This is me, without my hair.

It has been a relatively recent revelation for me that I tend, perhaps more than others (perhaps only because I do it on paper), to romanticize my past. I re-present it. I create characters. For myself and for others. The truth is in it all somewhere, more or less buried. And that is the essay I will always be writing.

This is something recent. It's an excerpt of something unfinished. And it is, itself, unfinished. It's probably in need of revision. I can't tell yet. Though, I should note, melodrama is part of the topic -- so at least some of the melodrama you find will probably remain.

*****

I’d tried desperately to avoid falling in love with this girl. I’d refused to say it aloud. I would find myself thinking it, almost verbalizing, with my mouth in her hair and my leg thrown over hers in a way that seemed utterly unique to the harmonizing contours of our bodies. And I would stop myself. I would not let myself speak the words. I’d thought (it seems so silly now) that would be enough. Enough of a wall.

It wasn’t.

And then because of that—because of all the willful stoppage—when I finally let the words emerge (and still, it was only in writing, at first, that I allowed myself to do it then), it was, for me, a culmination. It was a climax. This was, I was thinking, consciously or not, the zenith of something.

(Despite the break-up we’d rationally made official two weeks earlier.)

(Despite the outward awareness that this was a redundant ending (emphasis to no avail, in the end), and not the holding pattern of sorts I somewhere deeply imagined it to be.)

(Despite the rest of the words I’d written, listing the reasons I was glad for her sake she was leaving – not lies at all, but truths impugned.)

Then, for me, finally: Here was the moment.

Her tears—the suddenly sad kind (though due to nostalgia, I now recognize)—told me her eyes had immediately scrolled to the final line. Those three words. But she read, too, my listed reasons. And then, “I love you too.” She said it back. And then my tears came. And it was exactly as, I thought, it should have been. Two star-crossed lovers, I was thinking, torn apart by circumstance. How unbelievably sad. Forget the months of repressing feeling, attempting not to feel. How unbelievably sad. Forget the supposed indiscretion. How unbelievably sad. These two people were losing each other and neither of them wanted it that way. How unbelievably sad. I thought.

How unbelievably sad.

Because if my “I love you” was a peak finally crested, hers was a valley. Mine was a “Look! See what I can say to you after all this time!” And hers was simply an “Of course.” Of course she loved me. We’d known each other five years, spent countless hours lying in each other’s arms, finally dated for eight months, living together most weekends. Of course she loved me.

But her love for me was, then, unexceptional. While my love for her had grown extraordinary.

So what I heard from her then was what fit with my own feelings – the same love despite tragedy I’d finally acknowledged myself. When what she’d spoken was truly love despite failure. For her, she still loved me, but we’d failed.