To Pink and Red From Black and Blue February 14, 2008

Today I wear a Thomas Pink button down, pink, and a Marc Jacobs wrap sweater, deep red.
 
Apparently, when you’re this happy, you do stuff like this. Shit that’s unjustifiably sappy. You’re so thrilled with life that wearing red and pink to your very professional office setting on this day makes sense to you. You think it’s fun. That it’s whimsical. Maybe even ironically cute. You don’t give one damn what it is.
 
You’re that happy.
 
That in love.
 
And you fucking adore loud clashing colors anyway.
 
Love makes you do crazy things.
 
You first learned this when you were 17 years old.
 
His name was Caleb. He was tall, athletic and lean. His eyes were ice blue. He was intimidatingly smart. And refreshingly eccentric.
 
He was a fresh import junior year, transferring from a nearby town to play baseball - my high school one of those that perpetually kicked ass at almost every sport, reaching Districts, Regionals, and States almost every year. And he was very serious about baseball. Girls gushed about the new cute guy who’s, like, totally crushworthy! but I barely cared. My small hometown bred beautiful people. The kind that looked like they had just stepped out of an Abercrombie ad. In fact, my friends Andy and Brett, twins, were shipped down to the Caribbeans for a shoot their senior year. 
 
I was tired of all of it. Even when included in the clusterfuck of it. Or maybe because I was included in the clusterfuck of it. So over the beautiful people; the cookie cutter molds; the ‘I’m so perfect’ archetypes. So ready for something different. Just hungry to leave and be lost in a wave of everything new. I didn’t simply count the number of days until my high school graduation – I counted the number of seconds.
 
I met him finally, one day after school, a friend shouting for me to come over and meet the new kid who wasn’t so new anymore. It was the fall of senior year. We went to Palio’s for dinner. I knew he was interested. I knew he wanted something to happen between us.
 
I knew it couldn’t.
 
And at dinner I told him just that. Knowing, just a few weeks earlier, I had gulped down a handful of Tylenols after one more night of playing punching bag to my father’s verbal, mental, and emotional assault. My mother had found the empty Tylenol bottle and me vomitting in the bathroom upstairs. And cried. Slapped me and told me to never, ever, ever be so stupid again. Grabbed my face, bore her eyes into mine, and whispered only 8 more months, daughter, then you leave this house. Convincing me that night to decide that, no matter fucking what, I would make it to my high school graduation; that I wouldn’t so selfishly hurt my mother and my sisters; and that I sure as hell wouldn’t let my father rob me of a life away from him.
 
I uncomfortably uttered over a plate of Palio’s famous Eggplant Parmesan that my father was a very, very strict guy. Like really strict. Trust me. And Caleb laughed. Assured me that he had never met parents who didn’t immediately fall in love him, his eyes filled with joy and happiness at the prospect of us. His premature statement held weight - his good looks, engaging personality, and easy manner cooed Instant Catch. I knew that my father would be like no other parent Caleb had encountered. But in that moment, all I wanted was to believe him. To feel normal.
 
So we began dating and our first fight inevitably happened a month or so later - him frustrated and confused as to why he couldn’t take me on a simple date on a Friday night. Why I hadn’t introduced him to my parents yet when I had already met his multiple times. Why I acted so scared and skittish whenever I was on the phone with him. I couldn’t lie to him anymore, exhausted of my own fabrications for why I couldn’t come over on a Saturday afternoon or why he couldn’t just stop by on a Sunday morning with Zimmerman bagels for my whole family. I told him everything soon after that fight.  He cried and said he couldn’t believe how someone so beautiful and warm could spring from an environment like mine. And I cried because someone was telling me I was beautiful for the first time in my life.
 
The recklessness soon followed. Maybe because we were only seventeen and didn’t know fucking better. Maybe because he quickly began to see me as something he had to protect from my father. We turned into our own twisted version of Romeo and Juliet. But for a brief period of a couple months - after he had learned everything but before the guilt and the weight would eventually settle in too deep - we were something completely pure. He wrote me letters. And love songs. He snuck into my room to leave me stuffed animals and mixed CDs. So many mixed CDs. Music became the closest thing to capturing our overwhelming emotions for one another into something compact and tangible. We talked about marriage. What we’d name our children. He’d tell me how he couldn’t wait for that day, far in the future, when we’d lay out in our backyard, rolling around with our three kids as he occasionally snuck a handful of my rack or my ass, and we’d laugh. All as he ran his hands over my hair and kissed my forehead.
 
I became addicted to what we had. Of course I did. After only knowing fear and disillusionment during my most important formative years, love? Love was the sparkles and the glee and the warmth that I had seen far too little of until Caleb.
 
My father still yelled at me almost every night. He spat at me. And I clutched onto my inconspicuous safety blanket created by all the words and kisses ever planted on me by Caleb. I grasped onto the knowledge that I could call him the moment my father stopped yelling, no matter the hour, and he would tell me he loved me and that he woke up every morning with a smile because of me.
 
He tried to give me everything. His cell so I could call him anytime, anywhere, any hour. His nights when he should have been sleeping, driving to my house so I could sneak out and we could sit in his bright blue convertible and just be together. His words weaved into beautiful stories inspired by our love. He gave me his entire self.
 
I feared that whatever he saw in me that was beautiful and romantic and conflicted would eventually turn into something depressing and burdensome and exhausting. And that fear did eventually become our reality. Because I needed him too much after a while. And he needed me too. But with me came a wash of painful yarning buried in inherent sadness. And he quickly learned that he could love me, but he couldn’t really have me. And the more he couldn’t have me, the more desperate he became. He loved me too much to be able to sensibly bear the thought that any moment he wasn’t around me could mean a moment I was hurt and scared. With that kind of love came too much sadness because of something very much beyond both our controls. 
 
We broke up not too long after I went away to college. And for two more years, I loved him. He played me those two years. Perhaps the result of some deep-buried resentment. Revenge. Maybe regret. He’d call and tell me that he still loved me too and that he missed the something special we had that he couldn’t find with anyone else. That he wanted to see me. And I let myself believe him every time - every single time – because I still loved him. But just as suddenly, there’d be no more phone calls from him. And my heart that had already been battered and broken too often – and dealt its biggest blow when someone I had loved so fearlessly and so unconditionally had finally told me he’d had enough - would hurt just a little more.
 
At least it was a reminder I still had my heart.
 
The relationships I fell into after Caleb weren’t pretty. I grew bored and tired of every guy who wanted me. Sometimes I even wished I was capable of loving some of them back, knowing how much they loved me. But no one could grab me like Caleb had. No one had his intensity. His was the something more that no one else could give me. Some hole in my mind made constant home to the thought of what we could have been under different circumstances. And healthy relationships with new people are not borne from a mindset such as this.
 
Thoughts of Caleb eventually grew more faint. I began to mentally give Tennyson a Fuck You anytime I heard someone flex his infamous maxim. Caleb had robbed me from whatever fledgling ability I had to trust other people after our love lost. Before him, I had been ignorant and cautious but optimistic. After him, I understood that no one could truly love anyone with such crippling baggage. I wisened up. Became some sick hybrid of Unintentional Maneater, the product of never completely grasping the effect I had on boys boys boys but using to my advantage the windfalls. Senior year in college became a nonstop funfest with some of the craziest motherfuckers I will ever probably know.
 
But all of it was running away from demons. Chasing down my next distraction of allure, my next rush of constant movement. I had long stopped comparing guys to Caleb or the menagerie of emotions he had been able to draw out of me, but the ugly fog of our trainwreck still hovered – yes, three whole fucking years later.
 
It was in this mentally fucked condition I met a friend of my friend whose party I was dragged to that fall after college graduation. A boy who I instantly knew was different when I met him. Because the only thing someone has ever truly needed to capture my attention is to be interesting. But interesting is a hard quality for most guys to pin down when the girl who is to fill the role of interested defines it more by a gut recognition than anything rational or tangible in words. 
 
He had a quiet confidence that I found immediately attractive, but that was the only thing that came immediate for us. The attraction. It took us one full year after meeting to establish a relationship. And when we did, no one really believed we’d last past a week. Neither of us had good reason to believe we’d make it either. He was known to ward off anything remotely serious. And not to be outdone, I was the girl who had given her entire heart to the first person she had believed she truly loved – the first person who she felt had ever truly loved her - and learned to throw men away, left and right, in every direction, ever afterwards.
 
Somehow though, we both knew we’d be okay. Because, I guess, when something kicks you in your gut as truth, you have to know. When you’ve really dealt with so much shit, you don’t scoff in the face of toilet paper. Really terrific, Grade-A quality toilet paper. Not the generic industrial public restroom variety and not the type that’s too soft and leaves undesirable leftover fibers in your ass crack. The kind that’s absolutely perfect at getting the job done. Repeatedly.
 
So of course I hesitated telling him about my father.  
 
Things are different now from what they were when I was 17 years old. But I initially scared at the thought of telling my boyfriend because I won’t ever escape who my father was and still can be sometimes. I will never escape my childhood. And once that part of me is shared, the person I date has to accept that too. 
 
I don’t think I should have to escape any of it. Because it’s a part of me, and for all the reasons I love intensely and am fiercely loyal to the people I care about, I think it has something to do with my upbringing. Why I cherish unabashed freedom and practice spontaneity to a fault. Or why I tear up when I read about abused children and am so emphatically passionate about helping battered women and their children.
 
I’m a lot of kinds of ugly and imperfect, but I discarded wearing my pain and feelings of entitlement on my sleeve a long time ago. Some of my closest friends from college, the people I loved most fiercely, were battered and broken people too. Fabulous, hilarious, genius people who I thought got it because they too had experienced some kind of pain growing up. But their shtick got old after a while. Our shtick got old. The bitchiness and assholery got really, really old. I tried to convince myself that they were good people when it counted because I think it’s entirely possible to be snarky, to be cynical and sarcastic, to even be mean at times; to drink too much, to be too loud, to dabble in the controversial, but at heart, to still be moral. To know what it means to be a solid person and a good friend. After some repeated twisted back-stabbing shit that all of them wanted to laugh about after the fact and pretend never happened, I realized these people weren’t that.
 
While my pain has influenced who I’ve become, it’s not who I am. I despise extensive pity parties over mindless trivial shit. I’ve spent too many years feeling enough pain and sadness for many lives over. I never, ever want people to feel pain just because I felt pain. I want the exact opposite. I want no one to ever, ever feel anything close to the pain I had to feel.
 
And that is an easy, easy task with my boyfriend.
 
He is one of the most good people that may exist in this world. Completely oblivious to What’s Cool or What’s Hot right this flash minute, he cracks jokes about Britney or Paris that were current a year ago and asks “What’s that?” when I mention the latest buzz thing. Yet he has a style and taste that’s all his own and – really? It’s so cool and definitely what’s hot. He’s completely uncontrived. Complex and full of contradictions. And original. Yet not one bit a mess that wallows in his own narcissistic delight. One year plus some and I still feel fucking giddy that I have found someone so smart and funny and cool. He challenges me and keeps me consistently intrigued. ADD, Non-Committal, Rushing-To-The-Next-New-Thing Me. He’s effortlessly breathtaking. And best of all? He’s just so unaware of how fucking awesome he is.
 
It all makes me want to pinch his fucking cheeks.
 
He is why I know I still have a valid shot at being a truly good person. Without even meaning to, I’ve found a kind of peace with him that I didn’t know I so badly needed. It has no ties with distracting myself from all the bad with all this good. With him, I see that love isn’t just tears and sacrifices and confessions and saga after saga after saga. I had confused all that shit with passion in the past, when it was a just cover-up for why nothing good enough existed to dominate the bad. With him, I’ve learned that passion can be loud and full of bounce. But it can be quiet, too. It can be a kind of comfortable that’s heady with excitement. A constant source of fiery blue sparks and down comforter warmth at every moment.
 
I don’t feel like I need to find someone that can make up my shitty childhood for me anymore. Someone who can fix me. My rare kind of passion – the type that can only come from a painful past – has lost all association with anger because of him. He makes me feel whole in the healthiest way possible. We’re bacon and scallops. Each is fucking awesome by itself. But a whole new kind of fucking brilliance is created when the two are combined together.
 
We support each other. We want so much good for the other. We’re each others biggest fan.
 
There are times when I catch myself crying. He doesn’t know this. It happens in the shower or when I’m alone in the apartment. I cry and I clutch my heart, overwhelmed. All this happiness, all this love. And the odd guilt and fear I feel. Like I owe something to someone. Or that I’m borrowing something not meant for me to own outright.
 
See, I’m far removed from the little girl that cherished those very brief sojourns of happiness during her childhood, those rare times when my father showed me how truly wonderful he could be. I’ve still never seen a smile or a laugh infectious like his. Those nights, I’d pray so hard to God to please let my dad just stay happy, please, God, please please I’ll never ask for anything else, hands red when released from their vice-like grip. I’d let my hopes fly. And they would eventually crash because my father never stayed that wonderful. His demons always won. I’m not that little girl anymore. I’m not even the chick I was a few years ago, who still fiercely believed anything good in her life would soon see its end. That everything happy and warm and safe knew to leave her just when she was beginning to accept it as a truth.
 
I can let hope flicker now and not fear that whatever it is that’s warranted my hope will disappear or disappoint.
 
But still I cry sometimes. Maybe because I so desperately want my father and my mother to know this kind of love. So desperately hope that my two younger sisters will eventually know something like this and they too can make peace with whatever lessons of unconditional trust and love we missed out on as little girls. That everything can be based in good, even the truly ugly moments. That fights can be constructive and not just rip and tear and destroy. And you just want to spread all this freaking love to everyone so that they too can feel this because you, Addictive-Personality You, believes that maybe it is possible to live High! On! Life! Alone! all because of this one person.
 
Blissful, estatic love that makes a girl like me write a turgid anthem to her boyfriend today - because fuck, he deserves unabashed love thrown in his face if for no other reason than that he’d never demand that from anyone - as she wears her pink and red with such ease no matter how unjustifiably pathetic because it emphatically trumps the black and blue that once covered her.