Let’s talk about love. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, right? It is February; time for love stories and big plastic heart-shaped things swinging from store rafters. But let’s really talk about it for a second. Let’s talk about what love means to you. To me love is a fucking huge concept. It’s this stretchy, luminous thing we strive for every day. Whether or not we’re apt to admit it, love or the desire to find loves tends to be one of the biggest driving forces in everything we do. My first attempt at love was with a guy named Ethan and we were together for three whole years. That’s great right?
Nowadays I like to say he ruined my youth, or at least my first couple years of college, but for the first two of those three years I had absolutely no regrets. I lived and breathed love like it was always meant to be, like this boy was the only one on earth. But after three years, things started to crack. Things got tense and I got angry and he got involved in drugs. Then one day, in November, 2011, he called, told me he had been arrested for selling drugs, that he was moving back home and dropping out of school. With that phone call love came to a grinding halt, slid across my kitchen floor and toppled right into the garbage can.
The previous summer, the clock had already started ticked closer to the end of our blessed union. In a quiet voice that did nothing but make my stomach roll and my legs automatically clamp shut, he’d said, “If you got pregnant I’d marry you, ya know.”
I shoved him off me and rolled towards the edge of the bed. He reached for me, his fingertips grasping at my back. My skin crawled with hot, angry goosebumps as I untangled myself from the sheets.
“What? Did I say something wrong?”
“Get out of my bed.”
We always had sex with condoms. He would whine, “trust me baby, just trust me,” playing up his pouty lips as his fingers reached for my waistband. I always told him no until one spring morning when I got tired of saying no. And then, for the next three weeks, I anxiously awaited my fate.
One day, over the phone, I told him that I was afraid I might be pregnant. I had been a mess all day, fidgeting in class, bouncing my legs, jiggling my feet. I had rings under my eyes like I was the inside of a fucking dead tree with each ring representing an hour I lost sleep while waiting for my belated time of the month.
I wasn’t sure what I expected him to say. Maybe, “What should we do?” or “Are you okay?” or even “It’s going to be alright, whatever happens. You’ll be fine.” Even if it was a lie, I was just looking for some comfort.
Instead, he feigned a homework emergency and then went on to ignore my phone calls for the next two weeks. He even ignored the text I sent telling him that there was nothing of note in my uterus after all.
He showed up at my apartment a couple days after that and took me out, boozed me up, made me feel beautiful. Love came rushing back. But I could feel the shadowy presence of the end hovering close by. That morning, when he uttered those words of marriage to me, at me really, I could feel the finale snorting, soft, hot breath on my neck.
After getting dressed, we took our fight out into the living room.
“How dare you say something like that to me?”
“What do you mean?” He still used that I’m the boy you fell in love with when you were 17 voice.
“You know I’d say no right?”
“No.”
“I would never marry you.”
It wasn’t just him. It was marriage, but also him. I was offended that he would expect me to give myself to him, legally, after what had just happened. I had always been loud and proud about my intention to flout the norm and never get married. He, apparently, hadn’t been bothering to listen.
“Why would you say that?” Maybe, at one point he could have changed my mind, but that was before he started keeping a fifth of whiskey next to the bed. That was before he snorted coke off my signed copy of a Jennifer Egan novel.
“If I got pregnant I would expect you to cough up to money for a fucking abortion.”
Before I slept with him the first time I’d had this talk with him. The “if I get pregnant I will be getting an abortion” talk. Now, more than ever, it seemed relevant. I had things to do, a life to lead. He was still living off his parent’s money. He didn’t have time to be a deadbeat dad and I didn’t want to gamble in the genetic lottery only to have a baby who looked just like him.
“If I’m so terrible why do you love me?” He was starting to get this dark, murky look in his eyes. I felt like my heart was on the outside of my body. He’d never looked at me like this before.
It was a good question, though. Why did I love him? Did I love him? I had been saying it for three years, but was I saying it because I meant it, or was I saying it to reassure myself? Each time I felt doubt slide in I’d tell myself that this was who I chose.
Because really that’s what it was coming down to, I chose him. Sure, in high school there really wasn’t much to choose from, I didn’t have a vast array of men swooning at my feet, but I always stuck with my decisions. And my loyalty to this boy was somehow stronger than my love for myself.
He stood there, waiting for an answer. He’d stood in front of me hundreds of times in the past three years, but this time he looked different. It wasn’t anything that I could pinpoint, a physical difference. It was a feeling, like maybe he wasn’t the boy I thought he was.
Later, after he’d left, I started examining my intentions. My mother raised me to believe that no one would ever come along on a white horse, like the end of a Disney movie, to save me. I had to find my own Prince Charming and I had to fight for him. I kept fighting with Ethan because I was pretty convinced I was fighting for him, for us. For him to finally transform into my own personal Prince Charming. I realized that all those clichés about changing people were wrong. You might just change them into something you never wanted for yourself in the first place.
It wasn’t just that though. After three years in captivity I had developed a healthy amount of fear. I was terrified to be alone. It always seems really overwhelming when I thought about it too hard. No one loves me. No one, on this planet, loves me at all. The risk of that truth coming out, of that being a fact, always scared me into staying, into letting him into my apartment after he hadn’t spoken to me in two weeks, into ignoring signs that he was partying too hard, that it might be becoming a problem. It would wake me up in the middle of the night when I was alone in bed and imprint itself in typeface in my brain. I am alone and no one loves me.
For some reason I thought this boy would save me from going through the rest of my life by myself, he would rescue me from dying alone, he would be the answer to the question of love, even though I was starting to earnestly hate him. And every day when he showed up to our relationship as himself I hated him more, because he wasn’t that boy that I’d fallen in love with anymore, and it wasn’t fucking fair.
We wallowed in our fate a while longer before I ended things. It was a fight I wasn’t keen on losing, a realization I had to live with before I accepted. It sat in my gullet for a time, a prickly cactus of indigestion and shame. I realized that in my fight to convince myself and everyone around me that Ethan and I were soul mates, I’d lost so much of myself. When people told me he was awful I’d tell them, point blank, “He loves me.” Except when he called me that day, and told me how he had once again chosen drugs over me I realized that he didn’t love me, and the thing I’d been so scared of was already the truth so when I lost him, it was like losing nothing at all.
Two months ago I saw his picture on the internet. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, but he appeared, like dark magic, on my screen. He was shoved in between two barely legal college girls with a forty in one hand and a blunt in the other. And, to my surprise, my first reaction was to laugh. I felt as though the whole big blue sky was inside of my chest.
I remembered that girl who would have been calling him, how she would agonize over his voicemail and wonder where he was or who he was with or what state of fucked up he’d be in that night. I remembered torturing myself with thoughts that I wasn’t good enough for him, wasn’t pretty enough, wasn’t enough. But in that photo it all became clear. He was not the boy I fell in love with, and I was not the girl I had been. I was better now. I was free.
Gibson Culbreth is a girl named after a guitar. She is currently attending Columbia College Chicago for Fiction Writing and interning for 2nd Story. Her work has been featured on the Molotov Cocktail, Down in the Dirt Magazine and The Story Week Reader.