Where Old Love Goes

Look at us, pretending to be normal, out to dinner on a weeknight, ordering the same beer like old friends.  There was a food truck inside the restaurant and an exposed brick wall.

He took a bite from his dinner and washed it down with his beer.  “I just don’t get it,” he was saying.  “I mean, Rob—you remember Rob, right, my roommate? And his girlfriend?”

“Sarah,” I said, quickly, to prove that I remembered.  It had been a long time since I had seen them.  I did the quick math.  At least six years.

“Yeah, Sarah—well, they were together for seven years.  Seven.  And I said to Rob, you know, ‘When are you going to propose to her?’ and he said, ‘Eh, I’m just not ready yet.’  And then, like two weeks later, just like that,” he put his fork down and snapped his fingers for emphasis: “He bought a ring and proposed.”  He watched me for a reaction, but as I rounded thirty, I was jaded to proposals of varying degrees of suddenness.

When it was clear I was waiting for something more serious to happen, he continued, “So I asked him, you know, ‘What changed?’ And he said he ‘just knew’ he was ready, all of a sudden like that.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head and looking toward my plate. I had ordered some noodle dish, which I was regretting because it was difficult to eat, and I didn’t want to be messy.  This wasn’t a date—because Dan is my ex—but it had a distinctly date-like flavor, with the butterflies and the shared Lyft ride and now the hipstery, after-work gastropub.  I looked at Dan.  I knew his face by heart, and I knew the pleading look in those dark, half-moon eyes framed by his long lashes.  He wanted more of an answer, and I didn’t have one to give.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.  “I mean, how do you know when you’re ready?” 

He’d been telling me that he wasn’t sure if it was the right time to ask his girlfriend to marry him. Now he asked it: “How do I know if she’s the one?”

“Yeah, no,” I said, “I’m not really sure,” and I twirled my fork into my noodles, tidying them carefully with the help of a spoon.  I focused on the act, so as not to give myself away, but I had to press my lips together to hide a smile.

We’re exes who have a friendship, one I always tell people is “very healthy.”  A text-you-on-your-birthday-or-when-someone-dies situation: appropriate and correct.  This was only the second time I had seen him in person since we broke up six years before, and it was only because I had an extra ticket to see an author he really loved, which seemed a perfectly acceptable context in which to have dinner in the city.  Healthy, I kept reminding myself, but how could it be, really, if I wanted to put my bare foot up his pant leg under the table?  This was all pretend, this pretense that we were just friends and out for a casual, catch-up dinner—wasn’t it?

It was a surprise to see him after so long.  In the place of the boy I expected stood a man in a gray v-neck t-shirt and clean, dark denim.  His hair was tidy, and he had this crafted stubble look.  When he hugged me, he smelled good.

After all this time, I felt the same the instantaneous rush of joy through my chest, as familiar as the first time I ever locked eyes with him.  How often I had thought in my life that this was the person that I would “end up with”—though I’ve always hated that turn of phrase, which sounds like certain death.  For the last six years, I had lived with a subtle whisper that my life was only ‘like this’ until we got back together and things went back to normal.

So it was uncomfortable to discuss marriage with him, specifically his marriage to someone who wasn’t yet The One.  And it was uncomfortable to admit to both Dan and to myself that I understood his friend, who seemed like he had rushed into a proposal.  I knew what it was like to be suddenly ready, because I felt it now, about someone else.

But it did not seem like it was at all my place to say so.  Not to my ex-boyfriend whom I had loved so fully and so long.  Not with such a scattered and difficult past.  And certainly, without a ring on my finger, I didn’t feel I had the right to speak on any engaged person’s behalf.  But how could I explain to him that it could happen that fast? That when you know, you just—well, know.

So I didn’t speak it at all.  It matters to me that I am able to keep this friendship, even if it feels at times fake or forced, with someone who once meant everything to me.  To me it says: we are grown-up.  We have closure.  We have moved on, and we are mature enough to acknowledge the weight of what we once had, many years ago.

Except. 

Faced with him, it didn’t feel so black and white. In the months leading up to my engagement, I’ve realized that loving someone and wanting to marry them can be mutually exclusive in a way that no one had ever told me they could.  And likewise, knowing who I want to marry does not make me reborn, fresh and new. It does not make all the love I had ever felt before just magically dissolve and disappear.

When I was very young, I fell deeply in love, and I gave a piece of myself away that I never got back.  Maybe I was having dinner with Dan because it was the only way to visit with her, that lost part of me, which he is forever forced to keep.

I knew he had left someone with me too.  Someone whom he’d had to forfeit or abandon that September afternoon when he broke up with me on the phone while I was in France.  “I just can’t keep doing this over and over,” he’d said.  He was right; it was the third time I had moved abroad in as many years.  I wanted to disappear into Europe, get soaked into its old stones.

Six years later, I was leaving John in Colorado to go back to France for another year.

“Of course,” Dan said when I told him, and he shook his head.  “Running away to France again, like you always do when things get serious.”

A protest rose up inside—But! I had already applied for the job before I even met John.  Would a better woman have thrown her plans away?  Isn’t John right for me because he doesn’t want me to stick around?

Yet I felt seen and known and exposed in the middle of the busy restaurant.  I wanted to think that in the six years since we broke up—six years, and in that time I had become a vegetarian and a beer-drinker, which we had already noted over dinner—I had changed.

But I felt profoundly unchanged, sitting there across from him.  Because I could run and run and run, and there would always be someone here in Boston who knew me all too well, who saw through me completely.  He owned a part of me from the past, and when he held it up to the light, it fit like the missing piece into the puzzle of the woman who sat across from him now.

And because I felt seen and known and understood, there was a part of me that wished we would both throw everything away and run headlong back to that love that had so captivated us when we were kids in a parking lot on an August afternoon, when the sweltering heat radiated off the cars and the pavement, and he had moved toward me, and I had said, “Don’t kiss me.”

And he had said, “Oh, okay,” and been taken aback.

“Because if you kiss me, I will never want to stop and I have to be at work in fifteen minutes,” and he smiled, and, of course, we kissed.

That kiss had always been a part of our lore, our origin story.  We had recounted it a thousand times in our thousands of days together.  Our lover’s chatter:

“Do you remember our first kiss?”

“Of course I do.  In the parking lot.  You told me not to kiss you.”

“It was so hot that day.”

When we broke up, the stories that defined us got tucked away.  And when John puts the ring on my finger, they will turn to dust.

My heart breaks when I think of it—because stories are all that I have. Who am I, without them? I was once someone who did not believe in love, but this happened to me: I was walking down a hallway in the middle of my life, and I locked with those half-moon eyes, and I fell in love at first sight.  It was a love that filled me and made me whole, and it was the love that made me ready for what I have now, with John.

And it always would be love, I knew, as I sat there at dinner.  I was restrained.  Be normal, I reminded myself. I dabbed my face with my napkin.  I listened to him talk and agreed with most everything.  I was not his person anymore, and it was never my place to say if this girl was the one.

It won’t matter if he loves or marries her.  And it won’t matter how much or how long I love the person I marry, either. Old love is shelved but never disappears. It stays preserved, perfectly, like something in a jar.  I only want to keep up the charade of friendship, so he will let me visit the part of me he keeps.  Because I love her, and I love him for loving her, in a way that prowls around inside me and I am not supposed to speak.

-Jamie Burgess

Jamie Lynne Burgess is a writer living in Northwest Colorado. She has lived in many places, including the Marshall Islands, France, and New England, and place is at the center of much of her work. She is currently working on a novel about climate change in the South Pacific. Visit jamielynneburgess.com to learn more.