The day before Valentine’s Day

Sometimes you just need to cry it out

Yesterday, the day before Valentine’s Day, I fell. No, I literally fell—in a shower of calla lilies and white roses, my umbrella capsizing down the wet steps, the heel of my left boot catching on the hem of my coat. I landed on my palms and said fuck three or four times, with an impressive vehemence that surprised me when I thought back to the moment later. I had always associated that tone with adults; my father cursing with abandon in traffic; my mother in childhood pushing a hand into her hair by the kitchen table and kicking the fridge while I watched on timidly. My driver, who saw the whole thing, came out to help me collect stray stems in the rain. In the car, he silently handed me a box of tissues. I hadn’t even realized I was bleeding.

It was all a little on the nose, probably—certainly on the knees, fucking ouch. But who comes into love and romance with any grace anymore? Later that night, I ordered Korean takeout and watched Carrie and Aidan break up for the second time in front of the fountain (Season 4, Episode 15). It was a sad scene, but both of them were dry-eyed, seeming more exhausted than anything. By the time you’re 35 years old, how many more tears do you have left to cry when yet another relationship fails?

“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?” Rishi, sitting across from me on a train ride back into the city in the early afternoon last weekend. She was smiling watching me cry from behind my sunglasses. We’d spent the night at her aunt’s idyllic house in East Bay, where she lived happily with her husband and three children. Her neighborhood was gorgeous, straight-up paradisical—rolling green hills everywhere, Teslas and BMWs in every driveway, the sort of home you had to walk through three sets of double-paned doors to get inside of. What were the odds that inside such a beautiful home, every room also brimmed with beautiful love? Real, true, grown-up beautiful love.

“I used to hate her kids, when I was a kid,” Rishi confided in me as we got ready for bed in the guest bedroom. “I was so jealous of their happy little family.”

But now, I could tell she was comforted. Excited, even. Sitting next to me at the giant kitchen island, she chatted smilingly with her aunt all night and all morning; she teased her teenaged cousins and gave them unsolicited life advice; she quietly put her earphones in on the train for fifteen minutes, listening to a song on loop that I could tell made her think of her long-term boyfriend. I drank in the distant look on her face, trance-like and serene. I thought back on our winding, fifteen-year friendship: all the falling outs we had over boyfriends and girlfriends we disapproved of (we took turns dating imprudently), all the late-night cross-country emergency phone calls we made to each other in college, crying and hurting and panicking; all the pain inside us both that expressed itself so differently between our polar temperaments, yet were so remarkably identical in intensity. Now here we were, nearly 25, sitting on a train in California, another mundane weekend having come and gone. I thought this could be the end of all the endings. And that’s when I started to cry.

“No, I am actually never going to be loved,” I said, wiping the snot from my nose on my jacket sleeve. “And I am never going to love anyone.” Hyperbolic and melodramatic, but those were the sort of things that felt the best to say out loud, especially to a best friend who did, in fact, love you very much. And you loved her.

“Oh, stop sulking,” Rishi laughed. “You are about to enter the prime of your life. You’ve just started living! How are you already torturing yourself when you’ve barely touched the dating pool in this city—”

“I am not—I have not—”

“—and more importantly, what you’re saying is impossible, because you are a deeply loving person. You are possibly the most loving person I know.”

Later, she sent me the song she’d been listening to and texted me:

You will make your life in the shape you want it to be.
Better than anyone else I know.

I felt better

Yes, I can make certain parts of my life into any shape I want. My perfect shoe collection, my perfect little apartment, my perfect cat with her perfect new collar. But what of the shape of love, I wonder—can I have any say in that? Many times, over the years, I’ve tried to predict what sort of person I’m meant to be loving. Broody tattooed models, sensitive dancers, computer science frat guys, car girls who day trade at the gym, the corner cashier in my hometown who wants me to come over and watch When Harry Met Sally with him. I’ve tried plenty, I’ve come up short each time. I used to never care; delighted, even, in commiserating with friends after the fact—but as those same friends continue to peel away from me one by one, whisked away on the current of adulthood and called to consider things like marriage and family in a suddenly not-so-distant future, I feel bereft of intimacy in a completely novel and nerve-wracking way. On some level, I must have thought we were all always going to be girls together.

In the car, I took a photo of my bloody knees and texted it to N.

The flowers are fine, I joked. Thanks again, they’re really lovely.

The conundrum of this, too. I stared at my phone, chewed my lip. A new person in my life that I hadn’t planned for. Had actively planned against, actually. We’d done Valentine’s Day early because he was flying out of the country later that evening. You’d assume that dipping a toe back into casual dating would help to alleviate anxieties about dying alone, but I only felt more ill at ease. I felt dreadful, actually.

“This is not about him,” I had said to Rishi on the train, when the first tear came streaking down my face.

She fixed me with a look that was both pointed and gentle. “But it’s not not about him.”

Boys always made me cry, even the ones that showed up on my doorstep with my favorite flowers, wearing a tie that was the exact shade of my current favorite color. Half the time, with N, I was angry over things that hadn’t happened and things he hadn’t said. I anticipated humiliation at all times; I angled him in imaginary fight rings, wary and wounded. But everyone knew I didn’t have much teeth on me. That was what I hated most, truth be told—that I couldn’t fake a convincing stiff upper lip to save my life. I seriously believed that men could smell it, that fundamental quality of mine which seemed to always invite eventual cruelty. You know, like the way certain kids make a pastime of torturing small animals before society teaches them to cover up those baser instincts.

I’d been thinking about what Rishi had said to me. You are possibly the most loving person I know. Sure, it could be true. I loved making people feel good. It pleased me to please people. But what happens when somebody’s source of pleasure comes from your pain and powerlessness? All the time, while I sat in the passenger seats of boys’ cars or laid sleeplessly in their arms, I was thinking about power. How much did a boy need to do for you, before you could agree to give it up? Was power like money, something you parted with strategically and made back twice-fold? Or was it just one thing, gone forever the moment you chose to forsake it for a little company? How exactly was the upper hand won anyway? Excitation and anticipation, protracted silences, studied poses, jeans to make your ass look good and low-cut dresses pulled down just so to to reveal the trim of a lacy black bra, a car door opened for you and a forehead kiss. How was it so that the coldest frontier of modernity, in what Carrie Bradshaw aptly called the Age of Un-Innocence, sat right up against the juicy beating heart of romance? That the moments we as women must be at our most calculated and composed are the same ones we watched cartoon princesses float effortlessly into?

And what’s more, what if there came a day you met someone who didn’t want to play the game of power with you? Somebody who was just themselves, who was decent, who protested each time you sneakily called yourself something unkind in an attempt to beat them to the punch. And if, by the time you met this person, you’d already experienced all your first-time passions and pains, your set-ups and let-downs, and now stood on the other side of naivety—pricklier, more suspicious, and only marginally wiser for it—was there ever a world you could stand in front of them and, in the moment when it mattered most, still find it in yourself to cry again, cry the way you did at 15, at 25?

That’s the question everybody is trying to answer, I wager. I don’t have an answer either, but I can at least tell you how the field study is going. After panic-cancelling on meeting N’s friends for the first time, I paced my apartment and contemplated ending things. I wasn’t ready, I was too fresh out of a relationship, I had never not craved being alone. Plus, I needed to figure out what to do about my job first, and if I was going to New York or not, and I needed to pull the trigger on a new gym membership, and, and… But it was no use. He told me three times that if I was feeling better, he’d come get me. I finally relented and asked him to come by after the party, resolving to make a game-time decision when I saw him.

I’ve often wondered how intimacy is created between two people. Up until that night, we’d gone on every fancy date in the book, me taking care to look my best every time, him taking care to carry everything out according to my wishes. I could tell by the way we perfectly conducted our little courting dance that we were old cats. I used to think there was something horrible about dating again after having had and lost a real thing; that you’d have nothing more to give after giving the best you had to somebody or something that didn’t work out, and each new encounter afterwards would only grow more derivative, more self-referential, more practiced. And I do think that’s true, up to a point. A game you master is a game you move increasingly away from enjoyment for, for the pure and simple reason that it surprises you less often.

Well, I’ll say this. The first time you cry in front of somebody new is always a hell of a shock, to both parties. He showed up looking ridiculous, with party paint all over his face, and I don’t know what came over me. I was mostly in disbelief that he came, that he wasn’t angry. “I don’t know,” I kept saying to him. “I just think you should go out with some other nice girl.”

“You’re not nice?”

“I’m putting you on trial all the time, so no. And I think you should date somebody more fun.”

He looked at me—weepy in my pajamas, agitated, a little embarrassed and a lot relieved to have finally gotten everything off my chest—and the expression on his face seemed to say, But I’m having fun right now. Maybe he was. The funny thing is, I realized in that moment that finally, I kind of was, too.

Anyways, Happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate and/or commiserate. I have no plans today, aside from running down to the corner CVS for Neosporin and some more bandages. I had rather hoped I’d be the sort of girl who floated into love and romance, not fell. But you know what? So long as you get where you want to go, I figure it doesn’t really matter how you get there. And I’m on my way.