54. On the immutability of regret

…and the stranglehold it continues to impart upon me.

I’m at another wedding somewhere in Pennsylvania and I’m thinking of him, again, as I’ve become accustomed to doing whenever I’m confronted by ceremonial matrimony. As I wrote in Fifty:

Henry was supposed to be my plus-one to Nancy’s wedding and all the other weddings I’d attend throughout my lifetime because I wanted to be his. I was supposed to meet him at the altar with the most heartfelt speech I would ever prepare, but the realist in me just couldn’t imagine him being prepared with vows of his own. I didn’t think he could do it. The realization that he was incapable of doing the same because he just wasn’t right for me was crushing. It wasn’t going to be him. Seated somewhere amongst the crowd and watching the groom kiss the bride, I silently cried.

It’s a bit trite, I do admit, to be harping on the same subject over and over and over. Yet I recognize that the continued impulse to revisit it is a manifestation of something else, namely the subconscious thoughts I’ve been having about my current state of affairs.

Nancy’s wedding was supposed to be the big event. I would fly all the way back to California, the place of my birth, with him in tow. I would bring him as my plus-one, the singular man at the end of my long line of men who’d loved me until they didn’t, the one who represented that all my failures had eventually, finally, led me to that one moment on the nuptial dance floor where I, surrounded by a crowd of partygoers, would look into his eyes and cement in my mind that he, ever dependable, would be the one to last forever. Then, I would take him home to meet my parents and begin the next chapter of the rest of my life.

That that next chapter never arrived, that an entirely divergent narrative began to weave itself instead—I can’t help wishing that things had ended differently. The me that he knew wasn’t the me I became after he left. He knew me as I had been, perennially frustrated and in a bad mood and wanting to evolve into a better version of myself but not quite committing to all the necessary steps required to get me there, and—bless him—he tried, he really did, he tried to help me out. I suppose that, in the end, he felt spurned.

I can’t come to terms with the knowledge that it was his absence that forced me into character development, that I might never have matured in the way that I did had he chosen to stick around. I can’t help wanting him to have experienced the me that is objectively better than the me that I was when I was his. I resent that the me in his memory is the me who made such avoidable mistakes. I hate that it’s that version of me who will forever scare him away.

I can’t help it.

I don’t mean to lionize him, but I think I’m being honest about who he was when I remember his kindness. The him that he was when he loved me, it wasn’t like the sun shining at me with the full force of its radiance—that’s me, actually, when I’m at my brightest, because I’m exuberant when in love—but rather like the moon, full in phase, reflecting back to me all the brilliance that became shared between us two because that’s who he was and that’s how he loved: quietly, steadfast. Reliable.

The me that I became in the aftermath is the me I wish he had had. All the imaginary rules I’d created for myself, built up and ossified within my head, all the norms for how I ought to behave or the self I should outwardly project, they had shattered. I finally had a reason to become better, to be better, as if doing so would bring him back to me. I looked for him in every man thereafter.

It was futile, of course. He never came back.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t acknowledge all the tropes and projection and assumptions that underlie my emotions—emotions aren’t entirely rational, we know—and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t comment and analyze, but I’d like to just sit with these feelings because over-intellectualizing what I feel is also me trying to do away with the discomfort, to sanitize and wipe clean the unsavory parts of me so that I needn’t fear judgmental eyes. Maybe the sadness lingers because I’m doing this to myself; I’m making myself miserable because I hate how things ended between us, and I’m a broken record repeating the same words ad nauseam, but I can’t help it. The regret is there. It exists. It screams at me for acknowledgement from some dusty corner where it sits, staring at me, glowering. Regardless of the many steps I take away from who I was towards who I want to be, I always return to feed it. Regret is my sullen pet.

It would hurt less if I stopped seeing him everywhere. I saw him at Port Authority, taking the stairs up from the A train platform to bustling 8th Ave. I saw him through the nightclub haze in a Hell’s Kitchen venue, forcibly coming face to face with him after a drag queen’s performance. I saw him in the lobby at Fiumicino Airport’s railway station, as if he’d followed me through customs on my way to Tuscany. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t actually him. The fantasy I had had, a domestic bliss I had once assumed was just within reach, had slipped through my fingers. When I read [Ling Ma’s] Bliss Montage, he was all that I could think about.

I don’t know what I will do if I actually catch him. I can’t hold him down. I can’t arrest him. But I am close enough that I can see the goose bumps on the backs of his arms, and it isn’t until I am this close that I realize how much I want to catch him. I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.

I chase him toward the freeway, the traffic lights, cars honking, radios playing a mash of songs about heartbreak and ruin, heartbreak and memory, heartbreak and hatred, how it’s the deeper intimacy.

I reach out and almost touch his shirt. I can feel the warmth of his skin, I can smell the sourness of his sweat. He jumps beyond my reach.

But I am close. I am so, so close.

This is what surfaces when I stop to consider my current trajectory. I’m many eons removed, proscribed, from the life I had prescribed myself. I don’t have the husband. I don’t have the dual male household income. I don’t have the fulfilling career. I had a taste of having it all and I failed to secure it, and its specter continues to haunt me because I have yet to achieve it.

I’m somewhere in downtown Toronto, walking, when I finally experience a fraction of the mental slap to the face I had been hoping to get by forcing myself out of my natural environment. It’s not the whole thing, not the total all-encompassing catharsis that I need, but the feeling rocks my brain, shakes me, demands to know how I’ve become—or, rather, reverted to—this mopey version of me, and all but commands me to return to my confident self. It’s baffled at my inertia, and it wants to know why. Why am I still like this? For all that I know I’ve accomplished, why am I this specific iteration of me and not my exultant, shining self? I’m eating Irish soda bread and a soufflé and lobsters and french fries and Peking duck and poutine and why am I still like this?

I suppose that I need, in so many ways, someone to take a chance on me. Someone to see something within me. Someone to validate that what I’ve done is worth it, who I am is worth it, what I can and will do is worth it. It’s happened before. I need it to happen again.

Someone has to help you. Someone has to birth you, feed you, raise you, clothe you, teach you, hire you, trust you, choose you. There’s no such thing as independence, and it fucking frustrates me because so much of my life is dependent upon the whims of an infinite others, and I can’t break free. I’m fucking stuck. I want so badly to be independent and I just haven’t gotten there. I don’t want to be reliant upon others, I want to give myself the security I so badly need. Macroeconomic and social factors are conspiring against me but I just need a win. One, singular win. I’m good for it, I promise.