Wayne, my ex-boyfriend, has moved back to my city a decade after our split. We've kept in touch sporadically over the intervening years; when he first mentioned his possible return a year or two ago, I gave him an open invitation to catch up in person over drinks, a meal, anything, out of respect for what we had. I've yet to hear back from him.
Of all my exes, he was the one I still talked to the most and one of the two I actually held in high esteem: if Alberto was my most consequential boyfriend, Wayne was the second.
When I graduated from college, I didn’t immediately have a job lined up. I had spent the prior year working at Sony Music in the hopes of securing full-time employment there, but when push came to shove I couldn’t do it. The job offers I fielded came with salaries below $32,000, which was hardly enough to cover rent and living expenses in New York even if I had multiple roommates. It wasn’t an impossible number, but it would be difficult, and frankly I thought that I could do better.
I had devoted the earlier few years to working all over the music industry. It was an interest I had hoped would turn into my material reality. I was drawn to the pop machine, and it was bittersweet to have come so close only to have to leave with naught, save for the illustrious names on my resume (Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, John Legend) for whom I had managed global marketing campaigns. I had wanted to work in music because it was my foremost passion, but I couldn’t afford to do so.
That summer was difficult. I graduated with great dismay at the job hunting process—I thought there would be more to it than just Googling certain companies and perusing their seemingly unending lists of open requisitions. Honestly, I didn’t even know that many companies. It’s a tangent for another time, but suffice it to say that I needed help and I didn’t try very hard to find it out of misplaced pride.
I spent three months applying to everything I saw, hearing back from almost nobody. It felt like half of my friends had left the city after graduating and the remaining half already had jobs. I was falling behind. Every day, I fought off nervous ennui. I was restless in my tiny, sweltering studio apartment. I wanted to get away from my laptop, but I felt beholden to it because I felt like I needed to be applying to jobs every waking minute. Anything otherwise would be time wasted.
To keep myself busy, I took up cooking. I watched a lot of Food Network shows and mimicked their recipes. I made biscuits and gravy in honor of Peels, the restaurant on Bowery I’d loved, and upset my stomach because I didn’t bake my biscuits all the way through. I made banana cream pies, lamenting that none of my creations came close to the inimitable desserts from Petee’s. At night, I listened to the drunken revelry of my neighborhood bars from Fat Baby to Pianos to Arlene's Grocery; the city was alive, even if I was struggling. It was a small comfort.
I interviewed for paralegal and marketing jobs. I perfected my sausage gravy recipe. The paper-thin walls of my apartment did little to muddle the many sounds of my gay neighbor next door in the throes of his hookups; when he moved out, I pilfered the air conditioning unit he'd left behind so that I could cool down the heat. I agonized for weeks on end. I would’ve taken any job just to be able to afford paying my rent.
Finally, an offer came in and I ended up working for a small startup next to Bryant Park. I became a legitimate adult. I was assigned a salary of up to $42,000, and I was making it in New York. With my professional life somewhat handled, I felt ready to date. So, I downloaded Tinder.
I don't really remember swiping right on Wayne. When the app notified me that we'd matched, I rifled through his profile pictures and vaguely recollected having looked at them before making a snap decision to swipe right. I thought he was cute and I was willing to meet him. I was surprised that he felt the same way about me, too.
There's a Whole Foods on Bowery and Houston that I still point out nowadays to the current love of my life whenever we walk by, who chastises me [for calling him that and] when I do it because I have a bad memory; I forget each time that I've already explained to him the store's significance. Ten years ago, for our first date, Wayne met me there to shop for groceries together and bring them back to my apartment on Orchard, where he would show me how to cook a Filipino meal of sinigang and rice.
Wayne was just two years younger than me. He was a student at the Parsons School of Design, studying art and design and everything that aspiring creatives do at a college like that. For where my life was, Wayne was a breath of fresh air.
At the time, I wasn't depressed, but I think I was feeling disillusioned. I didn't really know what to do with myself after graduating college. I had my corporate job, but was that it? Would I simply spend my days at a desk until I died? Was that adulthood? I kept telling myself that I was going to find my way back into the entertainment industry, where I could actually enjoy the work I would do, but that was in some faraway future and I still had the present to consider.
Wayne, of course, busied himself in his own little world. He was in a constant state of creation: he was always sketching or tinkering away, making art out of his drawings and stop-motion films with clay figurines, as if his well of creativity would overflow should he stop. Even the way he talked was inventive; the spirited diction of the pidgin to which he habitually reverted when conversing in private was animated, not primitive. To this day, the vestiges of the language with which we intimately spoke to one another continue to resurface in how I converse with every boyfriend that has succeeded him.
He was born in Hawaii to Filipino parents, who'd lived in Hawaii for so long that they once worked for the infamous Dole Plantation. If “Asian American” is a label that broadly (and somewhat erroneously) applies to all people of Asian ancestry in the territorial United States, then Wayne was my first Asian American boyfriend. I'd had brief dalliances with such men before him, but he was the first one that I seriously dated.
Wayne changed the way I saw the world. Alberto had done that too three years prior by forcing me to confront my ego and become a gentler spirit, but Wayne taught me to literally see things differently. With respect to art, he instructed me to pay attention to the brushstrokes of paintings and to imagine mixing the paints myself in creating the colors on display, exercising my brain in re-imagining intent. In effect, he re-conceptualized empathy for me.
I still remember the smell of the tomatoes simmering away in the sinigang broth. I can revisit in my head that fateful winter night when we were cuddled up in an armchair in someone else's apartment, in the midst of their house party, both of us just a little bit tipsy and me asking him if he would be my boyfriend and him fervently nodding yes in response. I haven't forgotten the way he sang in the shower every morning, introducing me to the best Whitney Houston runs and Mariah Carey ad libs, and how I called him my songbird. I've kept in mind all along the instructions his doctors gave me for preparing our meals according to his prescribed diet, because they held me as his partner responsible for his health. For that fleeting year when we all but lived together, him and me and Yin too, I was happy. We had our own little family in a tiny apartment by Tompkins Square Park.
I cried when we broke up. I held him in my arms and I sobbed. I'd cried for Alberto, too, but that was a prescribed breakup, one that we both knew was coming because he was off to a new adventure in graduate school. Breaking up with Wayne was different because one of us was unintentionally and forcibly leaving New York. Dating him had symbolized my moving on from my triumvirate of NYU men—Alberto, John, and Stephen—because I'd loved all three in distinct ways yet the chapter of my life in which they had so heavily featured had closed, but separating from him felt like I was foisting upon him a cyclical trauma: Alberto had left me to be alone for my senior year in college, and here I was doing the same to Wayne.
A decade later, as I was shattered by the Henry breakup, I relied on Wayne. He was living in Hawaii but still made time to sit on the phone with me as I processed Henry's departure. Wayne thought that Henry had overreacted and left my life too hastily, but I thought that Wayne was perhaps more forgiving than Henry was. Both men had had the experience of dating me, but only one understood that relationships are imperfect. As we talked, I asked him if he thought we would have eventually broken up too had neither of us been forced to leave New York all those years ago; without hesitation, he said no.
If ever he reads this, I hope that he remembers to check his DMs. We've got a lot to catch up about, and there's a lot of overdue reminiscing. I think he's seeing someone else now, too, but that doesn't bother me. He deserves to be happy.
To the loves that change us for the better.