I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all
In Memoriam:27 - Alfred Lord Tennyson
Through the years, mostly during melancholy times, I go back and forth debating with myself whether Tennyson's words are truth or not. Sometimes I lean one way for its truth and then at other times against it. These thoughts are always in regards to G. G., the guy who has been, to this point, my only true love. His exit from my life felt worse than death because it was his choice to live his life without me in it.
When I first started this blog I said that I had only had the title of girlfriend once in my life, and then for only about six months, that is the truth, but I didn't say that I had loved and been loved for nearly ten years in a relationship in which I had never held the "girlfriend" title.
When I was 28 years old I moved to a small, beach resort town far from home. I had moved to this beach community to spend at least the summer - I ended up staying for six years. My brother had been living there and I would be staying with him.
Upon first meeting G.G. I acknowledged, to myself, that he was physically my "type" of guy - 6'0 feet tall, thick, curly, brown hair, beautiful blue eyes and baby-faced. He had hired me to work part-time in a small beach shop he managed. As a boss, G.G. was fine, but whenever I saw him out at the local beach bars I tried to hide from him. He just seemed so full of himself, so loud and obnoxious, it turned me off to the point where I didn't see him as being attractive at all. But as it turned out, the longer I worked with him the more I got to know the real him, not the one who was embarrassing to me outside of the shop.
I remember about three months after I had been working for him, I had a problem balancing out the cash in my register against the sales. He came over and stood behind me going over the register tape to find the problem. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and an electrical current shot through my body. I can still recall the heat that rushed to my face. I could barely concentrate. I was in shock that my body was having a physical reaction to a guy that I thought was so often annoying; a guy who I never in my wildest dreams pictured "like liking." I was really confused. He got the cash problem squared away and I clocked out and went home. But from that moment on everything in my world was made different.
I didn't let him know my feelings. We were becoming great friends. He encouraged me to keep working part-time because he felt that I would move quickly into a full-time position within the company which meant an enormous leap in income. I stayed on and eventually not only moved into a full-time job, but ended up managing a store myself.
When I had first moved to this particular resort town I crashed at my brother's apartment. After sleeping on his bedroom floor for several months I finally had to find a place of my own. I rented a great apartment, but I knew it would have to be temporary as the price was really too steep for my budget. G.G. had moved into a three bedroom house with two other guys in the heart of the town which was just a short walk from the shop we worked at. I told him if one of the rooms opened up to let me know as it would be significantly cheaper for me to share a house.
Within six months a room did become available and the guys let me move in. G.G. and I grew even closer, but the intimacy was only in the mental, spiritual and emotional realm - it wasn't physical. The first question people would ask me when I would explain that kind of intimacy was, "Is he gay?" No, he wasn't. The whole time I lived in the house with him he never brought a girl home. But I knew of previous girls he slept with and one girl in particular that was his first love from the town where he had grown up.
Eventually, G.G. did know of my feelings towards him. Not because I said, "I'm in love with you," but because he could detect that his talking about other girls was upsetting to me. It wasn't that I cried and screamed or anything. I just closed down. Closed him out. He didn't like that. In some ways, or, at least at some times, he needed me more than I needed him.
It was, beginning to end, a strange relationship. I once talked to a women, whom I considered wise, about G.G. and why he was the way he was. Why it was that the closer one got to him the further away - mentally, emotionally and physically he wanted to get from them? He had behaved that way not just towards me, but also towards his mother and to that first girl he had loved.
G.G. was adopted. I knew he deeply loved his adopted mother. He talked of his admiration and respect for her, but he also said, that even as a little boy, he never let her hug him. He once even told me that despite his great love for his parents, he wouldn't go to their funeral when they died. He wouldn't be able to "handle" it.
He was in his early 20's when he experienced his first real love. The girl was cute (I saw photos) and smart (she eventually became a medical doctor) and they kept up a long-distance relationship while she was in med school and he had moved to the beach town that was also far from his home. They planned to meet in Europe and spend a few weeks traveling together. After the long flight to Paris (he was half a world away) he was exhausted but happy to see her. But then, after spending that first night together, he told her he didn't think it was going to work out. He wanted to travel on his own. He left her that morning. He told me that they never spoke again.
In hindsight, I can see the patterns of his life easily, but when I was with him I just thought that it was a shame that things worked out poorly for them - his mother and his first love.
Once, he told me that the reason that he didn't have sex with me was not because he wouldn't want to, but because he knew it would ruin our relationship. I guess he felt it would change the dynamic to both our detriments.
Anyway, this wise women I had spoken to about G.G. said, "I believe that there are some sensitive souls who while in the womb, hear their mother's voice for nine months and then they never hear that voice again. Because of that, they feel rejected and abandoned, and the only way for them to protect themselves from the pain of that loss is to not let that ever happen to them again." In other words, she continued, "They abandon the person they come to love before that person has a chance to leave them." She went on to say that these sensitive souls, on an unconscious level, believe something must be wrong with them, there is some failing on their part which made their birth mother not want them and they feel like sooner, or later, the person they come to love will find out, just as their birth mother did, that they are "worthless" and leave too. At the end of our conversation she said that a person like G.G. would pick a mate that was a bland shade of brown, someone who he could love, but was dispassionate about, someone that he knew either wouldn't find out, or wouldn't care, what a disappointment he was.
Finally, after six years of being in love with G.G., and at 34 years of age, I decided I needed to break away from him. I wasn't getting any younger and he wasn't getting any closer to what I wanted - marriage. To this day, I believe that the kind of relationship we had together, 9.9 times out of 10, would have ended in wedded bliss, and even after I moved away, it almost did.
I went from that beach town to a desert town far away and spoke to G.G. a couple of times a year for the first two years. Sometime, in the summer of 2000, G.G. started talking to me more often, slowly at first, monthly, then eventually, weekly, and by the summer of 2001, about every other day or so. We talked about everything just as we always had. The more we talked the more he would bring up us actually being together, being married, having kids, what our life would be like. I was the hesitant one now. Inside I was overjoyed at what he was saying, outside, I was cautious.
One day, in the beginning of 2002, he told me he was ready to make the commitment to me. He said he would put an ad in his local paper for its Wednesday edition to sell off his belongings. He wanted to move to be with me. To him, I calmly, yet encouragingly, said that would be great, but inside I was feeling like my happiness knew no bounds. What I wanted most in life, the person I wanted to be with most in life, was finally going to happen.
A couple of days went by and I hadn't heard from G.G. so I left him a message to call me. A few more days came and went without hearing from him and I began to worry that something was wrong - not with our relationship, but that he'd been in a car wreck or had some other kind of accident. I was really feeling desperate to hear that he was okay. I'd phone him at different hours and there was never any answer which made me worry more.
Finally, after a week or so, I called his parent's (whom I'd never met and who didn't know me) and I spoke with his father. I told him that I was a friend and that I was concerned because I hadn't heard from G.G. and did they know if everything was okay with him? His father said he spoke to him a few days earlier and everything seemed fine.
I was starting to have a Titanic kind of sinking feeling, but I decided to call a friend whom I had kind of lost contact with over the years I had been away from the beach town. I hated to just blurt out the reason I was back in touch was to find out if she knew anything about G.G. (for various reasons, my relationship with him is probably what drove she and I apart) but that's what I did. She said she had seen him the day before and he was fine.
Now I was drowning at the bottom of the sea. With all the tears I cried it almost felt like a literal drowning. I kept leaving messages and I'd never hear back. I went to the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon. I was gone all of thirty minutes and when I got home my answering machine light was blinking red. I had a message. I listened to it and it was him. He just said, "Womp!" the nickname he called me and then hung up. I immediately called back, but there was no answer.
I was devastated. I didn't understand. He had been the one making all of the advances. I had kept my distance as best I could. I knew he loved me. I didn't have one iota of doubt about that (to this day, I still know he loves me). But why would someone who loved me treat me the way he had treated me? It was unfathomable and I wanted an answer, an apology.
I kept calling. I kept leaving messages. I called his work where I knew part of his job was to answer the phone, he said he was busy and couldn't talk. I told him I'd call again. I did. When I finally got him it was a short conversation, but he said he was sorry and then he said, "Don't take it personally."
When G.G. said, "Don't take it personally," I knew what he meant. It didn't make my heartache any easier to bear, but he was telling me that it wasn't anything I had done, or anything I would do. It was his baggage and his demons.
The moment I got my apology I knew that I would never talk to G.G. again in my life - not because I would harbor anger, but because that was just the way it was going to be. All I've ever harbored against G.G. is the pure sadness that comes from loss. I lost the best friend I had ever known. There was only one other man in my life who I felt so connected to and that was my father. I looked at both my father and G.G. as being brilliant, visionary, thoughtful thinkers who challenged me, bringing so much value, so much fascinating breadth and depth to my life. The big difference between the two was that my father wasn't a coward.
I remember the night before my flight was to leave our little beach community, when G.G. and I were lying side by side in bed, and neither of us knew what, if anything, our future together would be, whether or not we would ever even see each other again, and he said, "You're not going to find anyone better than me." I replied, "I probably won't," adding, "but you're not going to find anyone better than me either." And he said, "Maybe not."
Today, all these years later, I just want to change my response. I want to reply, "It might take awhile, but I will."
