Once upon a time, there was a young man who was having a great deal of difficulty healing after a breakup. There didn’t seem to be any reason it was so hard; it had been several years, and he could no longer reliably bring her face to mind. He didn’t even still
hurt in any real sense, he was just pathologically wary of starting a new relationship without understanding how that one had be so brutally derailed.
He blamed himself for the dissolution; he could have been more thoughtful, he could’ve been more observant, he could’ve made more of an effort. On the other hand, he didn’t feel what he had done was so horribly wrong that he had to be so badly hurt as penance. His friends tried to help, but nothing they could say would bring her back, and nothing they could say would help him understand what had gone wrong. He became very bitter and cynical about relationships, and gave up what small efforts he was making to make new ones.
He went to a party at a friends’ house out of town. He was there well before the party started, and was already fairly well-lit by the time the other guests started to arrive. That’s when
she showed up, making a dramatic entrance with a thick head of wavy red hair and a big infectious smile. She opened her mouth and a posh British accent poured forth, the medium for a steady stream of caustic witticisms that struck exactly the right chord with him. They hit it off immediately. The party moved to a dimly-lit club downtown, and to his horror, he found himself recounting the saga of the painful breakup, but she listened intently and seemed even more interested in him. He drank yet more, and there was a stumbling exchange on the dance floor in which he kissed her and got her phone number, promising to call as soon as he was home.
He did so, and she seemed surprised but delighted to hear from him. They began a phone and email exchange that consisted entirely of shared references and flirting, with virtually no real substance. He learned that she was in school to become a surgeon, and he told her about his disillusionment as an American pre-med. The flirting grew more intense, feeding off itself, each ever trying to one-up the other. They met in New York for a thoroughly surreal weekend in a borrowed apartment, sponsored by his credit cards. They went to excellent restaurants and ordered more sophisticated food than he'd ever had, food that made him feel like he must have ‘made it’ in some obscure way. She returned to school in London; the calls got shorter and more precious. The emails grew longer and bawdier, and suddenly they were discussing their engagement. She came to visit him at a break in school, and they went to the most expensive restaurant he’d ever been to in his life; their fellow diners were all CNN-famous, and he was more thoroughly entranced than ever.
He visited her in London a few times, on his own for most of the trips as she worked interminable rounds in one hospital or another. He wandered the city at random, walking miles every day, continuously marveling at the limitless array of things that were simply
done better. The youngest historic sites were older than his entire country, and the city itself was approachable in a manner unlike any other place he’d ever been. He fell desperately in love with it then, and vowed to determine a way to make it his home. When he returned stateside, he began to read about jobs overseas, and to plan his escape. His conversations with his fiancée were about nothing else.
Eventually, and inevitably, they ran out of television programs to discuss, and conservatives to mock, and authors to share, and began to have petty squabbles. He wasn't fun enough for her, and she wasn't serious enough for him. As time passed, he visited her again in London, seeing even less of her this time. He discovered that his aimless style of exploring was less successful as he retraced the same steps with no guide and with no one to share what he'd discovered. He began to resent the expenditure for an interaction that amounted to little more than a series of phone conversations. When he returned home, he began having trouble reaching her at the accustomed time, and her excuses became less compelling as it became routine. Their squabbles worsened, and before long, the engagement was off. She returned his ring, and he began writing her letters in which he waxed lyrical about how important their love was. He wasn’t sure this was true any more, but it seemed like the correct posture, and he still very much wanted to move to London.
One night, at a terrifically lame party hosted by friends, there was the most fascinating woman he'd ever met, sitting by herself until he managed to convince her to come talk to him. They talked for hours, and he was completely at ease. She was opinionated but made no effort to censor herself, she mocked him readily but not cruelly when he was being an idiot. She was smart, she was funny, she was real. They began seeing one another in a very carefully controlled way; he explained the situation with his ex-fiancée as if it were salvageable, telling himself that this way, she could make her own choices about their relationship. She was with him once when the other called and he signaled her to be quiet as he answered the phone. She was, but he saw in her face how badly he had hurt her. He broke off his relationship with her several times, claiming it wasn’t fair to her, and confusing to him, but he couldn’t go more than a few hours without changing his mind.
He had bought a final ticket to London months earlier, before the engagement had been rescinded, and he decided to use it with no real intention, trying to convince himself that it was still worth the effort. He stayed in a cheap hotel far from the center of town, and saw her even less frequently than on previous visits; when he did it was wholly unpleasant. They agreed to go out to dinner to talk things over, and as they did, he got angry, and his voice became louder, and increasingly less appropriate. She asked him to keep it down; it was a regular haunt of hers. At that moment, her priorities crystallized before him. He stormed out, leaving the ring in her coat pocket. He made his way back to the hotel, stopping at the Tube station to call America.
She answered the phone and was reserved as he told her of the night’s events. She asked him what it all meant for them, and he told her that he was hers if she wanted him. She broke down in relief but quickly recovered; they talked a little longer before they hung up, and he went back to his hotel more sure he’d made the right decision than he’d ever been in his life. He spent the last few days of the trip in Wales, wishing she were there.
Over the years, he often reflected on that phone call, on the mixed emotions in her voice, on the palpable effort she was making not to reveal her turmoil before he shared his decision. He knew he had been horribly cruel to claim there was a chance with his ex-fiancée, but he continued to tell himself that it had been for her own good, refusing to see how severely it had hurt. He failed to grasp the conflict between her anger and her happiness, between her relief that it had gone the way she wanted and her feeling that it should never have been in doubt. Then one day, a little over seven years later, he understood everything as he hung up the phone, everything all at once.
