drop andrew off at home with his gear, since he had a big amp with him. he said the whole band was stopping for mexican food at a restaurant down the street (the name of which escapes me now) and would i want to join? i said yes, eager to be near him.

in the lot, we loitered on a parking chock while we sat and shared a cigarette. and then he kissed me and i forgot how to breathe. i had no idea how i had arrived here so quickly, or why i was suddenly getting what i wanted.

in our conversation, i had mentioned that i worked as a local music columnist for cbc and he told me that he had an incredible demo one of his friends had done that he wanted to play for me though it hadn’t been released, and would i want to come back to his house to hear it?

at that moment i knew i wasn’t going home, but i vowed to myself i wouldn’t sleep with him.

after our late-night meal, i drove to his place a few blocks away and he invited me into his upstairs apartment in a house that he shared. we sat on his bed, a mattress on the floor, and it played me his friend’s song. it really was an incredible track, one i didn’t want to end, i wanted my own copy to play on my radio show, to memorize this moment.

andrew asked me to stay and i said i would under the condition that it was absolutely clear we would not be having sex. and he agreed, but that didn’t stop him from begging me for a blowjob 10 minutes later. i refused him. more than once. oddly, my twenty-something brain i thought his request was how indicative of how much he liked me because he was thirty. but in hindsight he was no different than mike asking to 69 on our first date; it was horniness after a long dry spell and both had expected me to take care of it. their arousal had nothing to do with me, it was because i was a nearby body.

by the time we went to bed it was 4 am, and i had work the following day. there was workout gear in my car, and i wore that into the office instead of my clothes from the night before, which reeked of cigarettes. there was a voicemail on my cellphone from my mom hissing, “where are you?” telling me how pissed she was that i never came home. i called her when i got into work, told her i had too much to drink and crashed, at my friend’s insistence, at her place because i was in no condition to drive. my mom didn’t believe a word of it.

andrew and i were together for three months, and there are more stories that i remember from that relationship years later than all the others that preceded it. i don’t know why the mind holds some scenes and discards others. i thought we had this passionate love affair, but the love was only one-sided, going from me to him. without reciprocal love there was a chasm of emptiness, a longing to get back to the scraps of feeling that were given to me, even if it was all pain.

because he was older and interested in me, i thought it meant that this somehow elevated me above women closer to his age. when really, older men tend to prefer younger women because they are less likely to assert their needs, they are less likely to know themselves, they are less likely to hold older men accountable for treating them like shit. those were hard lessons to learn, and i couldn’t help but look back with that knowledge later and see our whole relationship as a mirage where i believed it had more depth than it actually possessed. 		220108
...
unhinged i tried not to take
his behavior
personally


but it was personal
highly personal


i could pretend that it wasn't so
when life
kept heaping new interactions
new meanings
new days
on us


looking for his coat
by the door
looking for his backpack
in the lockerroom


no big deal
no problem
just another work friend
i kept telling myself 		220108
...
tender_square a few weeks fresh from my breakup with andrew i went out to the_loop with theresa and her boyfriend james. the club was pretty dead that night but james brought along his friend john. i drank more than i should’ve, getting loose with gin and soda, flirting with john because it was something to do and being out with others felt better than getting blitzed in my apartment alone.

with liquor in my bloodstream i was more carefree, running to the dance floor whenever a song shot through me. i got up from the table too quickly and tripped on the leg of a chair, crashing my upper thigh against the seat, but the booze helped me shake it off.

theresa had her digital camera and documented the evening. i dressed more casual than usual for going out, opting for jeans, a band tee, and tying my hair into a ponytail under a newsboy cap. there’s a photo of me holding up both hands in the dark of the club, the flash illuminating the unsure expression on my face.

theresa intercepted me on the dancefloor to whisper about john away from the boys at the table.

“so, are you, like, into him?”

“i dunno. i guess he’s kind of cute.”

“because he hasn’t had a ton of experience; maybe you could show him a few things?”

i never thought to question that my best friend wouldn’t have my best interests at heart. i agreed because i thought sleeping with someone else would get my ex out of my system, would propel me into moving on when i only just recovered from the whiplash of getting dumped. and john was moving to toronto in a couple of weeks so i’d never have to see him again.

after last call, theresa and james came back to my apartment with john. the plan was for them to leave once 30 minutes had passed, then john would stay behind.

john and i never discussed this directly.

and when it was just he and i left at 3 o’clock in the morning on my living room futon, i was in a situation i couldn’t back out of.

we kissed and his mouth tasted of emptiness. we moved to my bedroom and i reached new hollows within when he was inside me.

the sex was awful: three thrusts and an “i’ll get you in the morning,” as if john had the skills to bring any woman to orgasm. in the dim lamp light, he commented on the huge bruise blooming on my outer thigh from when i fell into the chair earlier at the club.

i woke with a headache and the sun filtering through the wooden shade. and before i could say more than “good morning” to the stranger beside me, john was on top of me, pushing my underwear aside while i still wore it, entering me with a condom while i was dry.

our second time was much like the first. afterwards, he made no move to leave my bed. i offered to make breakfast, saying, “i was already planning to cook eggs for myself.” i didn’t know how else to end the interaction between us. we chewed quietly across from one another, sipping coffee at my kitchen table. i may have even read the paper to give him the hint that i didn’t want him around.

it took everything i had no to offer him a ride home when our plates were cleared; he had no vehicle. theresa had driven us back to my place that night. but i already knew how pathetic it was that i allowed this man i didn’t know to be inside me and that it was clear i had no respect for how the body is a gift you bestow to someone worthy. because he wasn’t at all deserving of what i gave him.

when he finally put his shoes on to leave, he promised to call and we both knew it was a lie when he was leaving the city.

theresa phoned later as i was stripping my bedding of the memory, asking how it went.

“it…wasn’t good.”

“what happened?”

“well, the first time was over so quickly, which was fine because i wasn’t enjoying myself anyway. and he said he’d get me in the morning, but i thought it was something he just said in the moment, not that it would actually happen.”

“so, you had sex again?”

“yeah.” and i didn’t know how else to process what had happened to me, so i joked: “here i was with my granny-panty sailboat underwear on and he just pushed it aside and started having sex with me. i guess he’s a fan of styx because all he wanted to do was come sail away to my vadge.”

theresa laughed. i laughed with her.

and whenever i called up that anecdote in the years that followed, i always included the detail about my sailboat underwear and i always changed the lyrics to “come sail away” as i dramatically belted it out, creating a distance between the memory of what took place and my understanding of it. i never questioned what happened between john and i until last year (see “crying”); i thought that because we’d had sex the first time, i didn’t have a right to refuse.

while it’s true that i never said “no” to john that morning, i never said “yes” to him either. 		220219
...
epitome of incomprehensibility He was wrong to do that. I don't think inexperience is any excuse there.

More generally, about discovering what we want in relationships...I don't know, it always seems to take a long time. For me, for a lot of people. But it makes me sad to see more expectations being put on women specifically (whether it's to be more mature, more innocent, more available, more organized...the list goes on).

And you articulate that really well.

Back to figuring out what we want in relationships...I keep thinking of what unhinged and Soma wrote in shifting_definitions; the rest of my thoughts might go better there. 		220220
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