Lovergirl

Or, my attempt at a Valentine's Day post

1. It is fall 2011. I am in ninth grade. I have never had a boyfriend, which makes sense because I am 14. I am convinced it is already too late for me (I will not embark on my first serious relationship until almost a decade later). A is a transfer student. He is on the staff of the newspaper with me. He is gangly and quiet and does not know that I have been firmly established as undateable and unkissable and so I make him my mark. I ingratiate him into my friend group and eventually corner him on his bus to see if he likes me. He says he does. We are boyfriend and girlfriend. This means doing our geometry homework together during free periods and me cheering him on from the stands of his volleyball games. Once I hold his hand and he nearly falls down a flight of stairs. A is deeply Catholic and not allowed to go on dates. We do not kiss until six months in, and even then it is so chaste and brief that I gaslight myself into thinking it did not happen. By the summer, he stops answering my texts and calls, so I dial his landline (!) and tell his sister to give him the phone and then I tell him that we’re over. I will not have another romantic encounter until college.

2. It is spring 2016. I am a college freshman. B is my friend. He is a sophomore and he is very good at guitar. Some weekend nights we go to parties together and sometimes I go back to his apartment with him and we sit on his couch or at his kitchen table eating stale tortilla chips. Once he showed me his middle school gymnastics videos. Another time his roommate made us watch a foreign film, something black & white, maybe northern European; we had to watch it with subtitles. He does not touch me. At the end of these outings, I tell him I should get going, and he walks me to the door and then closes it behind him, leaving me to walk back across campus, alone, at two in the morning. But one cool evening he asks if I will be a plus-one to his coed frat’s spring formal. Black tie. My mother brings me dress options. I do not know how to do makeup, so I go without. We take uncomfortable pictures and he does not touch me and I leave early to meet my best friend (a different boy, a boy I am probably in love with) for donuts, and I think, was that my first date? B and I never talk about it again. A year and a half later he meets a girl on Tinder. They live together to this day.

3. It is fall 2016. I am a college sophomore. C is an acquaintance and a senior who used to have long hair like Jesus that he chopped off after breaking up with his girlfriend of many years. We do not go on a date, exactly, but he texts me a lot and comes to watch me perform “Raspberry Beret” for a final exam (a performance in which I wear an actual raspberry-colored beret) and then we both get drunk at my friend’s house party and he kisses me on the front porch. Three months later I see him in a frozen yogurt shop with his “ex.” They break up, again, two years later. I hear that he was mean and weird with money. I see him all over the east side of Los Angeles, long after we both graduate. I don’t doubt he remembers the kiss, but I wonder if he remembers it was my first.

4. It is spring 2017. I am still a sophomore. D is in a few of my classes and after the presidential election he takes me to a protest and when the police threaten us with rubber bullets he grabs my hand and we run. For six months he flirts with me in fits and starts, then finally asks me on a date in front of a large group of people, thus making it impossible for me to say no. We go to a bookstore, where he gawks at the stack I buy, and then to an ice cream shop, where he does not offer to pay for my three dollar scoop. He spends the Uber ride back to campus talking about how hot one of his female roommates is. Four months later we are at the first party of junior year and he is there with his new boyfriend. We never talk about it again.

5. It is the spring of 2018. E did lighting at a show I played two years earlier and we keep running into each other on campus until finally I find him on Facebook and ask him to get coffee because he looks like Clark Kent, which is, pardon the pun, my kryptonite. We sit at a table outside and he complains about astrology and the Kardashians and “pronouns.” He overshares about his absent father. He walks me to my astronomy class. I never see him again.

6. It is the fall of 2018. F and I match on a dating app. I have never gone on an app date before and I try to duck his requests to see me, but he agrees to drive across the city to have coffee with me at the same ill-fated café as my last date. He is smaller and paler in person. I feel like I’m in an interview for a job I don’t want and the entire date I am aching for an appropriate amount of time to pass so I can stand up from the table. I make up an excuse to leave, and when he texts me asking for a second date, I do not respond.

7. It is still the fall of 2018. G is an exchange student. I became obsessed with him the previous fall, when he dated a beautiful girl with doe eyes and perfect bangs but he still dutifully responded to my Facebook messages asking what kind of animal he would be. When he comes back to visit, I try to avoid the humiliation of a second rejection, but I fall for him, again. At a Halloween party we sit on the front porch with our knees touching and he asks me to tell him a secret. We strike up a weeklong flirtation over Instagram. I ask him to go to a bookstore—is that really all I thought a date was in college?—and we wind up at LACMA, “as friends.” By the end of the night we are at a bar and he is paying “because it’s our first date.” I order prosecco because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu. The next weekend I take him to the Getty to see the sunset, but Los Angeles is on fire and the whole sky is ash. We talk for eight hours anyway, splitting a cookie on the lip of a fountain and talking about time travel, nursing gin and tonics at a bar in Silver Lake (as I write this, the bar is permanently closing). He interrupts himself midsentence at one point to remark, with his deadly accent: you are so pretty. Two weeks later I drag him to the boygenius concert at the Wiltern and he sits like a good soldier for three hours while I sob through every song. Three days before he has to fly back across the ocean, he walks me home from a party and comes upstairs and hot damn, I get my second ever kiss. I am convinced that G is my soulmate but we get into a fight over the phone when I find out he slept with someone the day he got home. We don’t speak for a year. Eventually I “happy birthday” my way back into his life, and we enact a regular schedule of FaceTimes every other month wherein we compare existential dread and bad dates. I write two songs about him for my first album. He is one of my dearest friends.

8. It is the fall of 2019. H and I match on a dating app over the summer. Our conversation trails off, but then two months later I get onstage at a bar in Hollywood and see him sitting in the front row. I message him on Instagram, pretending I don’t know why he looks familiar. We get lunch at a diner near my apartment and I nearly set myself on fire trying to blow out a candle on the walk out the door (I remember this because I felt relieved that I would have something to talk about when I sat down). He orders oatmeal at 2pm; people later tell me this says something profound about his character. A week later we get pizza in Highland Park and he drives me to a birthday party in his ancient station wagon and I think he’s going to kiss me across the console but he doesn’t. A week later we go to a show at that same bar in Hollywood and then the same diner but a different location and before my onion rings can even come he tells me he doesn’t want to see me anymore. Somehow, we finish the meal and have the best conversation we’ve ever had, minus the part where he tells me that he showed photos of me to his friends and they gaped, asking if “that” was really his type. I Uber home and try to make myself cry for the plot. Nothing comes out. The last I checked, he’s still a fan of my music, and he is in love with a beautiful girl.

9. It is Leap Day 2020. I walk into a party and nearly collide headfirst with J, who is six foot five and looks like, I kid you not, the shadowy boyfriend of all my daydreams made manifest. We talk all night and he asks for my number and then asks me on a date exactly three days later. We go to a flea market. Within a week the world has shut down. We talk on the phone constantly—almost never on FaceTime, as he insists that he gets too distracted by his own image—and after six weeks he flees his family home for refuge in mine. Our kissing is stilted and awkward but we have to see it through because kissing options are direly limited while a novel respiratory virus ravages the globe. He stays at my apartment for hours. When he leaves, I can already tell something is wrong. After two weeks of increasingly irregular phone calls, he lets me know that he doesn’t want to date me. Quote: “I don’t want to be part of a narrative.” A week later I write a song, through tears, called “Skip That Party.” Within two months he has ghosted me. I never see him again. Last I heard, he was getting a master’s degree at Cambridge, maybe Oxford. He doesn’t have social media; he could be anywhere, now.

10. It is spring 2021. I am having FaceTime dates while I await vaccination. One of my digital suitors is K, a non-celebrity from the celebrity dating app. He is a British actor who manages to be so off-putting that I have to stop responding to him entirely (his last message to me, before he got the hint: “And just like that, our femme fatale slips back into the shadows”). The other is L, from a regular person dating app. L is artsy, but only barely—he builds his own guitars. He works in real estate, or property management, or both, or neither. The great dream of his life is to be a husband and a father and to build his own family home. He has perfect tanned skin and perfect white teeth and perfect shiny hair; he looks like a Ken doll, by far the most clean and symmetrical man I have ever dated (up to that point). We FaceTime for hours and he stares at me with glittering brown eyes. After I tell him I like how he looks in a backwards cap, I never see him without one. He is dyslexic and a community college dropout and I have to tell him repeatedly that I don’t care, he’s kind and he’s funny and he’s handsome and it doesn’t matter if he can’t quote any Vonnegut, I still think he’s smart. We finally arrange an in-person meeting, and we run into someone he knows at the restaurant. He informs them breezily that we are on a first date. No one has ever broken the fourth wall like this, with me—no one has ever admitted that they were dating me before. He pays for our meal and we walk to Echo Park to sit by the water, where he tells me that they just dredged the lake and found seven dead bodies. Somehow this is not a turn-off to me. He walks me to my car and I insist we sit inside to “warm up” (foolproof move) and ask to “read his palm” (I don’t know how to read palms). We kiss, and he tells me he has to see me again. An hour before our second date, he calls me and says: “You’re a genius, but I’m just not feeling very romantic these days. But you’re a genius.” It’s only after I call my mother crying that I realize I have been dumped for being too smart. I eat an entire pizza, delete our text thread, and move on within 72 hours. The last I checked, he’s still really handsome—I have noticed that the men who are kind to me are allowed to keep their looks, whereas the cruel ones get uglier. Like a witch’s curse.

11. It is February 2024. After L, I fall in love for real. I end up running from him; my first love betrays my trust in ways that I am still trying to repair. I fall in love again, and this time it’s him running from me; my second love abandons me with a callousness I am still trying to understand. I go out on more dates. Occasionally they are good. Mostly they are bad. The difference is that I have so much less to prove now. I am sitting at my desk, revisiting the men who have led me here, the ones who were merely boring and the ones who did irreparable damage to my heart. I am astonishing myself with my willingness to fall down romantic rabbit holes that I know will not end in forever. And I am astonishing myself with my capacity to love and to love again, to try and fail and try again. I am now and forever the girl who writes love letters and buys presents and genuinely enjoys meeting the parents. Even when the world repeatedly beats me up and lets me down. And especially then.