This essay is part nine of my year-long project where, each month, I’ll look through old journal entries by using a random date generator to decide which day of my past to explore. This month’s was July 24th.
JUly 24th, 2012—2023
2012: We laid out again and worked out and then all the Olympics people arrived. We wanted to go to O’Neil’s, but we spent too much time pre-gaming, so everything was closed by the time we left.
2013: I worked on stuff for Logan Airport which was pretty neat and my [internship manager] told me he didn’t want me to go back to school. When I got home, we all had pizza and talked about the Boston Bomber on Rolling Stone.
2014: I didn’t stay super late at the office because I finished most of the things I was assigned. Dana made us a delicious French dinner and dessert and afterwards, I spent the night packing for NYC.
2015: I went to yoga, then met a guy (again!) in Argo before showering at Zach’s and going to The Height’s to celebrate National Tequila Day. Then, we had a CCIM reunion party with [the associate dean of our college] and went out in Hell’s Kitchen.
2016: I woke up in Harlem on 157th with [a guy I had met] and we had a really great conversation. At night, I went to the LES and had drinks and dinner with Sofia again.
2017: I was called for Jury Duty, so most of my day was just sitting at the court house and realizing how dumb people actually are. After, I went to work because I didn’t get chosen.
2018: Work was fine — I wasn’t as busy as Chels, but was still consistently doing things and ended up falling asleep pretty early which was truly needed.
2019: I was really upset after work and knew I shouldn’t drink, so I got ready to go to the gym, but ended up hanging with Serria instead, then went up to the roof to cry a little bit alone.
2020: Work was surprisingly busy and I had a great call with an illustrator’s agent who used to be a photo editor at TIME. Jonny, Marisa and I worked outside together and I’m just so glad that they came home.
2021: I walked so much today — after 305, I went to Fox and Jane, then took myself out to lunch at Cowgirl before walking to the East Village at night to have a couple of drinks with a friend.
2022: Dad and I had brunch with Liz and Melissa before walking around Soho and buying me a swimsuit so we could go to the pool on the roof at his hotel. It was a really lovely day that we had together.
2023: I am thankful [my favorite 305 instructor] is still here for me to start my Monday’s out with; he puts me in a much better mood. After work, I went to go see Barbie and I’m glad that I went to see it even if I went by myself.
Inspired by one of the journal entries above, this is a long one — longer than I’d intended — and it’s a part two to the poem I’d written for this project back in May. That piece was all about the sensory feelings I had at the beginning of significant relationships in my life; this one is about the endings and what came after.
Taste.
It was ironic that I couldn’t eat when we stopped seeing each other because I ate more around him than anyone I’d ever met. My disordered eating just simply didn’t exist in his orbit – on our first date alone, I put more food in my mouth in front of him than I had during the entirety of my last eight month relationship. We had lunch in Harlem; dessert on the LES; a second dessert of ice cream cones in Williamsburg, soft serve that melted down my hand in a sticky swirl while my legs twirled around his own on a park bench. We ended the date splitting tacos, eating them standing up in a parking lot, the 10-hour marathon day of tasting and talking and laughing and kissing culminating by using the trunk of his car as our table and an old T-shirt as a napkin. When we were together, eating felt exciting and I felt full and it was my favorite thing, the way he just knew where to bring me, letting me be a passenger princess while he steered us to the next location, completely in charge, one hand always on my thigh.
When it was ending – the unanswered texts, the long stretches of silence, the dates that only included one meal and then stopped all together without a concrete reason as to why – the feeling started in my stomach. I couldn’t eat anything without thinking of him and the food turning to an inedible dust in my mouth. My nerves were activated at all times, flutters that rippled throughout my core as a cruel reminder that it always ends like this. I’d skip dinner and stay up all night, staring at the ceiling... not feeling hunger, not really feeling anything at all.
And, later – a year later – we decided to meet up. The nerves in my stomach, dramatic as they were, had disappeared only a few weeks after we’d drifted apart and I’d been able to eat again, but we’d never spoken since. I’d wanted to see him to clear the air – I’d always felt uncomfortable and unsettled about our ending, about the sides of our story neither of us had ever gotten the opportunity to explain. As I walked up to the restaurant he’d chosen, I already knew I was going to leave unburdened, feeling lighter than when I’d arrived.
Before I could walk through the door, he stepped onto the sidewalk to meet me, and as soon as we made eye contact again, looking at each other for the first time in so long, I was delighted to find that I was hungry.
Sight.
After we stopped seeing each other, I thought about the first time we’d seen each other a lot. The stare from across the bar was so strong it had quite literally stopped me in place, everything and everyone around me moving while I recalibrated under his gaze, knowing even before we’d met that this was going to be big. It felt like a film when it was happening and time just intensified that projection — I liked seeing how perfect everything had been in the moment. I liked seeing how perfect we had been.
What I did not like seeing was how I acted after.
My feelings back then were big and I did not possess the communication tools to describe them. Instead, I would sit silently and quietly observe his interactions with other people and die a little inside, wondering what he was feeling when he was looking at them, wondering what he was feeling when he was looking at me, never once asking out of fear of what I’d learn. The memories all blend together now — I was not the most reliable of narrators when I was spending so much time on a barstool — but I think the last time I saw him, he was talking to the girl he’d date for years after me. When he looked at me the night we met, I’d felt like he was seeing into me, but on that night, that last night, I felt like he looked right through me and I knew then that, for me, the movie was finally over.
And, later — eight years later — I’d look down at my phone and see his name light up on my screen for the first time since I’d been 24. The absurdity of hearing from him was not lost on me until it was and then, I became absurd. We FaceTimed for two hours, staring at each other through our tiny screens, laughing at how much we had changed and how much we had stayed the same. Seeing him like that activated a reckless remnant of my past impulsiveness, something in me I no longer recognized, but knew had lied dormant for years and, the next day, I booked a flight to see him for the following week. It felt romantic, planning to see this man I’d met my first year in New York, when we were both still in our early twenties and, really, just children and I was excited to see him, excited to visit a place I’d never been to, it was all just so exciting!
I rode that high for a few days until I started panicking, started coming back down from my emotionally-charged decision-making because he’d always had this effect on me — around him, I acted like we were characters in our own movie, not real people, and I never knew how the film was going to end because I’d always let him write the script. When I started to second-guess my impulsivity, my gut reaction to just do anything for this man, I looked up my tickets and realized I’d never actually purchased them. In my manic rush of thinking about seeing him again, I’d forgotten to hit “confirm.”
I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time after that. For the past ten days, I’d been acting like I was the 23-year-old who’d walked into his bar, but looking back at me was the 32-year-old I’d become. When he’d known me, I’d always felt like I needed to be more, do more, prove myself more.
Now, I had the confidence to know I was more than enough.
Touch.
When he was telling me he loved me, but not enough, his hand was on my arm. I felt his voice all over my body, in all of the places he had touched me the night before, the months before, the years before. He’d grabbed my arm when I was 19 and changed my life – when I was 30 and could feel his words settling thickly on my skin, he changed it again. As we were having the conversation, sipping coffee on my couch like the comfortable couple we cosplayed for a day every six months before he left, again, I couldn’t look at him, but it was not lost on me that he was holding my arm in that very same spot. I had felt it as electricity when I was 19, sparked with the possibility of what was to come and so many years later, I just felt exhausted. Exhausted by the choices we could have made, but didn’t. Exhausted by what I thought my life was going to be like with him, but wasn’t. I was exhausted by everything in our relationship and for the first time in over ten years, I was ready for him to get on the plane.
And, later – ten months later – I went to visit him for a singular afternoon. When we touched, it was with neither the heaviness of our last meeting or the lightness of our first. It was no longer electric, but it was comfortable. It was the familiar touch of someone who had known me and loved me through many iterations of myself, a gift I am grateful to have. It was the touch of someone I would always feel connected to, but it was no longer the touch that made me blow up my life so many times over. That afternoon, we swam in the ocean in our underwear and played in the water and when he wrapped me around him so we could kiss, it felt good, it felt great, but it also felt complete.
It felt like I’d finally put the period at the end of the run-on sentence I’d been writing since I was 19.
Hearing.
I knew it was over with a singular sentence, said with sincerity in the early hours of a night turned into morning, but it devastated me. We’d been casual for months, almost years, really, and now, he told me, he was ready. We were going to do this for real, something we’d been talking about for a long time, something I’d made clear I wanted, but – there was just one thing he had to tell me first.
He said it, the sentence, and that piece of information irrevocably shifted my entire worldview of our relationship. Crying and drunk at 4 AM, I told him he should leave, but he didn’t. Crying and hungover at noon, I let him take me to lunch and after, he said “I just don’t know what to do,” and I, stupidly hopeful I could maybe forget the words from the night before, said, “About us?”
And, he said, “No, about how to get home from here. You live too far away from my apartment,” and it was so mundane that I wanted to die right there outside the restaurant. It was clear to me then we were removed from each other, me on my own island of despair, drowning while dissecting our relationship from inside this new, desperate lens and him, also stuck on an island, but a different one: Manhattan.
I knew it was over, but that doesn’t mean I left and the sentences, which I genuinely do not believe he meant to be hurtful, but were all the same, continued. Once, he told me he thought I liked him more than he liked me. Once, he told me I was one of the great loves of his twenties, then did not speak to me for the rest of the week. Once, he told me it was crazy I didn’t have a boyfriend – while he was in my bed. He always used phrases like this to keep me on his hook and I don’t think he ever realized that I’d always been able to see through them, I just liked being on his hook.
And, later – two years later? three years later? it’s hard to remember now – he’d apologize, kind of. It was through a text, a response to a blog post I’d written about him, though he was veiled enough that his identity would stay hidden to anyone who knew us both, the exception being ourselves. He told me he was flattered I’d written about him, he’d always liked my writing, but did feel bad for the quasi-trauma of our relationship aftermath that I was clearly working through in my posts.
Until I read his message, I hadn’t realized that’s what I’d written, but I suppose it made sense. It reminded me of when I’d broken up with someone else, years earlier, ironically on the same bench where the man above had called me a great love. As we said goodbye, the man I’d dumped pulled back and said, “Are you going to write about me?” and, without hesitation, I knew the answer was no, which was the answer he wanted, but to me, was the worst thing I could say. If the answer was no, it was because I didn’t feel enough. I only write about the big feelings, the things in my life I need extra time to sort through and I didn’t feel that way, hadn’t felt it once during the entirety of our time together.
That’s why we were breaking up in the first place.
Smell.
I will say this – before publishing my last poem, I did wonder what my past partners were going to think. I’d never written a poem before and was deeply proud of the result, but was concerned this could be the time I’d gone a little too far. Yes, I only write about my big moments – but how many times is it appropriate to revisit those moments on a public forum before it becomes weird? Was he going to think it was strange I was still writing about the night we met, 13 years later? Was he going to be ok with my recounting of our sexually-charged first date? Did he even remember the delicate way I crouched next to him, laughing, to pull out his one gray hair? Was he just grateful that I didn’t use his real name as an ongoing bit this time in the post? (Sorry, Jake).
What I’ll admit I did not think about, at all, was what my then-partner would think. I’d felt so comfortable in our relationship when I’d written it, it didn’t even cross my mind that it would be an issue. I’ll never know if it was – we didn’t talk about it and, five days after it was posted, we broke up.
Because I don’t know, I’m not going to write about him here now, at least not a lot. In reality, he’s probably the person I’ve written the most about. I journal for 30 minutes every morning and we were together for half a year – he was the person I was spending the most time with, the person I told everything to, so he filled up my pages. Even initially for this post, this section, his section, was the longest before I cut it down to this:
I loved the way he smelled. Once, for a sensory writing exercise I did earlier this year, I had to list smells I loved and smells I hated. Under love, I wrote “cigarette smoke (him)” and under hate, I wrote “cigarette smoke (everyone else).” I used to love waking up with him, rolling over to put my head on his shoulder and taking my first deep breath of the day, feeling relaxed and peaceful and like I was where I was meant to be.
But one gray morning, when things were not good, but I couldn’t actually admit that to myself yet, he got up out of bed before I could turn around. I heard him leave the apartment to smoke on his steps and I laid still in his bed, feeling so alone and for the first time, unsure of where we were at.
And, later – 15 minutes, 30 minutes, a whole hour, I don’t know – he came back. He walked up the stairs and climbed into bed. I wanted him to try to touch me, to talk to me, anything, but we both stayed silent and neither of us moved and that’s when I knew:
I didn’t like the smell of cigarettes anymore.