Link to original post: [drupal=5277]Maybe I Loved Her, Part 1- Unecessarily Long Introduction (and title)[/drupal]
Part 1- Unecessarily Long Introduction (and title)
Facebook Messenger is an awful way to communicate with someone. Programs like Skype, MSN Messenger, and even old standby AIM keep messages in one window. Facebook can’t seem to make up its mind, and splits its messages between three locations. Sometimes they show up in your message box, sometimes in that little box at the bottom of your Facebook page, and now in that specialized chat window that’s a really poor imitation of dedicated chat programs. Needless to say, I try to use it as sparingly as possible, so I’m always a bit surprised whenever a message comes across it.
Getting divorced sucks. I mean really sucks. It was almost a year between the moment when it became clear that my marriage was unsalvageable to the day when my marriage was legally over. I experienced essentially every negative emotion one can feel during those eleven months. And the funny thing is, the actual divorce proceeding is short. I spent more time filling out paperwork and waiting in line than I spent in front of the judge. He asked me and my ex-wife a few questions, banged his gavel and said good luck. Four years of marriage legally undone in about seven minutes. I’d already moved out by then, so there were no more awkward nights of sharing a bed, sleeping all the way to the wall. Instead, I was alone and broke in my own place, scraping together furnishings from the kindness of my neighbors and eating way more Chinese food than can possibly have been healthy. She kept custodial custody of our son, but I picked him up and brought him to school and picked him up from school every weekday, and he stayed with me Saturday and Sundays. So there was that, but not much else.
Attempts at dating were disastrous to say the least. I met an older woman at a dive bar, then threw up all over the bar when everyone peer-pressured me into drinking a “Doggy Bowl.” I got a text message from a number I didn’t recognize the next night- “I hear you got sick after I left last night- maybe I can help you feel better.” This was a strange, mildly unattractive woman from a dive bar, who’d gotten my number who knows how. But loneliness makes you do crazy things, so there I was, back at the same dive bar the very next night, apologizing profusely to the owner for vomiting all over his bar. I met the woman there, and it quickly became apparent that she was into to the kind of kinky stuff that was not for me.
I figured I should be more aggressive in pursuing women. So when a cute girl sat next to me on the bus a week later, I gave her my phone number. Except I gave her the wrong number. I wrote down 752-0191, then thought better of it and switched it to 725. Common sense didn’t hit me upside the head until after I got off the bus, when I checked my phone number and saw that it was indeed 752. Another blown opportunity, or so I thought until I received a text from a girl named Maia. I soon came to wish that she hadn’t figured out my real number. Over a week of texting, I discovered that she was an 18-year old high school senior, pregnant from a ****, and only a few weeks from getting an abortion, which she ultimately wouldn’t need because she had a miscarriage on Easter Sunday. Yeah, I’d have been better served walking to work that day.
Even I got the message after that: I was still hurting from my divorce, and even if these women had been perfect, I was pretty far from being able to maintain a relationship with anyone. So I kept to myself for the rest of the summer. I went to work, saw my son, and played an absurd amount of Street Fighter. As I got used to living on my own, it was an okay life. But Street Fighter can’t fulfill all of a man’s needs. Well, I suppose it can, but you get tired of fulfilling your own needs, if you know what I mean. It was September of last year, and I was back in school, with a new job and feeling good for a change. I’d gone from hating my ex-wife’s guts to actually talking to her pretty regularly. Things seemed to be improving, so I figured I’d dive back into the dating pool. But I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I’d made over the summer, somehow attracting the worst women in the city to myself. No, this time I would hedge my bets a little, and try to find someone who was safe, a known quantity, while still being hot as hell. Facebook may be awful for messaging, but it’s perfect for those kinds of inquiries. I was stalking my friends, when I just happened to come across Athena’s profile. What’s she up to? I wondered. It was time to put Facebook’s terrible communications system to work.
Everyone hates high school while they’re in it, but some people don’t hate it anymore when they’re out. I’m one of those people. I often look back on high school and wish that I hadn’t been so distracted by teenage angst and existential BS so that I could have enjoyed what was being offered to me more. There really is no social experience like high school, but you don’t realize that until you’re out of it and you experience college, full time work, living on your own, etc. That’s not to say that things don’t get better, but high school is such a unique experience. College and dorm life is better in some ways, but you can be kicked out of college (believe me, I know). Living on your own is nice and all, but on the days where you just want to come home and have someone serve you dinner, good luck with that. It provides the kind of common ground experience that builds friendships. High school was pretty awesome for me; I wasn’t a star football player or class president or any other cool kid cliché, but I had great friends and we made the most out of what our small school in our small town offered. And that’s where I met Athena, way back in 2002.
She stood out in the school; being one of the few white girls in a school that’s 95% black makes that pretty easy. She was probably the only Greek kid in the entire school. But I never really paid her much mind until we started doing all the same activities in my junior year. I was in Model U.N., and so was she. I played the clarinet, and so did she. I was the captain for the boys cross country team, and she was the girl’s captain, and same thing for the long distance track team. It wasn’t like we planned it or anything, it just kind of happened. And when you spend that much time around someone, you talk to them. I thought she was very pretty, and smart, and obviously we had a lot of common interests. But there was a problem- she’d dated my best friend. It had only been for a month, but I still thought of that as being off limits. It felt like I’d be disrespecting both of them if I tried to make a move on her, so although there was mutual interest, I never said anything.
We kept in contact for a bit after graduation, and I even still have some of our chat logs saved from MSN Messenger. I was at school in Richmond, VA and she was attending college closer to home, but we talked through the internet. It was then that we shared that we were interested in each other in high school, but that neither of us thought it would be appropriate to pursue a relationship. And of course, now I was 450 miles away, and she had a new boyfriend anyway. Oh well, college wouldn’t last forever, and I’d be back home eventually. We kept talking as friends, and that was that.
I got home, about three years early, thanks to VCU deciding that they actually wanted me to pay for college. Ironically, when I got back home, I stopped talking to Athena. And before I knew it, I was twenty one years old, married, with a son on the way. I didn’t think much of it. I was losing contact with most of my friends from high school at that point, and that friendship was just a casualty of growing up. It wasn’t until three or four years later that I saw her again. I was on a date with my ex-wife (still my wife then), and we were in a pizza restaurant in my old hometown, eating before our movie began. Athena came in, and I introduced her to my wife. We chatted for a bit, caught up on old friends, and then she left. Instantly my wife said, “She likes you.” I shrugged her off. I’m married, she has a boyfriend. It’s in your head, I said.
Well, it definitely was in my head, because I never forgot what my ex-wife said. And when I saw Athena’s profile last fall, I thought, “Well, she liked me in high school; she liked me in the pizza shop; does she like me now?” I wrote her a message, and didn’t even bother to try to catch up. I went straight for the kill: let’s go on a date. All that was left to do was wait, and hope for better luck.
Part 2- Just Friends, of Course
There are many things in our lives that we would like to forget. For me, there are also many things I would like to remember. I have an awful memory. Pretty much everything before the age of nine is a complete blur of random images and feelings, and nothing until I turned 13 is much clearer. My concrete memories don’t begin until high school, and while my recollection of events from then on is much better, there are still big chunks that I simply don’t remember. Whenever I talk to old friends from school or my brothers, I have to take them at their word that what they say happened actually happened, because I can’t remember. It’s not amnesia or anything medical, I just tend to lose the specifics of events and focus on the general, larger picture. It doesn’t bother me much, because I believe that most of what we remember is made up anyway. That doesn’t mean that it’s a lie, but instead a narrative we construct of our lives to fit our ideas about ourselves. I find that idea much more interesting than memory as a record of events that have occurred.
I find myself remembering feelings more than events, and despite everything that has happened, I usually remember feeling happy. I remember my junior year of high school the most vividly, because I was the happiest during that year. I remember the first year of my marriage the most for that reason as well. I suppose it’s not particularly surprising that I remember the good times and not the bad. A professor of mine had a great expression: “Nostalgia is memory with the pain taken out.” Some might define that as self-deluding, but I think it speaks to our ability to move forward through hard times and make the most of them. Bad things happen, and you don’t always get what you want. But hey, lemons can make some damn good lemonade.
We eventually decided to go out for dinner to catch up. When she came to my apartment, she looked exactly as I remembered from high school. She hadn’t grown an inch since then, and was only five feet tall. Her curly brown hair was about shoulder length. But it was her smile that really stood out. I know that describing a woman’s smile is probably one of the most cliché things someone can do (it’s only slightly less lame than describing their eyes), but cut me some slack- my mother worked in a dentist’s office for most of my childhood, and after seeing the kinds of mouths she had to work in, I’ve developed a pretty strong appreciation for oral hygiene. And Athena’s teeth were literally perfect. Her mouth was just the right width for her face, and her smile lifted her cheeks right into her eyes, giving her a little squint.
She presented me with a bottle of olive oil, perhaps the most stereotypical gift a Greek person can give. But she had a good excuse. Her family had opened a company which imported olive oil directly from Greece and sold it in stores here in the States. She worked with them as a co-owner of the business, and was up to her eyes in olive oil and shipping orders almost every day.
She chose the restaurant, an Afghan place in the next town over. Between leaving the car and ordering our food, we ran into no less than five people that Athena knew. That’s always fascinated me. I am not a social person. I tend to keep to myself in public places, and it takes a while for me to make friends. For some, meeting new people and getting to know them is exciting, but for me it’s a hassle, and one of the drawbacks of dating. In fact, one of the major reasons why I sought to date Athena was because I already knew her, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the frustrating song and dance of getting to know a new person. But it was clearly the opposite for her. She had friends everywhere, and greatly delighted in making more.
The food was okay, but the conversation was great. Before we knew it, we were being asked to leave because it was closing time at the restaurant. I checked my phone and gasped when I saw that it was already 1:00 AM. We went back to my apartment and sat outside in her car, talking and talking. I don’t think I got into my apartment until 3:30 AM, and that was only because I was worried that Athena might be too sleepy to drive if we continued talking. All in all, it was a pretty excellent first date…if it had been a date.
After that, we kept in contact through Facebook Messenger. We’d talk every day, for hours on end, about anything and everything. The next time we went to dinner, I chose the restaurant, a bar a few miles away from my apartment. I don’t like to drink, but it’s hard to find a place to hang out as an adult that doesn’t serve alcohol. We decided instead to drink root beer, play awful games of pool and listen to Billy Idol. We met up once or twice a week, either going out or just hanging out in my apartment playing games or watching movies. After the summer I had, it felt great to just have fun for a change, and to have something to look forward to other than the crushing depression I was finally beginning to emerge from. And it didn’t hurt that my friend wasn’t bad to look at.
During one of our late-night conversations, I happened to mention offhandedly that I hadn’t been to New York City since high school. Athena was incredulous. How could I have not been to NYC in so long? It was only a couple of hours away by train. I just hadn’t gotten around to it, I said in my defense.
“That’s fine,” she said. “You can go with me.”
I know why my ex-wife left me. At the time, I didn’t think her reasons justified breaking up our family, but in retrospect, I now understand that she did what she had to for herself, and that it was the right decision to make. In all honesty, I understood this on some level during our divorce as well, but it was buried under the anger and sadness I felt at the time. People get married, people get divorced. It happens. Sometimes, or maybe most times, things don’t work out.
What I was angry about were the circumstances though. She wanted the divorce, and I was willing to give it to her. But why did that mean that I had to move out? Why did it mean that I couldn’t keep my son? Why did her divorce mean that I lost everything? In my heart though, I knew this was the way it had to be. Even though I was angry, there are some things that I genuinely believe. I don’t believe that you should put a woman out of her home. I don’t believe that you should separate a mother and a child. And ultimately, as a man, it means that I have to put aside what I want and do what’s best for everyone else. When I was married, that meant working 50 hours a week and going to college. Now that I was going to be divorced, that meant not dragging it out, not starting a disastrous custody battle, not subjecting my son to any more pain than he would already feel. In short, it meant losing.
I don’t like to lose. I never did anything of note during my competitive Smash career, but I still went into every match determined to win, and I was salty when I lost. Believe me, I was very salty when I lost my divorce. I don’t think I said two words to my ex-wife between July 18th 2011 (the day we got divorced) and early September. But you know what? That was me acting out of hurt and loss, and while it may not seem like it when you’re in the depths of sadness, when you wake up in the morning and seriously consider taking your own life (which reminds me of another thing my brother said; a friend of his asked him if he was suicidal, and he said, “Only in the mornings.” It’s absolutely true), but time heals all wounds. It may not stop hurting completely, but it hurts less and less each day, and then you can start to function as a decent human being again. And I realized that I wasn’t behaving very decently to my ex-wife.
We eventually became friends again, and started talking on the phone pretty regularly. I even let her know that I was going to be trying to date Athena, as my ex-wife was acquaintances with her, and I didn’t want anything weird between anyone. In fact, in mid-September we even began discussing the possibility of going to NYC in October for our birthdays (my birthday is October 21st, and my ex-wife’s is October 20th). It was something we’d never done when we were married, which was a shame.
It was a week after that when Athena invited me to NYC with her. I couldn’t go with both of them; I was working Saturdays then and there was no way I could get two Saturdays off in the same month. I had feelings for Athena, but I also still had confused feelings for my ex-wife. After all, we’d been divorced for only about two months. Apparently neither of them returned those feelings though, as no matter who I went with, it would be as friends. So who do I choose?
The one I have the best chance of sleeping with, of course!
I’m not one to play games or mince words. If you want something, you have to ask for it, and being direct is the best way to get what you want. So I asked my ex-wife straight out if that was a possibility. It didn’t matter if we were getting back together or not, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. What I knew was that a trip to NYC with a woman was going to happen, and I was going on five months without sex. “You and Athena have invited me to New York, and I’m going with the one where it’s most likely that something good will happen,” I told her. She was surprisingly straightforward with me too, and told me that she just wanted to go as friends. Okay, I said. Then I’m going with Athena.
I should probably clarify that I didn’t expect anything to happen with either one of them; my ex-wife was clearly not interested in me anymore, and Athena had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in dating. But you can’t always listen to what someone says; sometimes you have to listen to what they do. And I’d talked to Athena literally every day since our first dinner. We’d been out several times together, and to anyone who was observing from the outside, it looked like we were dating. Still, I’m not one to force anything, so nothing physical had happened between us. I figured that if something was going to happen, I’d let her make the first move. And if that meant a 2% chance with her, as opposed to a 1% chance with my ex-wife, well then, who am I to argue with math?
The decision was made. I started packing my bags for a day trip to New York with my friend Athena.
Part 3- God, Greece and my Ex-Wife Hate Me 1/2
There’s no such thing as the friend zone. If a woman isn’t interested in you romantically or sexually, then she’s not, and that’s it. It has nothing to do with friendship or being a “nice guy” or ladder theory or any of that other nonsense. If you present yourself to a woman as her friend, then that’s how she will treat you. Trying to weasel your way into her pants almost never works, and in the rare instances where it does, you have nothing to be proud of. All you’ve done is lie very well; you pretended to be her friend, and caught her in a moment of weakness. Congratulations.
There is, however, a such thing as extenuating circumstances.
Being Greek meant that Athena had family in Greece, and that meant trips to Greece during the summer. That also meant having to deal with the cultural demands of being a first generation American with immigrant parents, who transplanted ideas about the old country to their new homes. Basically, it was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, minus the parents that eventually come around. She worked for her parents, lived with them, and vacationed with them. She wasn’t allowed to leave her parent’s home until she was married, and for them that meant being married to, in Athena’s words, a “nice Greek boy.” We talked about it often, how Athena felt that there were things she wanted to do that she couldn’t, and that she was being denied her independence.
It was during one of these conversations that she mentioned that during her vacation to Greece, she’d “reconnected” (her word again) with boy she’d known as a child named Michael. So this was why she didn’t want to date: she was already seeing someone. Or was she? I strongly believe that we say what we mean, whether we intend to or not, and that the words we choose to use are more important than the meaning of those words. I suppose that’s why I write, because I know the power of words.
As she described him, she never once used the word boyfriend. In fact, she described him in neutral, flat language, with words like “nice” and other vacuous terms one uses when they don’t know quite what to say. Her word choice certainly wasn’t lost on me, especially after having spent the entire last month talking to her and hearing how passionately she could describe things and people she truly cared about.
“You know Athena, it sounds like you’re not that into this guy, and you’re only doing this because it’s the safe choice and it’ll make your parents happy.” I expected her to deny it and launch into an unconvincing proclamation of her feelings for Michael. Instead, she started crying.
“I’ve been hurt so many times before. Is it wrong to want something safe?”she asked me. Yeah, she’d been hurt many, many times. If this blog is your idea of sad or tragic, you really haven’t heard anything at all. How could I blame her for not leaping at the opportunity to take a risk that, for all she knew, could lead to her being harmed physically or emotionally again? Add to that the constant pressure of her family, and the picture becomes painfully clear. Suffice to say, I am not a nice Greek boy. Even though it wasn’t really what I wanted to hear, I appreciated knowing it anyway. We were still going to New York together in a couple of weeks, and regardless of everything else, we’d have fun together as friends.
If only my ex-wife knew that. As it turned out, she hadn’t taken me choosing to go to NYC with Athena instead of her as well as I thought she had. Being the oblivious moron that I am, I didn’t realize it until about a week before the trip, when Athena was at my apartment one night. We were watching YouTube videos and cracking jokes, when I received a text message from my ex-wife. She wanted to talk to me about a field trip our son had coming up in a week and a half. I responded, telling her I had company, and that I would call her tomorrow to talk about it.
Big mistake. She knew that “company” meant Athena, and her jealousy flared tremendously. She texted me again. And again. And again. By the time Athena left, I’d received almost 150 texts from my ex-wife, some vulgar, some accusatory, but all angry. Emotions are strange, and don’t always make sense, so I get why my ex-wife was jealous. Yeah, she left me, but for the last five years, she’d been the center of my attention. That’s not something that you suddenly stop expecting. I didn’t argue with her, I just let her vent. Until she accused me of neglecting my son. That is the one thing I will not abide. No one comes before my son, and she knows that. But she also knows that it’s the perfect way to get to me; that’s my Achilles Heel.
My parents split when I was eight years old, but I wasn’t exactly sad about it. They fought constantly, and if evidence is needed as to why divorce must exist, my parents were it. It often felt like there was an invisible clock on the wall, ticking away to the next explosive argument between my parents. Inevitably it would come, but nothing would be resolved, and the timer would simply be reset. In reality, my parents were married, but they didn’t like each other very much.
My father told me a few years ago that my mother was his first real girlfriend. They’d met when he was in the Marines, and she was in the Navy. Then she got pregnant, so they got married. He said that he married her because he didn’t trust her to raise us well on her own. He thought she was unstable and potentially abusive. So he stuck around basically to protect us from her. But when my parents broke up, my father moved away, all the way to Arizona, and then California. And he was right, my mother was unstable and abusive. Without him around, living with my mother was pretty awful.
I swore that I would never get divorced, and that I would never abandon my son. As it turns out, I’m not the only one who had any say in me keeping the former promise, but I’m still in control of the latter. I have no worries about my ex-wife: she’s a wonderful mother who treats our son like a prince, and is always there for him. My determination to be around is about me, and what kind of father I want to be to my son. My ex-wife knows that very well, and it’s her go-to button when she really wants to piss me off.
But I was too excited about going to New York to let it get to me much. It was going to be the closest thing to a vacation I’d had in five years. I’d only called out of work twice in those five years: once for my wedding day, and once on the day my son was born. I was back at work the next day both times, so I felt like I’d earned one more day off.
We took the train to the city to avoid traffic and parking headaches. There’s something quaint about taking a train; the word evokes images of a steam engine and thick black smoke billowing into the sky, even though trains haven’t looked like that in at least fifty years.
New York City itself defies description. The last time I’d been there was in 2001, a couple of months after the World Trade Center fell. Ironically enough, Athena was there too. It was a trip for our high school band, and we were both there as clarinet players. We were pretty restricted as to where we could go and what we could see, so I didn’t remember much from the trip. But this time, it was as if the entire city was rolled out before me on a huge welcome mat. Grand Central Station looked more like a museum than a train station. The Empire State building towered above me, and I had to lean my head all the way back to see the iconic needle at its peak. We had no real destination. This was my opportunity to enjoy the city, and with Athena as my tour guide, I was doing just that.
Mostly though, I was enjoying the people. So many people. I come from a city that barely has 120,000 people and that shuts down almost completely at 9:00 PM. And here I was in New York, with eight million people (eight million! My entire state only has three million!), the city that never slept. Everywhere there was something you couldn’t see in my hometown: rows of ethnic restaurants, people dressed in the most standard and most outlandish fashions imaginable, fleets of taxis roaming the streets, and thousands upon thousands of the kinds of idiosyncrasies that makes New York such a fascinating place to those who visit it, things like two Starbucks on opposite sides of the same block. We stopped by the gigantic, three-story Toys ‘r Us with an indoor Ferris Wheel, ate lunch in a sandwich shop, got caught up in the massive Occupy Wall St. protest that happened to be occurring the same day we were in the city, made small talk with an Indian cab driver on our way across the city. I was instantly in love with New York.
Or was it really New York? Knowing that the woman you’re spending time with is only interested in friendship doesn’t do anything to mitigate the feelings you have, and being in a new place with a new person multiplies those feelings. Whether it was just as friends or not, I was having the time of my life, until we went home. Or tried to.
Part 3: God, Greece and my Ex-Wife Hate Me 2/2
I was looking through my yearbook last year and re-reading the notes my friends left me. Most of it was typical well-wishing and reminiscing, but one stood out to me for the first time. It was from a girl whom I’d spent a lot of time arguing with, until I’d matured a little bit and realized that I’d been acting like a jerk to her. From there, we were cool with each other. Anyway, she wrote in my yearbook,
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the least observant person that I know. If things aren’t spelled out pretty clearly for me, I usually miss the underlying message or implications. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with women, which I’ve historically been abysmal at. Not many women have come straight out and said that they’re interested in me, and that required me to fill in the blanks, to read between the lines. In almost every case, I failed to do so. In fact, I was in an elevator with my ex-wife the first time I talked to her. We were at our college, and she asked me what my major was. I told her history, and then got off the elevator. As soon as the door closed, a voice in my head shouted, “You moron, women DO NOT randomly ask men what their major is in an elevator.” I immediately tried to find her, but it was too late. It would be three months before I saw her again to ask for her phone number.
So no, I’m not particularly good at this whole dating thing. I’ve gotten a little smarter though over the years, and through trial and error I’ve finally learned to recognize the signs that someone is interested in you. And despite our conversations and her apparent unavailability, my friend Athena was giving them all off. Interest is one thing though; action is something different.
After a wonderful day in the big city, all that was left to do was return home. It was midnight, and we were sitting outside at the train station, enjoying the cool autumn weather when a man approached us.
“Good evening,” he says.
“Good evening.”
“What’s your name?”
I decide to have a little fun with him.
“James.”
“Is that your wife there?” he motions towards Athena.
“Yes.”
“It’s so nice to see a young couple out together, enjoying the city and each other.”
“Mm hm.”
“Can I pray with you two?” he asks, reaching out for my hand.
“I’m all set,” I say, withdrawing mine.
“Okay, okay, that’s cool. Look brother, I don’t mean to bother you and your lady tonight, but I was wondering if you could spare a dollar or two for me.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any-“ He didn’t even wait for me to finish my sentence before he walked off. I give him credit though; his approach was certainly more sophisticated than simply begging for money. Athena and I had a good laugh over that one.
Interracial couples in NYC don’t get a second look from anyone, and it was a nice change from how I sometimes felt (or imagined, maybe) people were looking at Athena and I back home. We weren’t actually a couple, but that’s the assumption that most people make when they see a man and a woman together. No one ever said anything or did anything overt, but just as I’d learned to tell when a woman was interested, I’d also learned how to tell when someone disapproved of you just by a look or body language. After all, it was the same thing in the end, listening to what someone wasn’t saying.
Our train arrived. It was finally time to go home, and we were both exhausted. I set the alarm on my phone for 2:15 AM, about ten minutes before we would reach our stop in case I fell asleep. I don’t even remember closing my eyes, but we were both out in moments. I jumped suddenly, startled by the sound of the conductor announced the next stop. I grabbed Athena by the hand and woke her up, rushing her so that we wouldn’t miss our stop. We jumped off the train as quickly as we could.
And saw nothing. I’d panicked and gotten us off at the wrong stop. We were in the middle of nowhere.
My mother was always pretty frank with us when it came to talking about sex and relationships. I can remember being told well before puberty to always use a condom. She was also equally frank about who she thought would make a good partner for her sons and who wouldn’t. Being gay was out of the question, which was why my mother was the last person in our family to find out that my youngest brother was gay. But I remember hearing the anti-white woman speech far more than I heard the anti-gay speech.
She was obsessed with the idea of my brothers and me settling down with a “strong black woman” like her someday. Apparently, in her mind strong meant argumentative, combative, short-tempered and generally unlikeable in everything other than short bursts. Eventually she modified her rules to include Hispanic women, Asian women, Middle Eastern women, whatever, except white women. They were still a big no-no.
Which is why, of course, one of my biggest crushes in high school was on a girl who’d moved to our town from Yugoslavia. I still can’t explain why I liked her: she wasn’t particularly pretty, she walked with a limp (sustained during the years of fighting in the Balkans), and I’d never actually talked to her a single time. But I crushed on her from a distance for more than a year, and hated myself for it. I felt like I was betraying my race and my mother at the same time. How could I have feelings for a white woman? What was wrong with me?
It’s funny the insane things you believe when you’re a child, simply because your parents told them to you. My mother is from the backwaters of Georgia, and they believe all kinds of nonsense down there. She once told us that hot water freezes faster than cold water, despite all understanding of science and common sense telling us the opposite. When my brother repeated this in school, he was nearly laughed out of the room. Even if it didn’t make sense, why question it? This is your mother telling you something, and you can trust what she says, right? So even though it didn’t make sense to me why I should have a problem with white women, even though by high school I knew better than to react to someone simply because of the color of their skin, I couldn’t help but do it. That crush was awful, but it forced me to confront the bigotry I’d accepted, even if I didn’t want it.
I never did get the chance to talk to the girl from Yugoslavia, but by the time I got over her, I’d also gotten rid of my discomfort for liking someone who looked different than me. Shortly after that was when I met Athena for the first time, and I really liked her. And now, eight years later, I’d gotten this woman that I really liked lost somewhere in New York state.
When I say we were in the middle of nowhere, that’s exactly where we were. The stop we’d gotten off at was a small one in a small town. There was absolutely no one on the streets. No people, no cars, no animals. Everything was closed, and there were no hotels. The only thing we could hear was us wondering aloud where we were, and where we would stay for the night.
Eventually we found a bank, and stood in the ATM lobby to warm up and figure out what we were going to do. The magic of the internet located a hotel for us, about ten miles away. Our only option was a cab. At that point, we were both so tired that we just wanted to sleep. We’d figure out how to get home in the morning.
No vacancies. How did a hotel in the middle of nowhere have no vacancies? We walked a half a mile to another hotel. Again, no vacancies. We walked back in the other direction to a third hotel, and spent fifteen minutes buzzing the front door and calling the front desk until we gave up. After another cab ride to the other side of town, we found a fourth hotel. A woman in a ratty robe and head wrap opened the door. I could see that look of disapproval in her face even in the dark.
“Excuse me miss, do you have any rooms with double beds available?”
“No,” she said with a thick eastern European accent.
“Do you have any rooms with single beds?”
“No.”
“…Do you have any rooms?”
“No.”
Why didn’t she just say that?
Now we were lost, cold and hungry, with nowhere to go, and it was 3:00 AM. The trains wouldn’t start running again until 8:00 AM. What would we do? The same thing we did every other night we were together: we talked, and walked aimlessly through New York towns, eighty miles away from our destination.
I don’t think it’s possible to put into words how wonderful of a woman Athena is. I can tell you that had the situation been reversed, and she’d mistakenly forced us off the train in New York, I wouldn’t have been a happy camper. But she was kind and upbeat, laughing at my bad jokes and making her own, and as we walked simply to kill the five hours until we could catch a train, I realized that I wanted to be with her, desperately. I was too tired to say anything about it then, and my legs and mouth were basically moving on auto-pilot at that point. But I’d seen the signs, I’d heard her words, I’d read her mannerisms, and I knew there was a tiny crack in the door still, despite everything else said between us. I’d make a move, soon.
We eventually found a 24-hour diner, and ordered French fries and coffee so that we wouldn’t look like total bums as we slept in the booth. 4:00 AM became 6:00 AM, and we were back on the road, walking to who knew where. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we walked about ten miles in no particular direction. Finally, it was 7:00 AM. We called one more cab to take us to the nearest train station. I stood in the station as Athena slept on the bench; I wouldn’t risk us both falling asleep again. The morning light passed through the glass enclosure, warming my face as I stared at hers. Getting home had turned into a disaster, but I was content regardless, because it was a disaster I’d shared with Athena. Or maybe I was just really, really tired.
Halloween isn’t a big holiday for me. We stopped celebrating it when I was eight years old, because of it being the devil’s holiday or some such nonsense. Either way, when all the other kids would put on their costumes and go trick or treating, I would sit in the house and watch TV, the light on our porch off so that everyone in the neighborhood knew not to come to our house expecting treats. I grew up without Halloween for the most part, so even today I don’t get excited for it the same way most adults that I know still do. I appreciate it now because my son enjoys it. He likes dressing up in his own costume, he likes seeing what everyone else is wearing, and he likes candy. Other than that, it’s just another day to me.
Athena, on the other hand, loved Halloween. She said she enjoyed the chance to be someone else for a day, to be crazy and spontaneous without having to worry about the consequences. I can see the appeal in that, although it doesn’t do anything for me personally: you’re right back to who you really are the next day, so why bother? She also enjoyed the parties and the effort that people put into their costumes. That I did agree with. I hadn’t been to a Halloween party though since the one my parents threw as my last Halloween. Not to worry though, as this was another experience that Athena was determined to make sure I had.
A friend of hers was throwing a party, and she invited me to go with her. I just had to find a costume, and I had one in mind already. I decided to go as a woman. It was cheap (I bought three blouses and two skirts from a thrift store for $10, and a wig was only $10 more), easy, and funny, and I could simply donate the clothes again when I was done. Not only was this a chance to celebrate Halloween again for the first time since my childhood, but it was also my opportunity to finally make a move on Athena.
We’d continued our streak of talking every day, and had seen a few movies together at my apartment. She told me that she’d wanted to see the movie Black Swan. I was interested in well, so I got a copy of it. So I figured we could make a real night out of it. After the party, we could go back to my place and watch the movie. By then, it would probably be pretty late, so I told her she could spend the night at my place. She agreed.
Now I’m going to stop here for a moment. We’re all adults here (I think), so most of you have had some experience with the kinds of parties that adults throw, which usually include alcohol. You may have some experience with sex, and you know how easily those things go together. You also know exactly what it means when someone asks you to spend the night at their house. There’s really no way to misinterpret what’s being suggested there, right? Okay, because I was pretty stoked when she agreed to all of those things. It was important to me that we laid all of that out before the night in question, but I’ll get into that a little later in this story. In any case, I’d finally set things up in such a way that I thought was direct, not underhanded or disingenuous, and would lead to some kind of intimacy between us.
And then God decided to cockblock me.
Remember the Halloween Nor’Easter last year? Because I sure as hell do. It NEVER snows in October here. NEVER. Yet not only did it snow in October last year, it snowed on Halloween. You know, the day that I was supposed to go to that party, with that girl, and then she was going to stay at my place? The roads were a mess, power lines were down everywhere, and needless to say, I did not make it to the party. Athena did; her friends were close enough to pick her up, so they did. I told her that if she still wanted to come to my place after the party, she was welcome, but I knew she couldn’t. I was too far away, and the roads were too bad to risk it. And just like that, the best laid plans of mice and men did indeed go astray.
Do you know what I ended up doing on Halloween instead? I walked to my ex-wife’s house, about a mile away, during the storm, because she’d lost power and needed help finding things in her apartment to take to her mother’s house. As it turned out, I was lucky. I was one of the few people I knew who didn’t lose power from the storm. My ex-wife, Athena, my brother and his roommate all lost power (my brother and his roommate ended up coming to stay with me for about a week while they waited for power to be restored). So God saw fit only to ruin my night, not my entire week like everyone else. It had been the perfect opportunity for me and Athena, and now that it had been ruined, I thought I wouldn’t get another one. But, as has been the case so often in the past few years, I was wrong. I would get another opportunity in, of all places, New York City once again.
Part 4: Do the Right Thing
Sex is pretty awesome. It can be funny, messy, wild, tender, and dozens of other adjectives that come to mind. It can be dangerous, harmful, and destructive as well. Whatever the motivations at hand for sex, sharing your body with someone is an act of intimacy that carries all sorts of meanings. When that act occurs without consent, that meaning is warped into something devastating.
Sexual assault is one of those things that, no matter how smart or empathetic you think you may be, is hard to understand unless it has happened to you. There are few experiences that can compare to someone entering your body without your permission, against your will, often as you fight back against them. Sexual assault is a violent crime as well, and leaving aside all the other implications of sexual assault, enduring a violent crime is a harrowing experience in its own right. I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but I have been robbed, twice. It’s something that stays with you for a long time, and you find yourself looking over your shoulder, staring at people to try and determine their intentions, afraid whenever the sun begins to go down. Those feelings diminish over time, but it can take a while.
Some statistics say that one in four, and even as high as one in three, women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their lives (and one in ten men), and possibly more since sexual assault is so underreported. Not only does that mean that anywhere between 25-33% of women are victimized in such a personal way, but that they must also live with the emotional and psychic damage of the assault. It may be hard to understand sexual assault, but it’s probably impossible to understand how it affects a person in the long run. We often speculate as to what we’d do in certain situations, as I did in the event that I ever was attacked. Then you find yourself getting jumped by three people, and getting hit in the head has a funny way of altering your perspective. Mike Tyson put it best: everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.
I’ve spent hours and hours talking to victims of sexual assault, and there are two things that have consistently come up in those discussions. The first is the sense of shame and worthlessness that takes over after a sexual assault. People don’t report sexual assault because they’re embarrassed, afraid and ashamed, and they feel that, at best, no one will believe them or, at worst, that they’ll say they deserved it. Those feelings almost invariably lead to the second thing I’ve encountered, a sense of guilt over the resulting period of sexual experimentation afterwards. I’ve heard this described in a few different ways. Some feel like they’re worthless, so it doesn’t matter who they give their bodies to. Others feel that their ability to control their own sexuality and their bodies has been taken from them, and they attempt to regain that sense of control over themselves. In many cases, I’ve heard how these experiences feel like being victimized all over again.
This is not one of those “all sex is ****” rants, and there’s no way that one can be expected to know the sexual history of every person they sleep with before the fact. However, you can only hear so many stories about how ostensibly consensual sexual encounters were anything but before it begins to affect the way you think and feel about sex as well. We do it not just to procreate, but for the pleasure of it. How do you know, though, if that’s what is really going on? It becomes the perfect recipe for overthinking a situation, something that I’m guilty of all too often. But truthfully, this is something I’d much rather overthink than ignore.
Before October of last year, I hadn’t been to New York in years, and already I was getting a chance to go back again. Two of Athena’s close friends were putting on a concert in the city, and she wanted someone to go with her. The concert was on a Friday night, and she’d rented a hotel room to stay over in New York.
At first, I declined. I’d taken a Saturday off the month before, and thought it was too soon to ask for another one. More importantly, I thought I’d be hanging my brother out to dry if I left again. We worked together in a grocery store stocking shelves, and in fact he’d helped me get the job. We usually received anywhere between 500-1,000 items to put up throughout the store, which wasn’t a problem when we were fully staffed. In the month since my last New York trip though, one of our coworkers had been fired, one had quit and one had severely reduced his hours. Stocking the shelves had gone from a three hour job to 4 1/2 -5 hours for our undermanned staff. Without me, my brother would essentially be working alone. I have a strong sense of responsibility and teamwork, and whatever I might gain from another trip to New York, I didn’t think it was worth leaving my brother to stack shelves by himself.
She asked me again and again, and I kept saying no. Eventually she told me why she wanted me to go with her. There was an outside chance that she’d see he ex-boyfriend there, as the friends she was going to see also knew him, and she didn’t want to face him alone. We’d talked at length about her ex (just as we talked about my ex-wife), and while she loved him, he was jealous, possessive, emotionally and verbally abusive, and she was afraid of running into him. This was to be an escort mission.
That began to change my mind about going with her, because I could certainly understand her concerns. It would still mean leaving my brother alone at work, so I decided to talk to him about it. I don’t recall the conversation exactly, but I think it went something like this:
“You want to stay here and work instead of spending the night in New York with Athena? Are you stupid or something?”
The answer is yes.
With my brother’s blessing, I decided that I would go back to the big city.
Freedom is a tricky thing. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines freedom as the following;
Freedom, to me, is the ability to choose, whether it be political parties or peanut butter. Those choices come with a cost though, a built in responsibility for the decisions that we make. Too often, it seems that people prefer the third definition of freedom, where they are freed from “something onerous,” usually the responsibility of their choices. True freedom for me isn’t being absolved of responsibility or obligation, but having the ability to choose which responsibilities you burden yourself with. I have a responsibility to my son and to my ex-wife. I have a responsibility to my brothers. I have a responsibility to Athena, and I have one to myself, to do what I think is the right thing in a given circumstance. Sometimes those competing responsibilities bump into each other, sometimes they conflict with what I want. But I chose them, directly or indirectly, even as they limit the choices that are available to me. My ex-wife has told me that I need to relax more, be willing to make mistakes, that life isn’t all about what you’re expected to do. She’s also told me that I’m the most trustworthy and reliable person she’s ever met. Well, this is why. I express my freedom through the commitments that I freely form.
Now, I was committed to protecting Athena from her ex-boyfriend should the need arise. This was my chance to make a move again. Our last overnight plan had been thwarted, and here was another one. Or was it? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the circumstances were vastly different. After all, the explicit understanding of Halloween was that we were getting together to party and have a good time. Here, yeah, we were going to the city to enjoy a concert, but staying overnight was more a function of the timing of the concert than the desire to spend the evening together in New York. She’d booked the hotel room long before she told me about the trip, maybe even before we’d begun hanging out again. She asked me to go with her because she trusted me. Would trying something be a violation of that trust?
Mostly though, it felt coercive. There’s certainly an argument to be made that when two people of breeding age agree to spend the night together, they both know what’s up. Hell, I made that argument. But I think it’s one thing to try something when we’re in my home, only a few miles from her own home. If things went wrong, if the advance was unwanted, or if she simply wasn’t in the mood, she could always get up and leave. That wasn’t the case in New York. If I made a move on her, I would have the additional pressure of our isolation and various expectations on my side, and that’s not what I wanted. If anything was going to happen between us, I wanted it to be a free choice on her part, not something she consented to out of obligation or inability to escape the situation. It just didn’t feel like this was the right time and place to make that move.
The concert was incredible. Imagine the church from episode five of Cowboy Bebop, “Ballad of Fallen Angels.” That’s where it took place. Athena’s friends are classical music composers who work at NYU, and the performed several of their pieces on classical guitar and piano, with a singer and chamber ensemble thrown in on certain pieces for good measure. I was greatly enjoying the concert, but a nagging thought kept biting at me. “This is the sort of thing you should have done with your wife. She should be here with you right now.” All of a sudden I was sad. I’d left my ex-wife’s home more than six months ago, and we’d been divorced for four. Why was I thinking this now, after all this time?
After the concert, we attended the after party. This was the first time I’d ever attended a millionaire’s after party, as it was thrown by the patrons of Athena’s friends. It was in a small apartment near the church, and was jam packed with artists, musicians, lawyers and other people I never spent any real amount of time with before. It was certainly a change of pace, but as I usually do, I found myself standing in a corner, eating hors d'oeuvres. I began talking to a woman named Juana, who’d moved to New York from Mexico City a few years ago. As we talked, I told her that I was recently divorced, and she revealed that she was separated from her husband as well. She’d known before their marriage that she didn’t really want to marry him, but she went through with it for the party for her and her friends. She moved out of their home after three months, and now they were beginning the process of getting divorced.
The rest of the night was fun, and seeing opera singers get drunk while eating pizza is actually pretty funny. But I quickly realized that these were not my kind of people. We didn’t value the same things, we didn’t find the same things humorous and we didn’t see the world in the same way. It was very interesting to spend time with them, but more as a novelty, as a way to see that there are people in the world who are truly that different from you, who lead totally different lives and have a totally different perspective.
By the time we got back to the hotel room, it was already 4:00 AM, and I was too tired to even think about all the stuff that had been running through my head all day. I slept on my side of the bed, and Athena slept on hers.
As I’ve said before, the hardest thing about my divorce was leaving my son. I thought it was the best way to handle a pretty bad situation, and I still think it was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t tear me up inside to go to bed at night without giving him a kiss, or to wake up in the morning to see that he’d crawled into bed with us during the middle of the night. I couldn’t be there all the time, but I was determined to make sure that I was there as much as possible.
At first, I would drop him off at daycare in the morning, pick him up in the afternoon, spend a few hours with him and then bring him back to his mother. He would come to my home on Saturday, and spend the night with me until Monday morning, when I dropped him off at school. Eventually I stopped picking him up in the morning, because his mother wanted to spend more time with him (even now, when I do the math, despite the fact that I don’t live with him, I actually spend more time with our son than my ex-wife does). But I still make sure that, no matter what, I see him every single day, even if it’s only for half an hour. I think it’s important for him, and I know it’s important for me.
The first time I didn’t keep my son on a Saturday night was when I went to New York City the first time with Athena. The second time was on Halloween; even though I didn’t end up having Athena stay over, the storm was too bad to bring my son to my house. This was my first real taste of what’s going to be coming my way someday, the need to balance a relationship with my son. For the first year of my divorce, anytime I felt happy when my son wasn’t around, a few moments later I would feel utterly depressed. How could I be enjoying myself without him? It was a thought that plagued the time I spent with Athena as well. As much as I liked her, I would gladly trade her for my son. That wasn’t possible though, and I had to learn how to live my life independently of him. I lived for my son exclusively. Now I had to figure out how to live for myself. I was definitely going to make mistakes on the road to figuring it out.
The night passed without incident, and on Saturday we were back to exploring the city. We went to see two of Athena’s other friends, a cute couple of twenty somethings who’d moved from Ohio to NYC as their latest cross-country excursion. While we were talking, I received a text message from my ex-wife. She wanted to know if I was still going to be back by 7:00 PM, as I’d agreed to be so that I could pick up Gabriel and she could go to the movies with a friend. I checked the time and saw that it was 3:30 PM. Probably not, I said, as it would take us at least a half an hour to even get back to Grand Central Station, then the train trip itself and the car ride back home.
She immediately called me, and what transpired was the worst argument I’ve ever had with my ex-wife. Even when we were still living together while awaiting the divorce, we didn’t fight like that. She was angry that I wasn’t going to be back home in time, and she was perfectly right to be. I agreed to be there by 7:00 PM, and I wasn’t going to make it. That was my fault, and I tried to apologize for it. But she was livid, and she went right for my button.
“I see you’re picking that woman over your son.”
I blew up. There I was, a visitor in Brooklyn, screaming obscenities into my cell phone as loudly as I possibly could. I’m not going to repeat the things I said, but rest assured that they were mean-spirited, angry personal attacks. In retrospect, as a guest in someone else’s home, I should have simply bit my tongue and let my ex-wife vent as opposed to yelling like a madman in front of my host’s apartment building. But this was the second time that she’d accused me of putting Athena before my son, and I was going to tell her exactly what I thought of her. I got through most of it before I she hung up on me.
I was so angry I couldn’t even see straight, and I apologized to Athena’s friends as soon as I got back into their apartment. Athena decided it was time for us to head home, and we quickly left, embarrassed beyond words. After we were out of their apartment, Athena told me that my ex-wife had called her, accusing her of stealing me away from my son and standing between us. That took my anger to a level that I didn’t even think was possible. Whatever problem my ex-wife had with me was between me and her, not me, her and Athena. Athena was on the verge of tears the entire way back home, apologizing for keeping me from my son. I spent the whole time trying to explain to her that it wasn’t her fault, that my ex-wife could be kind of insane when she was angry, and that she hadn’t done anything wrong. It seemed like getting home from NYC with Athena was always going to be a trip through hell.
I didn’t say a single word to my ex-wife when I showed up to pick up Gabriel. She’d missed her movie, and I was glad. We didn’t speak for almost a month after that. Somehow, Athena found it in her heart to forgive me for ruining her trip to NYC again, and we went back to hanging out as if nothing had happened.
Over the next few weeks, there would be a few moments where sex could have happened between Athena and I, but it never did. I’m the type that waits for the woman to make the first move, or, barring that, make it so explicitly clear that she wants a sexual encounter that no person, reasonable or otherwise, could misinterpret it. That’s how it happened with my ex-wife, so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility, although it’s certainly not common. As I said earlier, you can only hear so many horror stories about sex before it alters how you think about it, and I’ve heard tons and tons. When the woman makes the first move, then I know without a doubt that this is what she wants. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but we all know what it feels like to be hurt or used, even if it’s not sexually. I’d much rather ere on the side of caution in those situations, and while I’m certain that I’ve blown some opportunities as a result, I don’t regret those decisions at all.
Also, I think of sex in a very particular way. I don’t think that sex is as big of a deal as our culture makes it out to be, and that anyone, anywhere should be able to do what they want with their bodies as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else. For me personally though, sex isn’t something that you just do. There are a lot of feelings involved, and I can’t successfully separate those feelings from the act itself. It all gets mixed together in my head, and that can be a very hard thing to deal with. It seemed like sex was still on the table, but that an actual relationship wasn’t, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted one without the other.
In any case, I wasn’t worried about it. Athena had already invited me to attend her friend’s wedding with her the following April, and we were discussing going to an anime convention next summer. I enjoyed her company, and that was really all that mattered. The rest would sort itself out. Little did I know that the clock was ticking though, and I’d run out of time much sooner than I thought.
Part 5: The Answer
Words are very important to me. I earnestly believe in their power to inform, entertain and enlighten. A kind word can brighten our moods, and an unkind one can hurt us more than we’d like to admit. They provide insight into our psyche in ways that we don’t fully appreciate, or at least I think so. There are so many words, so many synonyms, so many varying shades of meaning, that I think it means something when a person describes an uncomfortable bed as “firm” instead of “hard.” I mentioned earlier that I don’ think the word “sexy” can be used platonically, and that’s because of what the word sexy means, not the intentions behind it. I choose my words carefully. I practice my sentences in my mind before I say them, and after I say them I repeat them in my mind again to look for ways to improve them. That kind of thing is fun to me. I assume that people say exactly what they mean, whether they meant to or not. Words are too powerful to throw around without thought or consideration.
At the same time, I’m not a word snob. I do appreciate sophistication in language, but if there’s a simple way to say something, I think that’s the best way. I don’t care if someone responds to the question, “How are you today?” with “I’m good” instead of the grammatically correct “I’m well.” I don’t think it’s important at all to know what the past participle is to be a good writer. The important stuff isn’t in the details, it’s in the meaning. The rules of language only matter insofar as they make meaning possible. Language evolves and changes; the verb “Google” didn’t even exist fifteen years ago, and now it’s an important part of our everyday lives. Language is going through another major evolution now, as internet and texting shorthand move out into the general way that we speak and write. Some people are appalled by LOL and WTF becoming “real” words, and I don’t understand why. We don’t say thou or thine anymore. Language changes.
When someone speaks, then, I pay attention. I don’t often remember what a person was wearing or what they were doing, but I always remember what they say. People say that actions speak louder than words, but I disagree. Words are action in themselves. When one’s actions don’t match their words, it is not true that their actions have trumped their words, but that one action has trumped another. We often reveal our desires through our words, but meet our obligations through our actions.
That’s the other power of words. They allow us to fantasize about our world. We know that we’re not actually going to quit our job, or punch the person in the drive-thru, or buy that expensive item. By saying it, we can experience the liberation of quitting a job without suffering the consequences. For that one moment, we get what we want. That moment is important, because the rest of the time, we almost never get what we want.
Before I knew it, it was December. Athena and I had been talking non-stop for four months, but the time was coming for us to take a break from each other. Her family was coming for a visit in mid-December and would be staying for about a month. That included her sister and her family, her grandparents, and Michael, the guy from Greece. She’d be too busy being the good host to hang out, and I figured it would be a good time for me to patch things up with my ex-wife, who I still wasn’t talking to beyond what was absolutely necessary. As much as I enjoyed talking to Athena, I knew a month wasn’t that long. She’d already invited me to attend a friend’s wedding with her next April, and we were making tentative plans to go an anime convention the next summer. I was comfortable with the fact that we were friends, but there was something that was bugging me. I liked her a lot, but I never made a move because I didn’t want to force anything. So why hadn’t she ever made a move on me? The only way to find out was to ask.
For the record, I think that men and women can be friends, but that no matter what, sex always creeps in. Not necessarily the act, but at least the thought, and good friendships aren’t ones that avoid that pitfall all together, but ones that navigate around it effectively. Some people can have sex and remain friends, and some people can’t, but either way it has to be dealt with. Deep down, I know I’m one of those people who can’t have sex and remain friends. My emotions get too caught up in the act, and I’d want more than just friendship afterwards. That was another reason I never made a move. When it became clear that a relationship wasn’t in the cards, I decided that I didn’t want to jerk my own feelings around (no pun intended) for what would have been an awesome but temporary experience. Had Athena made the same calculation?
“Let me ask you a question. You’ve been in my apartment many times for many hours, and there’s never any sexual tension. Why is that?”
“There’s always sexual tension,” she said. That was a real surprise to me, because I honestly didn’t feel any. In the beginning it was definitely there, but I’d put the idea out of my head, so I’d stopped noticing it. “I’ve thought about having sex with you, but I don’t want to ruin our friendship.” I was actually glad to hear that, because it meant that I’d made the right decision in not forcing the issue. Whatever her reason was, she’d decided that she didn’t want to go down that road, and I was very happy that I hadn’t tried to make her.
Yet that wasn’t exactly the truth. Athena had told me before about how her ex-boyfriend had given her a lot of grief for remaining friends with other guys she’d dated. And in reality, Athena and I were essentially dating minus any physical intimacy. I suspected that there was less concern about the effect on the relationship between us, and more about how her next boyfriend would respond to me if he knew that we’d slept together. Which was a legitimate concern, but why was that something to be worried about now? Yeah, Michael was coming to America, but that was only for a month. Was that who she was worried about?
That conversation happened two days before Athena’s family arrived. I wasn’t going to see her for a month, but I wasn’t worried. Once the holidays were over, things would pick up where we left off.
I haven’t seen her since.
You may or may not know this, but I live in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a small city, with less than 120,000 people (in fact, despite being the capital of my state, it’s only the third largest city). Our residents often bemoan the fact that we’re caught essentially halfway between New York City and Boston. It’s great to be able to visit both cities, but they claim it makes it difficult to grow Hartford with those two behemoths sucking all of the oxygen out of the Northeast. It’s true that we’ll never be able to offer the kinds of experiences that NYC and Boston can, but the reasons that contribute to Hartford’s stagnation have little to do with those cities. Our downtown has restaurants and bars, and nothing else. No grocery stores, no bookstores, no affordable clothing stores, no hipster destinations, no concert venue, nothing. Nothing that would actually encourage people to stick around after work and hang out in the city, so they all flee back to the suburbs. As such, the city essentially shuts down at 9:00 PM. If you’re not clubbing or drinking, there’s nothing to do. Developers continue to build luxury housing in downtown, but who wants to live there?
When something new or interesting does open, I try to do my best to support it. Things won’t change in my city unless we can keep those few fledgling businesses open. Last year, a store called the House of Fragrance opened. They sell bath accessories, scented soaps, perfume, you know, girl stuff. It’s not the kind of store I usually shop in, but it’s one of the most unique locations in my city, and fortunately for them, I happened to know not one, but two women who loved stuff like that.
I bought two scented soap gift boxes, one as a peace offering to my ex-wife, and one for Athena. I don’t usually buy Christmas presents, and I don’t usually receive them. I tend to think that gift-giving is an unnecessary expense, since I’d rather spend time with someone I appreciate, and that’s free. Still, no one became popular by being cheap, and every once in a while it’s nice to buy something for your friends. I exchanged gifts with my ex-wife on Christmas Eve; she got me an Axe gift set (Axe isn’t really my thing, but the deodorant wasn’t bad). I figured I’d wait until Athena contacted me, since she was busy with her family. So I waited. Christmas Day came, and she sent me a message wishing me and my son a Merry Christmas, but she said she was too busy to get away to pick up her gift. No problem. Her birthday was in mid-January, so I would just save it until then.
I was getting ready to go to work on the morning of January 2nd, and before I left the house I went through my usual routine. I checked my email and my Facebook, and saw an announcement scroll by in the ticker: “Athena ****** is engaged to Michael ***********.”
You could say that my ex-wife and I had a shotgun wedding, although that term is less than accurate. No one actually forced us to get married, but our decision was heavily influenced by the fact that my ex-wife was pregnant. It was important for both of us that our son was born to married parents. So eight months after we met, we were engaged, and we were married a month later. Was it a mistake? Yeah. But it was OUR mistake. No one forced us into it. No one even said, “You should get married.” We came to that conclusion on our own, with the best intentions. Most importantly though, we loved each other. At the moment I said my vows, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life, and she with me. It didn’t work out that way, but there was nothing cynical, opportunistic or coerced about our initial decision.
When I read that update on my Facebook, I literally felt sick to my stomach, because I knew that wasn’t the case for her. We’d talked too often about the pressures her parents constantly put on her. I’d seen her cry about it too many times. In those four months, and she’d talked about her ex-boyfriend more times than she’d talked about Michael. When she talked about her ex, I could hear the passion in her voice, the pain she felt at the way it had turned out. She’d loved him, and she often expressed regret that it hadn’t worked. When she talked about Michael, she sounded clinical, the way someone sounds when they describe someone who isn’t bad necessarily, but doesn’t illicit any strong feelings either way. This was wrong. It looked almost like an arranged marriage.
How had a one-month visit turned into an engagement? How had three weeks together become a marriage proposal? Once the initial shock wore off, I realized it had happened quite easily. Athena’s parents ruled her life. She lived with them, and she worked with them. She’d told me that she spoke Greek so often that she sometimes forgot English words. Add to that her grandparents, her married sister, a nice Greek boy and the holiday season, and you have a pressure cooker of expectations. After all, it wasn’t as if Athena was inviting Michael to stay with her, it was her parents who were inviting him to stay with her. It was their house.
The whole thing bothered me, to put it mildly. Most obviously, I still had feelings for Athena, and I knew she had them for me. My ex-wife had actually put it best to me in a conversation in December. “You don’t spend the kind of time she spends with you unless you like the person,” she’d said. I knew that, but hearing someone else say it confirmed that I wasn’t imagining things. But let’s face the facts: I am not Greek and I have a son. There’s no way Athena’s parents would have gone for that. And ultimately, they were the ones who were making the decision. I’ve said earlier that I hate to lose. In this case, I lost because the deck was stacked before I sat at the table. Athena had made a choice, because you know what? You DON’T talk to someone everyday if you don’t have feelings for them. It didn’t matter though, because Athena’s parents had basically already decided who she was going to marry.
And that actually bothered me more. If Athena and I had gotten together, maybe we would have worked out, maybe not, who knows. But I’m an American, and she’s an American, and one of the most fundamental aspects of our understanding of the world is choice. We choose our leaders, we choose the schools we attend, we choose the people we love. It’s unfathomable to me that someone else can decide who you will spend the rest of your life with. This isn’t a rant against arranged marriage; if you think that your parents will do a good job picking your spouse, then go for it. But you should be able to say, “I want you to pick my spouse;” there should be some kind of cultural or social backdrop to it. Neither of these were the case for Athena. It was simply the exertion of power over her. The marriage itself may not have been arranged in the way that word is typically understood, but coercion and the restriction of privileges accomplish the same end of controlling someone else’s life choices. Ostensibly, Athena works with her parents, but in reality she works for them. Being a co-owner of their business is just a way to lock her into the job with name equity. Choosing her husband is another bar in that jail cell.
Lastly, it offended me as a parent. It’s my job to raise my son, to teach him right from wrong, to make him into a decent person, and to prepare him to live in the world on his own someday. For now, that means strictly controlling his life: telling him what he can and can’t eat, what he can and can’t watch, when to go to bed, who to play with, everything. I control him because he cannot make the correct decisions for himself, and I try to do the right thing by him so that when the time comes, he will be able to make correct decisions for himself. And that time will come. Someday, he will be responsible for his own actions and decisions. He won’t always make the right choices, but as long as he considers the correct option before he ignores it, then I’ll consider the job I’ve done raising him to be a success. Children are people too, and my son has likes and tendencies that have nothing to do with how I raise him. I can only teach him and hope that he makes good decisions.
When he’s old enough though, his life becomes his own. My son may become an engineer someday, or he may become a serial killer. That will be his choice though, not mine. I will offer guidance and support, but once he’s 18, he will be free to do whatever he wishes. Letting go of your child is hard, but it’s something that you must do if you truly value them, because they deserve the right to live their own life. It angers me to think that Athena’s parents disagree with this philosophy. It may be because they’re Greek, or because they’re older, or whatever. Athena is an American raised in the late 20th/early 21st century, like me. We have certain ideas. I know that Americans tend to think that we’re right about everything, but if you live here, then what’s wrong with thinking and behaving like an American?
For Athena’s part, I find this all personally baffling. There is no way I’d let my parents make any long-term decisions about my life at my age. I don’t respect my parents at all. I like my father, but I can’t help but to look at him as more of a friend than a parent. And I don’t even like my mother. These people have absolutely zero authority over me, and little influence. I can’t understand why Athena gives a damn about what her parents think, but she very clearly does.
Would I say all of this to Athena? There are some things that, no matter how strongly you feel them, you still shouldn’t say. “Your marriage is doomed” may or may not be one of them. It’s one of those things that either sounds jealous and spiteful, or the person you say it to won't listen anyway. I know that if someone had told me that my marriage was destined to fail, I would have shrugged them off, even though they were right. No one did though, and that was what made me decide to tell Athena what I thought. I wouldn’t have listened to anyone who tried to warn me, but in retrospect, I sure as hell would have appreciated it.
I sent Athena a bunch of text messages (for lack of a better way to communicate) explaining my basic argument: that she was only doing this to please her parents and get away from them, that they were trapping her in what they thought would be the best life for her instead of what she wanted, that she was being coerced into it, and that no marriage conceived under such circumstances would survive. I told her that she was hurtling towards an eventual divorce, and that divorce sucks more than she could imagine.
She replied to thank me for my concern, and told me that while I was right to an extent, that she would learn from the mistakes that she’d seen others make and work to make her marriage work. She said that she wanted to talk about this more, but that texting wasn’t the proper way to do so, and that we’d talk about it the next time she saw me. Around the time of her engagement, her family’s business tripled its production, and she’s been working twelve hour days, six days a week since.
For the first time, I was at a loss for words. She openly acknowledged that my conclusions were correct, yet she was still going through with the marriage. Why? I couldn’t understand it. I never really got a chance to ask, either. January became February, then March, then April, and we didn’t talk. In April, I saw another update in my Facebook feed: “Athena ****** is married to Michael ***********.” I just shook my head.
My ex-wife had a friend named Raymond. They’d known each other for years, and while Raymond had feelings for her, my ex-wife always rejected them and they stayed friends. When our son was born, she asked if Raymond could come over to meet him. I said sure. From the moment he walked into the house until he left, I could tell he still had feelings for her. He acted like I wasn’t even in the room, bringing up the “good old days” before my ex-wife got married. It never bothered me that my ex-wife had male friends, just like it didn’t bother her that I had female friends. What bothered me was how obvious Raymond made his intentions, even with me being right there. It was a disrespectful thing to do, and I’ve disliked him ever since. It should come as no surprise that after she divorced me, Raymond tried to get together with my ex-wife again, and she shot him down again.
I had this experience in mind when I decided to finally mail Athena’s Christmas present to her. It was April, and between working like a slave and being married, she hadn’t found the time to come and pick it up, so I figured I’d make it a little easier for her. I added a letter to the gift, telling her congratulations on her marriage and apologizing for the tone I’d taken during our last conversation. I also told her that I was going to back off. She was a married woman now, and since I still had feelings for her, it would be inappropriate for me to call or text her. I dropped the box off at the post office, and sighed. That was that.
Or so I thought. As a testament to the insane hours she worked, she didn’t even have a chance to pick up her gift from the post office until June. That’s when I got the message that started this little tale:
I’ve written quite a bit here, but I still haven’t actually dealt with the title of this piece. Do I love her? I’m always reluctant to use that word. I think that when we overuse words, we drain them of their potency and force, and “love” is one of the most overused words in the English language (so is “beautiful,” and if you look, I haven’t used that word a single time until now. It’s so overused as to basically be meaningless). Love can be used in the platonic sense, but if I were to use the word now, it wouldn’t be in that way. So do I? Well, last Thursday I was messing around on the computer, and my Facebook Messenger pops up. It’s Athena. She was traveling on the road, and decided to see what I was up to. We talked for about an hour, the way we used to last year, making dumb jokes and the like. I didn’t realize how much I missed talking to her until I was doing it again, and I felt genuinely happy to be doing it.
Maybe I loved her? Maybe I still do.
Part 1- Unecessarily Long Introduction (and title)
Facebook Messenger is an awful way to communicate with someone. Programs like Skype, MSN Messenger, and even old standby AIM keep messages in one window. Facebook can’t seem to make up its mind, and splits its messages between three locations. Sometimes they show up in your message box, sometimes in that little box at the bottom of your Facebook page, and now in that specialized chat window that’s a really poor imitation of dedicated chat programs. Needless to say, I try to use it as sparingly as possible, so I’m always a bit surprised whenever a message comes across it.
In this case, I was very surprised. The message was from Athena. I hadn’t talked to her in months, Facebook Messenger or otherwise. The gift was a package of scented soap I’d bought her for Christmas, but since I hadn’t seen her since then, I’d mailed it to her in April, and she finally received in it June. The note was an explanation as to why I hadn’t been calling or writing to her. “Gab” is my son; I’m pretty sure that’s a typo that was supposed to be “Gabe” (I swore when my son was born that I would never allow anyone to call him Gab or Gabby). And “miss you” is where things get lame.
* * *
Getting divorced sucks. I mean really sucks. It was almost a year between the moment when it became clear that my marriage was unsalvageable to the day when my marriage was legally over. I experienced essentially every negative emotion one can feel during those eleven months. And the funny thing is, the actual divorce proceeding is short. I spent more time filling out paperwork and waiting in line than I spent in front of the judge. He asked me and my ex-wife a few questions, banged his gavel and said good luck. Four years of marriage legally undone in about seven minutes. I’d already moved out by then, so there were no more awkward nights of sharing a bed, sleeping all the way to the wall. Instead, I was alone and broke in my own place, scraping together furnishings from the kindness of my neighbors and eating way more Chinese food than can possibly have been healthy. She kept custodial custody of our son, but I picked him up and brought him to school and picked him up from school every weekday, and he stayed with me Saturday and Sundays. So there was that, but not much else.
Attempts at dating were disastrous to say the least. I met an older woman at a dive bar, then threw up all over the bar when everyone peer-pressured me into drinking a “Doggy Bowl.” I got a text message from a number I didn’t recognize the next night- “I hear you got sick after I left last night- maybe I can help you feel better.” This was a strange, mildly unattractive woman from a dive bar, who’d gotten my number who knows how. But loneliness makes you do crazy things, so there I was, back at the same dive bar the very next night, apologizing profusely to the owner for vomiting all over his bar. I met the woman there, and it quickly became apparent that she was into to the kind of kinky stuff that was not for me.
I figured I should be more aggressive in pursuing women. So when a cute girl sat next to me on the bus a week later, I gave her my phone number. Except I gave her the wrong number. I wrote down 752-0191, then thought better of it and switched it to 725. Common sense didn’t hit me upside the head until after I got off the bus, when I checked my phone number and saw that it was indeed 752. Another blown opportunity, or so I thought until I received a text from a girl named Maia. I soon came to wish that she hadn’t figured out my real number. Over a week of texting, I discovered that she was an 18-year old high school senior, pregnant from a ****, and only a few weeks from getting an abortion, which she ultimately wouldn’t need because she had a miscarriage on Easter Sunday. Yeah, I’d have been better served walking to work that day.
Even I got the message after that: I was still hurting from my divorce, and even if these women had been perfect, I was pretty far from being able to maintain a relationship with anyone. So I kept to myself for the rest of the summer. I went to work, saw my son, and played an absurd amount of Street Fighter. As I got used to living on my own, it was an okay life. But Street Fighter can’t fulfill all of a man’s needs. Well, I suppose it can, but you get tired of fulfilling your own needs, if you know what I mean. It was September of last year, and I was back in school, with a new job and feeling good for a change. I’d gone from hating my ex-wife’s guts to actually talking to her pretty regularly. Things seemed to be improving, so I figured I’d dive back into the dating pool. But I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I’d made over the summer, somehow attracting the worst women in the city to myself. No, this time I would hedge my bets a little, and try to find someone who was safe, a known quantity, while still being hot as hell. Facebook may be awful for messaging, but it’s perfect for those kinds of inquiries. I was stalking my friends, when I just happened to come across Athena’s profile. What’s she up to? I wondered. It was time to put Facebook’s terrible communications system to work.
* * *
Everyone hates high school while they’re in it, but some people don’t hate it anymore when they’re out. I’m one of those people. I often look back on high school and wish that I hadn’t been so distracted by teenage angst and existential BS so that I could have enjoyed what was being offered to me more. There really is no social experience like high school, but you don’t realize that until you’re out of it and you experience college, full time work, living on your own, etc. That’s not to say that things don’t get better, but high school is such a unique experience. College and dorm life is better in some ways, but you can be kicked out of college (believe me, I know). Living on your own is nice and all, but on the days where you just want to come home and have someone serve you dinner, good luck with that. It provides the kind of common ground experience that builds friendships. High school was pretty awesome for me; I wasn’t a star football player or class president or any other cool kid cliché, but I had great friends and we made the most out of what our small school in our small town offered. And that’s where I met Athena, way back in 2002.
She stood out in the school; being one of the few white girls in a school that’s 95% black makes that pretty easy. She was probably the only Greek kid in the entire school. But I never really paid her much mind until we started doing all the same activities in my junior year. I was in Model U.N., and so was she. I played the clarinet, and so did she. I was the captain for the boys cross country team, and she was the girl’s captain, and same thing for the long distance track team. It wasn’t like we planned it or anything, it just kind of happened. And when you spend that much time around someone, you talk to them. I thought she was very pretty, and smart, and obviously we had a lot of common interests. But there was a problem- she’d dated my best friend. It had only been for a month, but I still thought of that as being off limits. It felt like I’d be disrespecting both of them if I tried to make a move on her, so although there was mutual interest, I never said anything.
We kept in contact for a bit after graduation, and I even still have some of our chat logs saved from MSN Messenger. I was at school in Richmond, VA and she was attending college closer to home, but we talked through the internet. It was then that we shared that we were interested in each other in high school, but that neither of us thought it would be appropriate to pursue a relationship. And of course, now I was 450 miles away, and she had a new boyfriend anyway. Oh well, college wouldn’t last forever, and I’d be back home eventually. We kept talking as friends, and that was that.
I got home, about three years early, thanks to VCU deciding that they actually wanted me to pay for college. Ironically, when I got back home, I stopped talking to Athena. And before I knew it, I was twenty one years old, married, with a son on the way. I didn’t think much of it. I was losing contact with most of my friends from high school at that point, and that friendship was just a casualty of growing up. It wasn’t until three or four years later that I saw her again. I was on a date with my ex-wife (still my wife then), and we were in a pizza restaurant in my old hometown, eating before our movie began. Athena came in, and I introduced her to my wife. We chatted for a bit, caught up on old friends, and then she left. Instantly my wife said, “She likes you.” I shrugged her off. I’m married, she has a boyfriend. It’s in your head, I said.
* * *
Well, it definitely was in my head, because I never forgot what my ex-wife said. And when I saw Athena’s profile last fall, I thought, “Well, she liked me in high school; she liked me in the pizza shop; does she like me now?” I wrote her a message, and didn’t even bother to try to catch up. I went straight for the kill: let’s go on a date. All that was left to do was wait, and hope for better luck.
Part 2- Just Friends, of Course
There are many things in our lives that we would like to forget. For me, there are also many things I would like to remember. I have an awful memory. Pretty much everything before the age of nine is a complete blur of random images and feelings, and nothing until I turned 13 is much clearer. My concrete memories don’t begin until high school, and while my recollection of events from then on is much better, there are still big chunks that I simply don’t remember. Whenever I talk to old friends from school or my brothers, I have to take them at their word that what they say happened actually happened, because I can’t remember. It’s not amnesia or anything medical, I just tend to lose the specifics of events and focus on the general, larger picture. It doesn’t bother me much, because I believe that most of what we remember is made up anyway. That doesn’t mean that it’s a lie, but instead a narrative we construct of our lives to fit our ideas about ourselves. I find that idea much more interesting than memory as a record of events that have occurred.
I find myself remembering feelings more than events, and despite everything that has happened, I usually remember feeling happy. I remember my junior year of high school the most vividly, because I was the happiest during that year. I remember the first year of my marriage the most for that reason as well. I suppose it’s not particularly surprising that I remember the good times and not the bad. A professor of mine had a great expression: “Nostalgia is memory with the pain taken out.” Some might define that as self-deluding, but I think it speaks to our ability to move forward through hard times and make the most of them. Bad things happen, and you don’t always get what you want. But hey, lemons can make some damn good lemonade.
I didn’t remember this entire message, mind you; perhaps the one benefit Facebook Messenger has (or another detriment, depending on your perspective) is that it saves all of your messages. However, I do remember feeling happy when I received it. Not exactly what I had in mind, but once again another piece of sage advice came to the rescue, this time from my brother: “What’s wrong with having sexy friends?”
We eventually decided to go out for dinner to catch up. When she came to my apartment, she looked exactly as I remembered from high school. She hadn’t grown an inch since then, and was only five feet tall. Her curly brown hair was about shoulder length. But it was her smile that really stood out. I know that describing a woman’s smile is probably one of the most cliché things someone can do (it’s only slightly less lame than describing their eyes), but cut me some slack- my mother worked in a dentist’s office for most of my childhood, and after seeing the kinds of mouths she had to work in, I’ve developed a pretty strong appreciation for oral hygiene. And Athena’s teeth were literally perfect. Her mouth was just the right width for her face, and her smile lifted her cheeks right into her eyes, giving her a little squint.
She presented me with a bottle of olive oil, perhaps the most stereotypical gift a Greek person can give. But she had a good excuse. Her family had opened a company which imported olive oil directly from Greece and sold it in stores here in the States. She worked with them as a co-owner of the business, and was up to her eyes in olive oil and shipping orders almost every day.
She chose the restaurant, an Afghan place in the next town over. Between leaving the car and ordering our food, we ran into no less than five people that Athena knew. That’s always fascinated me. I am not a social person. I tend to keep to myself in public places, and it takes a while for me to make friends. For some, meeting new people and getting to know them is exciting, but for me it’s a hassle, and one of the drawbacks of dating. In fact, one of the major reasons why I sought to date Athena was because I already knew her, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the frustrating song and dance of getting to know a new person. But it was clearly the opposite for her. She had friends everywhere, and greatly delighted in making more.
The food was okay, but the conversation was great. Before we knew it, we were being asked to leave because it was closing time at the restaurant. I checked my phone and gasped when I saw that it was already 1:00 AM. We went back to my apartment and sat outside in her car, talking and talking. I don’t think I got into my apartment until 3:30 AM, and that was only because I was worried that Athena might be too sleepy to drive if we continued talking. All in all, it was a pretty excellent first date…if it had been a date.
After that, we kept in contact through Facebook Messenger. We’d talk every day, for hours on end, about anything and everything. The next time we went to dinner, I chose the restaurant, a bar a few miles away from my apartment. I don’t like to drink, but it’s hard to find a place to hang out as an adult that doesn’t serve alcohol. We decided instead to drink root beer, play awful games of pool and listen to Billy Idol. We met up once or twice a week, either going out or just hanging out in my apartment playing games or watching movies. After the summer I had, it felt great to just have fun for a change, and to have something to look forward to other than the crushing depression I was finally beginning to emerge from. And it didn’t hurt that my friend wasn’t bad to look at.
During one of our late-night conversations, I happened to mention offhandedly that I hadn’t been to New York City since high school. Athena was incredulous. How could I have not been to NYC in so long? It was only a couple of hours away by train. I just hadn’t gotten around to it, I said in my defense.
“That’s fine,” she said. “You can go with me.”
***
I know why my ex-wife left me. At the time, I didn’t think her reasons justified breaking up our family, but in retrospect, I now understand that she did what she had to for herself, and that it was the right decision to make. In all honesty, I understood this on some level during our divorce as well, but it was buried under the anger and sadness I felt at the time. People get married, people get divorced. It happens. Sometimes, or maybe most times, things don’t work out.
What I was angry about were the circumstances though. She wanted the divorce, and I was willing to give it to her. But why did that mean that I had to move out? Why did it mean that I couldn’t keep my son? Why did her divorce mean that I lost everything? In my heart though, I knew this was the way it had to be. Even though I was angry, there are some things that I genuinely believe. I don’t believe that you should put a woman out of her home. I don’t believe that you should separate a mother and a child. And ultimately, as a man, it means that I have to put aside what I want and do what’s best for everyone else. When I was married, that meant working 50 hours a week and going to college. Now that I was going to be divorced, that meant not dragging it out, not starting a disastrous custody battle, not subjecting my son to any more pain than he would already feel. In short, it meant losing.
I don’t like to lose. I never did anything of note during my competitive Smash career, but I still went into every match determined to win, and I was salty when I lost. Believe me, I was very salty when I lost my divorce. I don’t think I said two words to my ex-wife between July 18th 2011 (the day we got divorced) and early September. But you know what? That was me acting out of hurt and loss, and while it may not seem like it when you’re in the depths of sadness, when you wake up in the morning and seriously consider taking your own life (which reminds me of another thing my brother said; a friend of his asked him if he was suicidal, and he said, “Only in the mornings.” It’s absolutely true), but time heals all wounds. It may not stop hurting completely, but it hurts less and less each day, and then you can start to function as a decent human being again. And I realized that I wasn’t behaving very decently to my ex-wife.
We eventually became friends again, and started talking on the phone pretty regularly. I even let her know that I was going to be trying to date Athena, as my ex-wife was acquaintances with her, and I didn’t want anything weird between anyone. In fact, in mid-September we even began discussing the possibility of going to NYC in October for our birthdays (my birthday is October 21st, and my ex-wife’s is October 20th). It was something we’d never done when we were married, which was a shame.
It was a week after that when Athena invited me to NYC with her. I couldn’t go with both of them; I was working Saturdays then and there was no way I could get two Saturdays off in the same month. I had feelings for Athena, but I also still had confused feelings for my ex-wife. After all, we’d been divorced for only about two months. Apparently neither of them returned those feelings though, as no matter who I went with, it would be as friends. So who do I choose?
The one I have the best chance of sleeping with, of course!
I’m not one to play games or mince words. If you want something, you have to ask for it, and being direct is the best way to get what you want. So I asked my ex-wife straight out if that was a possibility. It didn’t matter if we were getting back together or not, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. What I knew was that a trip to NYC with a woman was going to happen, and I was going on five months without sex. “You and Athena have invited me to New York, and I’m going with the one where it’s most likely that something good will happen,” I told her. She was surprisingly straightforward with me too, and told me that she just wanted to go as friends. Okay, I said. Then I’m going with Athena.
I should probably clarify that I didn’t expect anything to happen with either one of them; my ex-wife was clearly not interested in me anymore, and Athena had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in dating. But you can’t always listen to what someone says; sometimes you have to listen to what they do. And I’d talked to Athena literally every day since our first dinner. We’d been out several times together, and to anyone who was observing from the outside, it looked like we were dating. Still, I’m not one to force anything, so nothing physical had happened between us. I figured that if something was going to happen, I’d let her make the first move. And if that meant a 2% chance with her, as opposed to a 1% chance with my ex-wife, well then, who am I to argue with math?
The decision was made. I started packing my bags for a day trip to New York with my friend Athena.
Part 3- God, Greece and my Ex-Wife Hate Me 1/2
There’s no such thing as the friend zone. If a woman isn’t interested in you romantically or sexually, then she’s not, and that’s it. It has nothing to do with friendship or being a “nice guy” or ladder theory or any of that other nonsense. If you present yourself to a woman as her friend, then that’s how she will treat you. Trying to weasel your way into her pants almost never works, and in the rare instances where it does, you have nothing to be proud of. All you’ve done is lie very well; you pretended to be her friend, and caught her in a moment of weakness. Congratulations.
There is, however, a such thing as extenuating circumstances.
***
Being Greek meant that Athena had family in Greece, and that meant trips to Greece during the summer. That also meant having to deal with the cultural demands of being a first generation American with immigrant parents, who transplanted ideas about the old country to their new homes. Basically, it was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, minus the parents that eventually come around. She worked for her parents, lived with them, and vacationed with them. She wasn’t allowed to leave her parent’s home until she was married, and for them that meant being married to, in Athena’s words, a “nice Greek boy.” We talked about it often, how Athena felt that there were things she wanted to do that she couldn’t, and that she was being denied her independence.
It was during one of these conversations that she mentioned that during her vacation to Greece, she’d “reconnected” (her word again) with boy she’d known as a child named Michael. So this was why she didn’t want to date: she was already seeing someone. Or was she? I strongly believe that we say what we mean, whether we intend to or not, and that the words we choose to use are more important than the meaning of those words. I suppose that’s why I write, because I know the power of words.
As she described him, she never once used the word boyfriend. In fact, she described him in neutral, flat language, with words like “nice” and other vacuous terms one uses when they don’t know quite what to say. Her word choice certainly wasn’t lost on me, especially after having spent the entire last month talking to her and hearing how passionately she could describe things and people she truly cared about.
“You know Athena, it sounds like you’re not that into this guy, and you’re only doing this because it’s the safe choice and it’ll make your parents happy.” I expected her to deny it and launch into an unconvincing proclamation of her feelings for Michael. Instead, she started crying.
“I’ve been hurt so many times before. Is it wrong to want something safe?”she asked me. Yeah, she’d been hurt many, many times. If this blog is your idea of sad or tragic, you really haven’t heard anything at all. How could I blame her for not leaping at the opportunity to take a risk that, for all she knew, could lead to her being harmed physically or emotionally again? Add to that the constant pressure of her family, and the picture becomes painfully clear. Suffice to say, I am not a nice Greek boy. Even though it wasn’t really what I wanted to hear, I appreciated knowing it anyway. We were still going to New York together in a couple of weeks, and regardless of everything else, we’d have fun together as friends.
If only my ex-wife knew that. As it turned out, she hadn’t taken me choosing to go to NYC with Athena instead of her as well as I thought she had. Being the oblivious moron that I am, I didn’t realize it until about a week before the trip, when Athena was at my apartment one night. We were watching YouTube videos and cracking jokes, when I received a text message from my ex-wife. She wanted to talk to me about a field trip our son had coming up in a week and a half. I responded, telling her I had company, and that I would call her tomorrow to talk about it.
Big mistake. She knew that “company” meant Athena, and her jealousy flared tremendously. She texted me again. And again. And again. By the time Athena left, I’d received almost 150 texts from my ex-wife, some vulgar, some accusatory, but all angry. Emotions are strange, and don’t always make sense, so I get why my ex-wife was jealous. Yeah, she left me, but for the last five years, she’d been the center of my attention. That’s not something that you suddenly stop expecting. I didn’t argue with her, I just let her vent. Until she accused me of neglecting my son. That is the one thing I will not abide. No one comes before my son, and she knows that. But she also knows that it’s the perfect way to get to me; that’s my Achilles Heel.
My parents split when I was eight years old, but I wasn’t exactly sad about it. They fought constantly, and if evidence is needed as to why divorce must exist, my parents were it. It often felt like there was an invisible clock on the wall, ticking away to the next explosive argument between my parents. Inevitably it would come, but nothing would be resolved, and the timer would simply be reset. In reality, my parents were married, but they didn’t like each other very much.
My father told me a few years ago that my mother was his first real girlfriend. They’d met when he was in the Marines, and she was in the Navy. Then she got pregnant, so they got married. He said that he married her because he didn’t trust her to raise us well on her own. He thought she was unstable and potentially abusive. So he stuck around basically to protect us from her. But when my parents broke up, my father moved away, all the way to Arizona, and then California. And he was right, my mother was unstable and abusive. Without him around, living with my mother was pretty awful.
I swore that I would never get divorced, and that I would never abandon my son. As it turns out, I’m not the only one who had any say in me keeping the former promise, but I’m still in control of the latter. I have no worries about my ex-wife: she’s a wonderful mother who treats our son like a prince, and is always there for him. My determination to be around is about me, and what kind of father I want to be to my son. My ex-wife knows that very well, and it’s her go-to button when she really wants to piss me off.
But I was too excited about going to New York to let it get to me much. It was going to be the closest thing to a vacation I’d had in five years. I’d only called out of work twice in those five years: once for my wedding day, and once on the day my son was born. I was back at work the next day both times, so I felt like I’d earned one more day off.
We took the train to the city to avoid traffic and parking headaches. There’s something quaint about taking a train; the word evokes images of a steam engine and thick black smoke billowing into the sky, even though trains haven’t looked like that in at least fifty years.
New York City itself defies description. The last time I’d been there was in 2001, a couple of months after the World Trade Center fell. Ironically enough, Athena was there too. It was a trip for our high school band, and we were both there as clarinet players. We were pretty restricted as to where we could go and what we could see, so I didn’t remember much from the trip. But this time, it was as if the entire city was rolled out before me on a huge welcome mat. Grand Central Station looked more like a museum than a train station. The Empire State building towered above me, and I had to lean my head all the way back to see the iconic needle at its peak. We had no real destination. This was my opportunity to enjoy the city, and with Athena as my tour guide, I was doing just that.
Mostly though, I was enjoying the people. So many people. I come from a city that barely has 120,000 people and that shuts down almost completely at 9:00 PM. And here I was in New York, with eight million people (eight million! My entire state only has three million!), the city that never slept. Everywhere there was something you couldn’t see in my hometown: rows of ethnic restaurants, people dressed in the most standard and most outlandish fashions imaginable, fleets of taxis roaming the streets, and thousands upon thousands of the kinds of idiosyncrasies that makes New York such a fascinating place to those who visit it, things like two Starbucks on opposite sides of the same block. We stopped by the gigantic, three-story Toys ‘r Us with an indoor Ferris Wheel, ate lunch in a sandwich shop, got caught up in the massive Occupy Wall St. protest that happened to be occurring the same day we were in the city, made small talk with an Indian cab driver on our way across the city. I was instantly in love with New York.
Or was it really New York? Knowing that the woman you’re spending time with is only interested in friendship doesn’t do anything to mitigate the feelings you have, and being in a new place with a new person multiplies those feelings. Whether it was just as friends or not, I was having the time of my life, until we went home. Or tried to.
Part 3: God, Greece and my Ex-Wife Hate Me 2/2
I was looking through my yearbook last year and re-reading the notes my friends left me. Most of it was typical well-wishing and reminiscing, but one stood out to me for the first time. It was from a girl whom I’d spent a lot of time arguing with, until I’d matured a little bit and realized that I’d been acting like a jerk to her. From there, we were cool with each other. Anyway, she wrote in my yearbook,
I must have read that note (along with all the others) a dozen times since I graduated, and it wasn’t until last year that I looked at it, slapped my forehead and groaned, “Ooooohhhhh.” There are some things that you don’t say platonically. Calling someone sexy is one of them. It only took me eight years to realize it.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the least observant person that I know. If things aren’t spelled out pretty clearly for me, I usually miss the underlying message or implications. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with women, which I’ve historically been abysmal at. Not many women have come straight out and said that they’re interested in me, and that required me to fill in the blanks, to read between the lines. In almost every case, I failed to do so. In fact, I was in an elevator with my ex-wife the first time I talked to her. We were at our college, and she asked me what my major was. I told her history, and then got off the elevator. As soon as the door closed, a voice in my head shouted, “You moron, women DO NOT randomly ask men what their major is in an elevator.” I immediately tried to find her, but it was too late. It would be three months before I saw her again to ask for her phone number.
So no, I’m not particularly good at this whole dating thing. I’ve gotten a little smarter though over the years, and through trial and error I’ve finally learned to recognize the signs that someone is interested in you. And despite our conversations and her apparent unavailability, my friend Athena was giving them all off. Interest is one thing though; action is something different.
***
After a wonderful day in the big city, all that was left to do was return home. It was midnight, and we were sitting outside at the train station, enjoying the cool autumn weather when a man approached us.
“Good evening,” he says.
“Good evening.”
“What’s your name?”
I decide to have a little fun with him.
“James.”
“Is that your wife there?” he motions towards Athena.
“Yes.”
“It’s so nice to see a young couple out together, enjoying the city and each other.”
“Mm hm.”
“Can I pray with you two?” he asks, reaching out for my hand.
“I’m all set,” I say, withdrawing mine.
“Okay, okay, that’s cool. Look brother, I don’t mean to bother you and your lady tonight, but I was wondering if you could spare a dollar or two for me.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any-“ He didn’t even wait for me to finish my sentence before he walked off. I give him credit though; his approach was certainly more sophisticated than simply begging for money. Athena and I had a good laugh over that one.
Interracial couples in NYC don’t get a second look from anyone, and it was a nice change from how I sometimes felt (or imagined, maybe) people were looking at Athena and I back home. We weren’t actually a couple, but that’s the assumption that most people make when they see a man and a woman together. No one ever said anything or did anything overt, but just as I’d learned to tell when a woman was interested, I’d also learned how to tell when someone disapproved of you just by a look or body language. After all, it was the same thing in the end, listening to what someone wasn’t saying.
Our train arrived. It was finally time to go home, and we were both exhausted. I set the alarm on my phone for 2:15 AM, about ten minutes before we would reach our stop in case I fell asleep. I don’t even remember closing my eyes, but we were both out in moments. I jumped suddenly, startled by the sound of the conductor announced the next stop. I grabbed Athena by the hand and woke her up, rushing her so that we wouldn’t miss our stop. We jumped off the train as quickly as we could.
And saw nothing. I’d panicked and gotten us off at the wrong stop. We were in the middle of nowhere.
***
My mother was always pretty frank with us when it came to talking about sex and relationships. I can remember being told well before puberty to always use a condom. She was also equally frank about who she thought would make a good partner for her sons and who wouldn’t. Being gay was out of the question, which was why my mother was the last person in our family to find out that my youngest brother was gay. But I remember hearing the anti-white woman speech far more than I heard the anti-gay speech.
She was obsessed with the idea of my brothers and me settling down with a “strong black woman” like her someday. Apparently, in her mind strong meant argumentative, combative, short-tempered and generally unlikeable in everything other than short bursts. Eventually she modified her rules to include Hispanic women, Asian women, Middle Eastern women, whatever, except white women. They were still a big no-no.
Which is why, of course, one of my biggest crushes in high school was on a girl who’d moved to our town from Yugoslavia. I still can’t explain why I liked her: she wasn’t particularly pretty, she walked with a limp (sustained during the years of fighting in the Balkans), and I’d never actually talked to her a single time. But I crushed on her from a distance for more than a year, and hated myself for it. I felt like I was betraying my race and my mother at the same time. How could I have feelings for a white woman? What was wrong with me?
It’s funny the insane things you believe when you’re a child, simply because your parents told them to you. My mother is from the backwaters of Georgia, and they believe all kinds of nonsense down there. She once told us that hot water freezes faster than cold water, despite all understanding of science and common sense telling us the opposite. When my brother repeated this in school, he was nearly laughed out of the room. Even if it didn’t make sense, why question it? This is your mother telling you something, and you can trust what she says, right? So even though it didn’t make sense to me why I should have a problem with white women, even though by high school I knew better than to react to someone simply because of the color of their skin, I couldn’t help but do it. That crush was awful, but it forced me to confront the bigotry I’d accepted, even if I didn’t want it.
I never did get the chance to talk to the girl from Yugoslavia, but by the time I got over her, I’d also gotten rid of my discomfort for liking someone who looked different than me. Shortly after that was when I met Athena for the first time, and I really liked her. And now, eight years later, I’d gotten this woman that I really liked lost somewhere in New York state.
When I say we were in the middle of nowhere, that’s exactly where we were. The stop we’d gotten off at was a small one in a small town. There was absolutely no one on the streets. No people, no cars, no animals. Everything was closed, and there were no hotels. The only thing we could hear was us wondering aloud where we were, and where we would stay for the night.
Eventually we found a bank, and stood in the ATM lobby to warm up and figure out what we were going to do. The magic of the internet located a hotel for us, about ten miles away. Our only option was a cab. At that point, we were both so tired that we just wanted to sleep. We’d figure out how to get home in the morning.
No vacancies. How did a hotel in the middle of nowhere have no vacancies? We walked a half a mile to another hotel. Again, no vacancies. We walked back in the other direction to a third hotel, and spent fifteen minutes buzzing the front door and calling the front desk until we gave up. After another cab ride to the other side of town, we found a fourth hotel. A woman in a ratty robe and head wrap opened the door. I could see that look of disapproval in her face even in the dark.
“Excuse me miss, do you have any rooms with double beds available?”
“No,” she said with a thick eastern European accent.
“Do you have any rooms with single beds?”
“No.”
“…Do you have any rooms?”
“No.”
Why didn’t she just say that?
Now we were lost, cold and hungry, with nowhere to go, and it was 3:00 AM. The trains wouldn’t start running again until 8:00 AM. What would we do? The same thing we did every other night we were together: we talked, and walked aimlessly through New York towns, eighty miles away from our destination.
I don’t think it’s possible to put into words how wonderful of a woman Athena is. I can tell you that had the situation been reversed, and she’d mistakenly forced us off the train in New York, I wouldn’t have been a happy camper. But she was kind and upbeat, laughing at my bad jokes and making her own, and as we walked simply to kill the five hours until we could catch a train, I realized that I wanted to be with her, desperately. I was too tired to say anything about it then, and my legs and mouth were basically moving on auto-pilot at that point. But I’d seen the signs, I’d heard her words, I’d read her mannerisms, and I knew there was a tiny crack in the door still, despite everything else said between us. I’d make a move, soon.
We eventually found a 24-hour diner, and ordered French fries and coffee so that we wouldn’t look like total bums as we slept in the booth. 4:00 AM became 6:00 AM, and we were back on the road, walking to who knew where. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we walked about ten miles in no particular direction. Finally, it was 7:00 AM. We called one more cab to take us to the nearest train station. I stood in the station as Athena slept on the bench; I wouldn’t risk us both falling asleep again. The morning light passed through the glass enclosure, warming my face as I stared at hers. Getting home had turned into a disaster, but I was content regardless, because it was a disaster I’d shared with Athena. Or maybe I was just really, really tired.
***
Halloween isn’t a big holiday for me. We stopped celebrating it when I was eight years old, because of it being the devil’s holiday or some such nonsense. Either way, when all the other kids would put on their costumes and go trick or treating, I would sit in the house and watch TV, the light on our porch off so that everyone in the neighborhood knew not to come to our house expecting treats. I grew up without Halloween for the most part, so even today I don’t get excited for it the same way most adults that I know still do. I appreciate it now because my son enjoys it. He likes dressing up in his own costume, he likes seeing what everyone else is wearing, and he likes candy. Other than that, it’s just another day to me.
Athena, on the other hand, loved Halloween. She said she enjoyed the chance to be someone else for a day, to be crazy and spontaneous without having to worry about the consequences. I can see the appeal in that, although it doesn’t do anything for me personally: you’re right back to who you really are the next day, so why bother? She also enjoyed the parties and the effort that people put into their costumes. That I did agree with. I hadn’t been to a Halloween party though since the one my parents threw as my last Halloween. Not to worry though, as this was another experience that Athena was determined to make sure I had.
A friend of hers was throwing a party, and she invited me to go with her. I just had to find a costume, and I had one in mind already. I decided to go as a woman. It was cheap (I bought three blouses and two skirts from a thrift store for $10, and a wig was only $10 more), easy, and funny, and I could simply donate the clothes again when I was done. Not only was this a chance to celebrate Halloween again for the first time since my childhood, but it was also my opportunity to finally make a move on Athena.
We’d continued our streak of talking every day, and had seen a few movies together at my apartment. She told me that she’d wanted to see the movie Black Swan. I was interested in well, so I got a copy of it. So I figured we could make a real night out of it. After the party, we could go back to my place and watch the movie. By then, it would probably be pretty late, so I told her she could spend the night at my place. She agreed.
Now I’m going to stop here for a moment. We’re all adults here (I think), so most of you have had some experience with the kinds of parties that adults throw, which usually include alcohol. You may have some experience with sex, and you know how easily those things go together. You also know exactly what it means when someone asks you to spend the night at their house. There’s really no way to misinterpret what’s being suggested there, right? Okay, because I was pretty stoked when she agreed to all of those things. It was important to me that we laid all of that out before the night in question, but I’ll get into that a little later in this story. In any case, I’d finally set things up in such a way that I thought was direct, not underhanded or disingenuous, and would lead to some kind of intimacy between us.
And then God decided to cockblock me.
Remember the Halloween Nor’Easter last year? Because I sure as hell do. It NEVER snows in October here. NEVER. Yet not only did it snow in October last year, it snowed on Halloween. You know, the day that I was supposed to go to that party, with that girl, and then she was going to stay at my place? The roads were a mess, power lines were down everywhere, and needless to say, I did not make it to the party. Athena did; her friends were close enough to pick her up, so they did. I told her that if she still wanted to come to my place after the party, she was welcome, but I knew she couldn’t. I was too far away, and the roads were too bad to risk it. And just like that, the best laid plans of mice and men did indeed go astray.
Do you know what I ended up doing on Halloween instead? I walked to my ex-wife’s house, about a mile away, during the storm, because she’d lost power and needed help finding things in her apartment to take to her mother’s house. As it turned out, I was lucky. I was one of the few people I knew who didn’t lose power from the storm. My ex-wife, Athena, my brother and his roommate all lost power (my brother and his roommate ended up coming to stay with me for about a week while they waited for power to be restored). So God saw fit only to ruin my night, not my entire week like everyone else. It had been the perfect opportunity for me and Athena, and now that it had been ruined, I thought I wouldn’t get another one. But, as has been the case so often in the past few years, I was wrong. I would get another opportunity in, of all places, New York City once again.
Part 4: Do the Right Thing
Sex is pretty awesome. It can be funny, messy, wild, tender, and dozens of other adjectives that come to mind. It can be dangerous, harmful, and destructive as well. Whatever the motivations at hand for sex, sharing your body with someone is an act of intimacy that carries all sorts of meanings. When that act occurs without consent, that meaning is warped into something devastating.
Sexual assault is one of those things that, no matter how smart or empathetic you think you may be, is hard to understand unless it has happened to you. There are few experiences that can compare to someone entering your body without your permission, against your will, often as you fight back against them. Sexual assault is a violent crime as well, and leaving aside all the other implications of sexual assault, enduring a violent crime is a harrowing experience in its own right. I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but I have been robbed, twice. It’s something that stays with you for a long time, and you find yourself looking over your shoulder, staring at people to try and determine their intentions, afraid whenever the sun begins to go down. Those feelings diminish over time, but it can take a while.
Some statistics say that one in four, and even as high as one in three, women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their lives (and one in ten men), and possibly more since sexual assault is so underreported. Not only does that mean that anywhere between 25-33% of women are victimized in such a personal way, but that they must also live with the emotional and psychic damage of the assault. It may be hard to understand sexual assault, but it’s probably impossible to understand how it affects a person in the long run. We often speculate as to what we’d do in certain situations, as I did in the event that I ever was attacked. Then you find yourself getting jumped by three people, and getting hit in the head has a funny way of altering your perspective. Mike Tyson put it best: everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.
I’ve spent hours and hours talking to victims of sexual assault, and there are two things that have consistently come up in those discussions. The first is the sense of shame and worthlessness that takes over after a sexual assault. People don’t report sexual assault because they’re embarrassed, afraid and ashamed, and they feel that, at best, no one will believe them or, at worst, that they’ll say they deserved it. Those feelings almost invariably lead to the second thing I’ve encountered, a sense of guilt over the resulting period of sexual experimentation afterwards. I’ve heard this described in a few different ways. Some feel like they’re worthless, so it doesn’t matter who they give their bodies to. Others feel that their ability to control their own sexuality and their bodies has been taken from them, and they attempt to regain that sense of control over themselves. In many cases, I’ve heard how these experiences feel like being victimized all over again.
This is not one of those “all sex is ****” rants, and there’s no way that one can be expected to know the sexual history of every person they sleep with before the fact. However, you can only hear so many stories about how ostensibly consensual sexual encounters were anything but before it begins to affect the way you think and feel about sex as well. We do it not just to procreate, but for the pleasure of it. How do you know, though, if that’s what is really going on? It becomes the perfect recipe for overthinking a situation, something that I’m guilty of all too often. But truthfully, this is something I’d much rather overthink than ignore.
***
Before October of last year, I hadn’t been to New York in years, and already I was getting a chance to go back again. Two of Athena’s close friends were putting on a concert in the city, and she wanted someone to go with her. The concert was on a Friday night, and she’d rented a hotel room to stay over in New York.
At first, I declined. I’d taken a Saturday off the month before, and thought it was too soon to ask for another one. More importantly, I thought I’d be hanging my brother out to dry if I left again. We worked together in a grocery store stocking shelves, and in fact he’d helped me get the job. We usually received anywhere between 500-1,000 items to put up throughout the store, which wasn’t a problem when we were fully staffed. In the month since my last New York trip though, one of our coworkers had been fired, one had quit and one had severely reduced his hours. Stocking the shelves had gone from a three hour job to 4 1/2 -5 hours for our undermanned staff. Without me, my brother would essentially be working alone. I have a strong sense of responsibility and teamwork, and whatever I might gain from another trip to New York, I didn’t think it was worth leaving my brother to stack shelves by himself.
She asked me again and again, and I kept saying no. Eventually she told me why she wanted me to go with her. There was an outside chance that she’d see he ex-boyfriend there, as the friends she was going to see also knew him, and she didn’t want to face him alone. We’d talked at length about her ex (just as we talked about my ex-wife), and while she loved him, he was jealous, possessive, emotionally and verbally abusive, and she was afraid of running into him. This was to be an escort mission.
That began to change my mind about going with her, because I could certainly understand her concerns. It would still mean leaving my brother alone at work, so I decided to talk to him about it. I don’t recall the conversation exactly, but I think it went something like this:
“You want to stay here and work instead of spending the night in New York with Athena? Are you stupid or something?”
The answer is yes.
With my brother’s blessing, I decided that I would go back to the big city.
***
Freedom is a tricky thing. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines freedom as the following;
The definition of freedom that resonates with me strongest is the first one. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds,” Captain Picard is facing the Borg as they tell him he will be assimilated, and that the human culture will adapt to service the Borg. Picard, in typical badass fashion, replied, “Impossible! My culture is based on freedom and self determination!” Merriam-Webster defines self-determination (in the non-political sense) as “free choice of one's own acts or states without external compulsion.”
Freedom, to me, is the ability to choose, whether it be political parties or peanut butter. Those choices come with a cost though, a built in responsibility for the decisions that we make. Too often, it seems that people prefer the third definition of freedom, where they are freed from “something onerous,” usually the responsibility of their choices. True freedom for me isn’t being absolved of responsibility or obligation, but having the ability to choose which responsibilities you burden yourself with. I have a responsibility to my son and to my ex-wife. I have a responsibility to my brothers. I have a responsibility to Athena, and I have one to myself, to do what I think is the right thing in a given circumstance. Sometimes those competing responsibilities bump into each other, sometimes they conflict with what I want. But I chose them, directly or indirectly, even as they limit the choices that are available to me. My ex-wife has told me that I need to relax more, be willing to make mistakes, that life isn’t all about what you’re expected to do. She’s also told me that I’m the most trustworthy and reliable person she’s ever met. Well, this is why. I express my freedom through the commitments that I freely form.
Now, I was committed to protecting Athena from her ex-boyfriend should the need arise. This was my chance to make a move again. Our last overnight plan had been thwarted, and here was another one. Or was it? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the circumstances were vastly different. After all, the explicit understanding of Halloween was that we were getting together to party and have a good time. Here, yeah, we were going to the city to enjoy a concert, but staying overnight was more a function of the timing of the concert than the desire to spend the evening together in New York. She’d booked the hotel room long before she told me about the trip, maybe even before we’d begun hanging out again. She asked me to go with her because she trusted me. Would trying something be a violation of that trust?
Mostly though, it felt coercive. There’s certainly an argument to be made that when two people of breeding age agree to spend the night together, they both know what’s up. Hell, I made that argument. But I think it’s one thing to try something when we’re in my home, only a few miles from her own home. If things went wrong, if the advance was unwanted, or if she simply wasn’t in the mood, she could always get up and leave. That wasn’t the case in New York. If I made a move on her, I would have the additional pressure of our isolation and various expectations on my side, and that’s not what I wanted. If anything was going to happen between us, I wanted it to be a free choice on her part, not something she consented to out of obligation or inability to escape the situation. It just didn’t feel like this was the right time and place to make that move.
The concert was incredible. Imagine the church from episode five of Cowboy Bebop, “Ballad of Fallen Angels.” That’s where it took place. Athena’s friends are classical music composers who work at NYU, and the performed several of their pieces on classical guitar and piano, with a singer and chamber ensemble thrown in on certain pieces for good measure. I was greatly enjoying the concert, but a nagging thought kept biting at me. “This is the sort of thing you should have done with your wife. She should be here with you right now.” All of a sudden I was sad. I’d left my ex-wife’s home more than six months ago, and we’d been divorced for four. Why was I thinking this now, after all this time?
After the concert, we attended the after party. This was the first time I’d ever attended a millionaire’s after party, as it was thrown by the patrons of Athena’s friends. It was in a small apartment near the church, and was jam packed with artists, musicians, lawyers and other people I never spent any real amount of time with before. It was certainly a change of pace, but as I usually do, I found myself standing in a corner, eating hors d'oeuvres. I began talking to a woman named Juana, who’d moved to New York from Mexico City a few years ago. As we talked, I told her that I was recently divorced, and she revealed that she was separated from her husband as well. She’d known before their marriage that she didn’t really want to marry him, but she went through with it for the party for her and her friends. She moved out of their home after three months, and now they were beginning the process of getting divorced.
The rest of the night was fun, and seeing opera singers get drunk while eating pizza is actually pretty funny. But I quickly realized that these were not my kind of people. We didn’t value the same things, we didn’t find the same things humorous and we didn’t see the world in the same way. It was very interesting to spend time with them, but more as a novelty, as a way to see that there are people in the world who are truly that different from you, who lead totally different lives and have a totally different perspective.
By the time we got back to the hotel room, it was already 4:00 AM, and I was too tired to even think about all the stuff that had been running through my head all day. I slept on my side of the bed, and Athena slept on hers.
***
As I’ve said before, the hardest thing about my divorce was leaving my son. I thought it was the best way to handle a pretty bad situation, and I still think it was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t tear me up inside to go to bed at night without giving him a kiss, or to wake up in the morning to see that he’d crawled into bed with us during the middle of the night. I couldn’t be there all the time, but I was determined to make sure that I was there as much as possible.
At first, I would drop him off at daycare in the morning, pick him up in the afternoon, spend a few hours with him and then bring him back to his mother. He would come to my home on Saturday, and spend the night with me until Monday morning, when I dropped him off at school. Eventually I stopped picking him up in the morning, because his mother wanted to spend more time with him (even now, when I do the math, despite the fact that I don’t live with him, I actually spend more time with our son than my ex-wife does). But I still make sure that, no matter what, I see him every single day, even if it’s only for half an hour. I think it’s important for him, and I know it’s important for me.
The first time I didn’t keep my son on a Saturday night was when I went to New York City the first time with Athena. The second time was on Halloween; even though I didn’t end up having Athena stay over, the storm was too bad to bring my son to my house. This was my first real taste of what’s going to be coming my way someday, the need to balance a relationship with my son. For the first year of my divorce, anytime I felt happy when my son wasn’t around, a few moments later I would feel utterly depressed. How could I be enjoying myself without him? It was a thought that plagued the time I spent with Athena as well. As much as I liked her, I would gladly trade her for my son. That wasn’t possible though, and I had to learn how to live my life independently of him. I lived for my son exclusively. Now I had to figure out how to live for myself. I was definitely going to make mistakes on the road to figuring it out.
The night passed without incident, and on Saturday we were back to exploring the city. We went to see two of Athena’s other friends, a cute couple of twenty somethings who’d moved from Ohio to NYC as their latest cross-country excursion. While we were talking, I received a text message from my ex-wife. She wanted to know if I was still going to be back by 7:00 PM, as I’d agreed to be so that I could pick up Gabriel and she could go to the movies with a friend. I checked the time and saw that it was 3:30 PM. Probably not, I said, as it would take us at least a half an hour to even get back to Grand Central Station, then the train trip itself and the car ride back home.
She immediately called me, and what transpired was the worst argument I’ve ever had with my ex-wife. Even when we were still living together while awaiting the divorce, we didn’t fight like that. She was angry that I wasn’t going to be back home in time, and she was perfectly right to be. I agreed to be there by 7:00 PM, and I wasn’t going to make it. That was my fault, and I tried to apologize for it. But she was livid, and she went right for my button.
“I see you’re picking that woman over your son.”
I blew up. There I was, a visitor in Brooklyn, screaming obscenities into my cell phone as loudly as I possibly could. I’m not going to repeat the things I said, but rest assured that they were mean-spirited, angry personal attacks. In retrospect, as a guest in someone else’s home, I should have simply bit my tongue and let my ex-wife vent as opposed to yelling like a madman in front of my host’s apartment building. But this was the second time that she’d accused me of putting Athena before my son, and I was going to tell her exactly what I thought of her. I got through most of it before I she hung up on me.
I was so angry I couldn’t even see straight, and I apologized to Athena’s friends as soon as I got back into their apartment. Athena decided it was time for us to head home, and we quickly left, embarrassed beyond words. After we were out of their apartment, Athena told me that my ex-wife had called her, accusing her of stealing me away from my son and standing between us. That took my anger to a level that I didn’t even think was possible. Whatever problem my ex-wife had with me was between me and her, not me, her and Athena. Athena was on the verge of tears the entire way back home, apologizing for keeping me from my son. I spent the whole time trying to explain to her that it wasn’t her fault, that my ex-wife could be kind of insane when she was angry, and that she hadn’t done anything wrong. It seemed like getting home from NYC with Athena was always going to be a trip through hell.
I didn’t say a single word to my ex-wife when I showed up to pick up Gabriel. She’d missed her movie, and I was glad. We didn’t speak for almost a month after that. Somehow, Athena found it in her heart to forgive me for ruining her trip to NYC again, and we went back to hanging out as if nothing had happened.
Over the next few weeks, there would be a few moments where sex could have happened between Athena and I, but it never did. I’m the type that waits for the woman to make the first move, or, barring that, make it so explicitly clear that she wants a sexual encounter that no person, reasonable or otherwise, could misinterpret it. That’s how it happened with my ex-wife, so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility, although it’s certainly not common. As I said earlier, you can only hear so many horror stories about sex before it alters how you think about it, and I’ve heard tons and tons. When the woman makes the first move, then I know without a doubt that this is what she wants. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but we all know what it feels like to be hurt or used, even if it’s not sexually. I’d much rather ere on the side of caution in those situations, and while I’m certain that I’ve blown some opportunities as a result, I don’t regret those decisions at all.
Also, I think of sex in a very particular way. I don’t think that sex is as big of a deal as our culture makes it out to be, and that anyone, anywhere should be able to do what they want with their bodies as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else. For me personally though, sex isn’t something that you just do. There are a lot of feelings involved, and I can’t successfully separate those feelings from the act itself. It all gets mixed together in my head, and that can be a very hard thing to deal with. It seemed like sex was still on the table, but that an actual relationship wasn’t, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted one without the other.
In any case, I wasn’t worried about it. Athena had already invited me to attend her friend’s wedding with her the following April, and we were discussing going to an anime convention next summer. I enjoyed her company, and that was really all that mattered. The rest would sort itself out. Little did I know that the clock was ticking though, and I’d run out of time much sooner than I thought.
Part 5: The Answer
Words are very important to me. I earnestly believe in their power to inform, entertain and enlighten. A kind word can brighten our moods, and an unkind one can hurt us more than we’d like to admit. They provide insight into our psyche in ways that we don’t fully appreciate, or at least I think so. There are so many words, so many synonyms, so many varying shades of meaning, that I think it means something when a person describes an uncomfortable bed as “firm” instead of “hard.” I mentioned earlier that I don’ think the word “sexy” can be used platonically, and that’s because of what the word sexy means, not the intentions behind it. I choose my words carefully. I practice my sentences in my mind before I say them, and after I say them I repeat them in my mind again to look for ways to improve them. That kind of thing is fun to me. I assume that people say exactly what they mean, whether they meant to or not. Words are too powerful to throw around without thought or consideration.
At the same time, I’m not a word snob. I do appreciate sophistication in language, but if there’s a simple way to say something, I think that’s the best way. I don’t care if someone responds to the question, “How are you today?” with “I’m good” instead of the grammatically correct “I’m well.” I don’t think it’s important at all to know what the past participle is to be a good writer. The important stuff isn’t in the details, it’s in the meaning. The rules of language only matter insofar as they make meaning possible. Language evolves and changes; the verb “Google” didn’t even exist fifteen years ago, and now it’s an important part of our everyday lives. Language is going through another major evolution now, as internet and texting shorthand move out into the general way that we speak and write. Some people are appalled by LOL and WTF becoming “real” words, and I don’t understand why. We don’t say thou or thine anymore. Language changes.
When someone speaks, then, I pay attention. I don’t often remember what a person was wearing or what they were doing, but I always remember what they say. People say that actions speak louder than words, but I disagree. Words are action in themselves. When one’s actions don’t match their words, it is not true that their actions have trumped their words, but that one action has trumped another. We often reveal our desires through our words, but meet our obligations through our actions.
That’s the other power of words. They allow us to fantasize about our world. We know that we’re not actually going to quit our job, or punch the person in the drive-thru, or buy that expensive item. By saying it, we can experience the liberation of quitting a job without suffering the consequences. For that one moment, we get what we want. That moment is important, because the rest of the time, we almost never get what we want.
***
Before I knew it, it was December. Athena and I had been talking non-stop for four months, but the time was coming for us to take a break from each other. Her family was coming for a visit in mid-December and would be staying for about a month. That included her sister and her family, her grandparents, and Michael, the guy from Greece. She’d be too busy being the good host to hang out, and I figured it would be a good time for me to patch things up with my ex-wife, who I still wasn’t talking to beyond what was absolutely necessary. As much as I enjoyed talking to Athena, I knew a month wasn’t that long. She’d already invited me to attend a friend’s wedding with her next April, and we were making tentative plans to go an anime convention the next summer. I was comfortable with the fact that we were friends, but there was something that was bugging me. I liked her a lot, but I never made a move because I didn’t want to force anything. So why hadn’t she ever made a move on me? The only way to find out was to ask.
For the record, I think that men and women can be friends, but that no matter what, sex always creeps in. Not necessarily the act, but at least the thought, and good friendships aren’t ones that avoid that pitfall all together, but ones that navigate around it effectively. Some people can have sex and remain friends, and some people can’t, but either way it has to be dealt with. Deep down, I know I’m one of those people who can’t have sex and remain friends. My emotions get too caught up in the act, and I’d want more than just friendship afterwards. That was another reason I never made a move. When it became clear that a relationship wasn’t in the cards, I decided that I didn’t want to jerk my own feelings around (no pun intended) for what would have been an awesome but temporary experience. Had Athena made the same calculation?
“Let me ask you a question. You’ve been in my apartment many times for many hours, and there’s never any sexual tension. Why is that?”
“There’s always sexual tension,” she said. That was a real surprise to me, because I honestly didn’t feel any. In the beginning it was definitely there, but I’d put the idea out of my head, so I’d stopped noticing it. “I’ve thought about having sex with you, but I don’t want to ruin our friendship.” I was actually glad to hear that, because it meant that I’d made the right decision in not forcing the issue. Whatever her reason was, she’d decided that she didn’t want to go down that road, and I was very happy that I hadn’t tried to make her.
Yet that wasn’t exactly the truth. Athena had told me before about how her ex-boyfriend had given her a lot of grief for remaining friends with other guys she’d dated. And in reality, Athena and I were essentially dating minus any physical intimacy. I suspected that there was less concern about the effect on the relationship between us, and more about how her next boyfriend would respond to me if he knew that we’d slept together. Which was a legitimate concern, but why was that something to be worried about now? Yeah, Michael was coming to America, but that was only for a month. Was that who she was worried about?
That conversation happened two days before Athena’s family arrived. I wasn’t going to see her for a month, but I wasn’t worried. Once the holidays were over, things would pick up where we left off.
I haven’t seen her since.
***
You may or may not know this, but I live in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a small city, with less than 120,000 people (in fact, despite being the capital of my state, it’s only the third largest city). Our residents often bemoan the fact that we’re caught essentially halfway between New York City and Boston. It’s great to be able to visit both cities, but they claim it makes it difficult to grow Hartford with those two behemoths sucking all of the oxygen out of the Northeast. It’s true that we’ll never be able to offer the kinds of experiences that NYC and Boston can, but the reasons that contribute to Hartford’s stagnation have little to do with those cities. Our downtown has restaurants and bars, and nothing else. No grocery stores, no bookstores, no affordable clothing stores, no hipster destinations, no concert venue, nothing. Nothing that would actually encourage people to stick around after work and hang out in the city, so they all flee back to the suburbs. As such, the city essentially shuts down at 9:00 PM. If you’re not clubbing or drinking, there’s nothing to do. Developers continue to build luxury housing in downtown, but who wants to live there?
When something new or interesting does open, I try to do my best to support it. Things won’t change in my city unless we can keep those few fledgling businesses open. Last year, a store called the House of Fragrance opened. They sell bath accessories, scented soaps, perfume, you know, girl stuff. It’s not the kind of store I usually shop in, but it’s one of the most unique locations in my city, and fortunately for them, I happened to know not one, but two women who loved stuff like that.
I bought two scented soap gift boxes, one as a peace offering to my ex-wife, and one for Athena. I don’t usually buy Christmas presents, and I don’t usually receive them. I tend to think that gift-giving is an unnecessary expense, since I’d rather spend time with someone I appreciate, and that’s free. Still, no one became popular by being cheap, and every once in a while it’s nice to buy something for your friends. I exchanged gifts with my ex-wife on Christmas Eve; she got me an Axe gift set (Axe isn’t really my thing, but the deodorant wasn’t bad). I figured I’d wait until Athena contacted me, since she was busy with her family. So I waited. Christmas Day came, and she sent me a message wishing me and my son a Merry Christmas, but she said she was too busy to get away to pick up her gift. No problem. Her birthday was in mid-January, so I would just save it until then.
I was getting ready to go to work on the morning of January 2nd, and before I left the house I went through my usual routine. I checked my email and my Facebook, and saw an announcement scroll by in the ticker: “Athena ****** is engaged to Michael ***********.”
You could say that my ex-wife and I had a shotgun wedding, although that term is less than accurate. No one actually forced us to get married, but our decision was heavily influenced by the fact that my ex-wife was pregnant. It was important for both of us that our son was born to married parents. So eight months after we met, we were engaged, and we were married a month later. Was it a mistake? Yeah. But it was OUR mistake. No one forced us into it. No one even said, “You should get married.” We came to that conclusion on our own, with the best intentions. Most importantly though, we loved each other. At the moment I said my vows, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life, and she with me. It didn’t work out that way, but there was nothing cynical, opportunistic or coerced about our initial decision.
When I read that update on my Facebook, I literally felt sick to my stomach, because I knew that wasn’t the case for her. We’d talked too often about the pressures her parents constantly put on her. I’d seen her cry about it too many times. In those four months, and she’d talked about her ex-boyfriend more times than she’d talked about Michael. When she talked about her ex, I could hear the passion in her voice, the pain she felt at the way it had turned out. She’d loved him, and she often expressed regret that it hadn’t worked. When she talked about Michael, she sounded clinical, the way someone sounds when they describe someone who isn’t bad necessarily, but doesn’t illicit any strong feelings either way. This was wrong. It looked almost like an arranged marriage.
How had a one-month visit turned into an engagement? How had three weeks together become a marriage proposal? Once the initial shock wore off, I realized it had happened quite easily. Athena’s parents ruled her life. She lived with them, and she worked with them. She’d told me that she spoke Greek so often that she sometimes forgot English words. Add to that her grandparents, her married sister, a nice Greek boy and the holiday season, and you have a pressure cooker of expectations. After all, it wasn’t as if Athena was inviting Michael to stay with her, it was her parents who were inviting him to stay with her. It was their house.
The whole thing bothered me, to put it mildly. Most obviously, I still had feelings for Athena, and I knew she had them for me. My ex-wife had actually put it best to me in a conversation in December. “You don’t spend the kind of time she spends with you unless you like the person,” she’d said. I knew that, but hearing someone else say it confirmed that I wasn’t imagining things. But let’s face the facts: I am not Greek and I have a son. There’s no way Athena’s parents would have gone for that. And ultimately, they were the ones who were making the decision. I’ve said earlier that I hate to lose. In this case, I lost because the deck was stacked before I sat at the table. Athena had made a choice, because you know what? You DON’T talk to someone everyday if you don’t have feelings for them. It didn’t matter though, because Athena’s parents had basically already decided who she was going to marry.
And that actually bothered me more. If Athena and I had gotten together, maybe we would have worked out, maybe not, who knows. But I’m an American, and she’s an American, and one of the most fundamental aspects of our understanding of the world is choice. We choose our leaders, we choose the schools we attend, we choose the people we love. It’s unfathomable to me that someone else can decide who you will spend the rest of your life with. This isn’t a rant against arranged marriage; if you think that your parents will do a good job picking your spouse, then go for it. But you should be able to say, “I want you to pick my spouse;” there should be some kind of cultural or social backdrop to it. Neither of these were the case for Athena. It was simply the exertion of power over her. The marriage itself may not have been arranged in the way that word is typically understood, but coercion and the restriction of privileges accomplish the same end of controlling someone else’s life choices. Ostensibly, Athena works with her parents, but in reality she works for them. Being a co-owner of their business is just a way to lock her into the job with name equity. Choosing her husband is another bar in that jail cell.
Lastly, it offended me as a parent. It’s my job to raise my son, to teach him right from wrong, to make him into a decent person, and to prepare him to live in the world on his own someday. For now, that means strictly controlling his life: telling him what he can and can’t eat, what he can and can’t watch, when to go to bed, who to play with, everything. I control him because he cannot make the correct decisions for himself, and I try to do the right thing by him so that when the time comes, he will be able to make correct decisions for himself. And that time will come. Someday, he will be responsible for his own actions and decisions. He won’t always make the right choices, but as long as he considers the correct option before he ignores it, then I’ll consider the job I’ve done raising him to be a success. Children are people too, and my son has likes and tendencies that have nothing to do with how I raise him. I can only teach him and hope that he makes good decisions.
When he’s old enough though, his life becomes his own. My son may become an engineer someday, or he may become a serial killer. That will be his choice though, not mine. I will offer guidance and support, but once he’s 18, he will be free to do whatever he wishes. Letting go of your child is hard, but it’s something that you must do if you truly value them, because they deserve the right to live their own life. It angers me to think that Athena’s parents disagree with this philosophy. It may be because they’re Greek, or because they’re older, or whatever. Athena is an American raised in the late 20th/early 21st century, like me. We have certain ideas. I know that Americans tend to think that we’re right about everything, but if you live here, then what’s wrong with thinking and behaving like an American?
For Athena’s part, I find this all personally baffling. There is no way I’d let my parents make any long-term decisions about my life at my age. I don’t respect my parents at all. I like my father, but I can’t help but to look at him as more of a friend than a parent. And I don’t even like my mother. These people have absolutely zero authority over me, and little influence. I can’t understand why Athena gives a damn about what her parents think, but she very clearly does.
Would I say all of this to Athena? There are some things that, no matter how strongly you feel them, you still shouldn’t say. “Your marriage is doomed” may or may not be one of them. It’s one of those things that either sounds jealous and spiteful, or the person you say it to won't listen anyway. I know that if someone had told me that my marriage was destined to fail, I would have shrugged them off, even though they were right. No one did though, and that was what made me decide to tell Athena what I thought. I wouldn’t have listened to anyone who tried to warn me, but in retrospect, I sure as hell would have appreciated it.
I sent Athena a bunch of text messages (for lack of a better way to communicate) explaining my basic argument: that she was only doing this to please her parents and get away from them, that they were trapping her in what they thought would be the best life for her instead of what she wanted, that she was being coerced into it, and that no marriage conceived under such circumstances would survive. I told her that she was hurtling towards an eventual divorce, and that divorce sucks more than she could imagine.
She replied to thank me for my concern, and told me that while I was right to an extent, that she would learn from the mistakes that she’d seen others make and work to make her marriage work. She said that she wanted to talk about this more, but that texting wasn’t the proper way to do so, and that we’d talk about it the next time she saw me. Around the time of her engagement, her family’s business tripled its production, and she’s been working twelve hour days, six days a week since.
For the first time, I was at a loss for words. She openly acknowledged that my conclusions were correct, yet she was still going through with the marriage. Why? I couldn’t understand it. I never really got a chance to ask, either. January became February, then March, then April, and we didn’t talk. In April, I saw another update in my Facebook feed: “Athena ****** is married to Michael ***********.” I just shook my head.
***
My ex-wife had a friend named Raymond. They’d known each other for years, and while Raymond had feelings for her, my ex-wife always rejected them and they stayed friends. When our son was born, she asked if Raymond could come over to meet him. I said sure. From the moment he walked into the house until he left, I could tell he still had feelings for her. He acted like I wasn’t even in the room, bringing up the “good old days” before my ex-wife got married. It never bothered me that my ex-wife had male friends, just like it didn’t bother her that I had female friends. What bothered me was how obvious Raymond made his intentions, even with me being right there. It was a disrespectful thing to do, and I’ve disliked him ever since. It should come as no surprise that after she divorced me, Raymond tried to get together with my ex-wife again, and she shot him down again.
I had this experience in mind when I decided to finally mail Athena’s Christmas present to her. It was April, and between working like a slave and being married, she hadn’t found the time to come and pick it up, so I figured I’d make it a little easier for her. I added a letter to the gift, telling her congratulations on her marriage and apologizing for the tone I’d taken during our last conversation. I also told her that I was going to back off. She was a married woman now, and since I still had feelings for her, it would be inappropriate for me to call or text her. I dropped the box off at the post office, and sighed. That was that.
Or so I thought. As a testament to the insane hours she worked, she didn’t even have a chance to pick up her gift from the post office until June. That’s when I got the message that started this little tale:
I told her I missed her too, a lot. We chatted for about a minute or so, and then she had to go. I don’t really get it. My decision to not contact her was made out of respect. I don’t respect her marriage, but I do still respect her, and she takes her marriage seriously even if I don’t. So I understand writing to me to say thank you, but I don’t understand telling me you miss me. Maybe I’m just overthinking again. There’s no secret message or hidden agenda behind the words “miss you.” I guess I take those words as an invitation to reconnect, but she’s still married. As long as that’s the case, then I’m not in any rush to blow up her cell phone or Facebook page.
***
I’ve written quite a bit here, but I still haven’t actually dealt with the title of this piece. Do I love her? I’m always reluctant to use that word. I think that when we overuse words, we drain them of their potency and force, and “love” is one of the most overused words in the English language (so is “beautiful,” and if you look, I haven’t used that word a single time until now. It’s so overused as to basically be meaningless). Love can be used in the platonic sense, but if I were to use the word now, it wouldn’t be in that way. So do I? Well, last Thursday I was messing around on the computer, and my Facebook Messenger pops up. It’s Athena. She was traveling on the road, and decided to see what I was up to. We talked for about an hour, the way we used to last year, making dumb jokes and the like. I didn’t realize how much I missed talking to her until I was doing it again, and I felt genuinely happy to be doing it.
Maybe I loved her? Maybe I still do.
too good
