I never told you about how shopping for Gala apples used to weigh so heavy on me. You were always so particular about them. Their shape. Their shine. Their texture and crunch. It always felt like the margin of perfection was too narrow for me to get right—the learning curve of apple scoring too steep for me to master. So it became your job to hand select each ruby prize. You did so lovingly, only bringing home the best and sweetest red globes for our lips to caress.
For the first year after you left, every time I reached for a Gala apple from the produce stand I felt a tightness in my chest. I had never told you about the imaginary scoring system that I failed to learn. But even after you were gone, the pressure to pluck perfection from the pile lingered. Each time I went to the grocery store the anxiety returned. The longer it went on, the sillier it felt. The visceral tightening in my stomach, bringing back a flood of memories of the life we used to have. Of the people we used to be.
Eventually I stopped buying Gala apples, for fear that the weight of them would crush me. I switched to Granny Smith, because the touch of them didn’t break my heart. They were tart rather than sweet, and their bruises never bothered me.
I’ve since found equilibrium in my grocery store escapades,
and the bottom of my fruit drawer holds space for both luscious red and green orbs.
It doesn’t shake me anymore when I pull the drawer out and they roll around
together. They’re just a piece of you and a piece of me, all that remains of
our beautiful, chaotic hyperbole.
I spent my teenage years dating a continuous cycle of losers, as my father so eloquently put it. Looking back now I realize that deep down I didn’t believe I was worthy of love, so I went looking for it in all the wrong places. I bounced around from one toxic relationship to another, never staying single for long. All of these failed attempts at love meant that when I met Tanner my second year in college, I knew immediately that he was really special. He was sarcastic yet sweet, gentle, and hilariously awkward after being home-schooled his entire life. He had more patience than anyone I had ever known and I knew that he would never hurt me. So after years of being emotionally wrecked by skater boys, I really fell hard for him and his honesty and authenticity.
The summer before my senior year in college Tanner proposed to me. Tanner never got excited about anything, and I loved that, but one minute I was at the St. Louis Zoo staring off into the elephant exhibit and the next minute I look down and there was a ring box sitting in front of me. He didn’t bother to get down on one knee, and the words, “Will you marry me?” never actually left his lips, but I still said yes anyway. My parents were heavily opposed to our engagement, but their lack of support only pushed me further down the path of certainty that our marriage was going to be a success. A few months after we got engaged Tanner and I took a visit to Portland to check out the chiropractic college there as a possible graduate school option for me. I loved it. I loved everything about it and I loved the city of Portland. But Tanner just loved me, so he agreed to move our lives across the country and put our wedding on hold until after graduate school.
Chiropractic school was physically and mentally exhausting. It demanded more time and energy than anything else in my life ever had, and Tanner was my rock through it all. But then a year into school Tanner’s factory job changed and required him to start working the night shift. Suddenly we were both on twelve hour days, but on completely opposite schedules. We saw each other for about ten minutes each day as we passed in and out of our front door. As months of this wore on, we slowly began to develop different friends and different interests. Whenever I hung out with my friends from school, Tanner opted to stay home alone instead. When I finally brought my best friend over to our house for the first time, Tanner didn’t even look up from playing Call of Duty to acknowledge the woman I had shared so many stories about.
Around this time I decided to reach out on Twitter to my college calculus teacher that I had always had a huge crush on from afar. Nineteen year old me lost so many hours of sleep pining over Hot Professor Brian, as I used to call him behind his back. He had a terrible mess of curly brown hair, but it worked for him. Back in college I used to get dressed up just to go into his office hours and get help with my homework. (I really am terrible at math, so it was sort of legitimate). He knew I had a shameless crush on him, but he was cool about it and clearly not trying to date a student, even though he was only three years older than me. I had never met anyone in my life like Brian and everyone on my dorm floor knew of my unrequited love for him. He was super young to be a professor and he had already traveled the world. He was intelligent and quick witted and confident. And a total babe. But Brian only taught at my college for a year which meant I had spent the next six years shamelessly Googling his name to see what school he was teaching at and what he was doing with his life. Tanner had heard a story or two about Hot Professor Brian in our five years together, but he had no idea I was still keeping tabs on him.
For months my interactions with Brian were casual and harmless. He was teaching in Pennsylvania and had an international job lined up the following fall halfway across the world in Abu Dhabi. But he stimulated every part of me in a way I had never experienced before. He continually challenged me to be better and to want more for myself. From across the country he was slowly igniting a fire inside of me, and that fire gave me the courage to do something completely out of character. I had recently bought a ukulele and taught myself a simple song. I’ve always loved singing, but I have terrible stage fright. One night, in the wee hours of the morning while Tanner was working overnights, I decided to record myself singing and upload it to Facebook for the world to see. It was the most terrifying thing I had done in years and it didn’t even require me to leave the bedroom. When Brian saw it the next morning he text me immediately and had countless wonderful things to say. He complimented the soulfulness of my voice and told me how awesome it was that I finally found the courage to do something I’d always wanted to do.
I spent that day feeling on top of the world. I knew Tanner had seen the video, but in our short correspondences throughout the day he never brought it up. I thought this was strange, because he knew how vulnerable singing made me feel. But we had dinner plans that night before he left to go on a camping trip, so I decided I would ask him about it then. So there we were at the Olive Garden, sitting across from each other and completely absorbed in our cell phones. When I brought up the video, he didn’t have much to say about it. I finally just asked, point blank, “Did you even bother to watch it?” He replied that he had opened it but only watched the first few seconds. Whatever emotion flashed across my face in that moment—he responded defensively, “It was a terrible song and the ukulele is a fucking stupid instrument.” It was one of those moments where time literally froze around me. I was sitting in the Olive Garden at Mall 205, with our unlimited salad and bread sticks, when I realized that I could not marry this man. The stark contrast between both Tanner and Brian’s responses hit me hard and all at once. I realized that Tanner and I didn’t have anything in common anymore. I had spent the last five years growing and changing so much, and he was still this kid spending his days off oversleeping and playing video games. I loved him, but it wasn’t going to work. Ever.
We ate the rest of our meal in silence and when he got back from his camping trip I sat him down and shattered his whole world. I had never broken up with someone before, and here I was, leaving the one person I had promised to spend the rest of my life with. My word had always meant everything to me, and letting him down broke my heart. I hated seeing how much hurt I caused him, while simultaneously feeling completely devoid of being able to offer him any sincere comfort. By the time I realized I was over it, I had nothing left to give.
I took that summer off of school to try to get my life together, but the truth is that I was seeing Brian before Tanner even had all of his stuff moved out of our house. A month into dating Brian we took a fairy tale vacation to Ireland where we bought a pair of Claddagh rings and sang Christmas songs in the car across the breadth of the country, all the way from Galway to Dublin in the middle of July. We decided that he wasn’t actually going to take the six-figure job across the world, he was going to move to Portland without a job lined up at all and we were going to figure it out. And we did. So for the second time in two years I helped a man pack up a carload of his possessions and drove him halfway across the country to be with me. After being engaged to Tanner and thinking I had a forever love, living with Brian showed me what real love was truly capable of. For the first time in my life I had a partner that taking care of me, rather than me constantly taking care of them. He bought me flowers just because, mailed me endless love letters, and hid notes around the house just to make me smile. When I graduated chiropractic school both of our families flew out to celebrate with us before he and I flew to Thailand for a one month vacation. It was the eighth country we would visit in two years, and life was pure bliss. It was the happiest, most fulfilling relationship I had ever known. I knew, without a doubt, that he was the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
Brian and I also never argued. But one Sunday night we were sitting on the couch having a pretty heated discussion about what to do with our upcoming lease renewal. I wanted to go on a month to month basis in our current house because I had just started my first job and I didn’t want to move amidst all of that transition. He was tired of commuting every day to the university he was teaching at and wanted to move closer in to the action of the city. And he thought it would be good for me to have coffee shops I could sit in on Saturday mornings and socialize, too. In the heat of the moment I told him that I was always going to be a woman who preferred to stay home on Saturday mornings in her pajamas drinking coffee that was already paid for. The next words that came out of his mouth were, “I think we’re different people who want different things and I don’t think this is sustainable anymore.” One minute we were talking about which quadrant of town to live in, and the next minute our life as I knew it was over.
I never saw it coming. I had been so consumed with school and then work and with taking all the love that Brian was giving me, that I had gone from a relationship where I gave everything to a relationship where I took everything and never even noticed I was doing it. I laid awake crying all night that night and when I walked into the kitchen the next morning my eyelids were so puffy I could barely see out of them. And when Brian looked over at me, I recognized the same look on his face that I had given Tanner two years earlier. He was over it. He had nothing left to give and I knew exactly how he felt. I knew exactly how we had gotten here, because I had already lived that life. I had been on the other side of it with Tanner, constantly giving to someone who never noticed all the sacrifices I was making. Our life was done, and I knew there was nothing I could do to change his mind.
So 2017 was a growing year for me, to put it lightly. I made a promise to myself to be single for an entire year. I needed to figure out who I was and get used to being alone after having not been alone for the last fifteen years. And it was a hard year, because it turns out that growth is often painful and uncomfortable. But somewhere between leaving Tanner and losing Brian I was forced to finally find myself. I was forced to look inward, to truly see myself for who I am, and to learn what I was made of when left with no other option. I embraced my whole self, with my faults and my flaws. And for the first time in my life, I am enough. I found that seventeen year old girl inside of me who was too scared to love herself and I fed her to the wolves. I learned to become my own rock. And I’m finally comfortable with being me and being alone with myself, because I now know that when I’m alone, I’m always in good company.
Post Script-
JDH Rod performed a version of this story at the Literary Arts’ Spring 2018 Storytelling Intensive. The audio of that performance can be heard here.
The YouTube video that changed her life can also be viewed below:
