Three.

A breakup? Within a breakup? Groundbreaking.

2022 began and ended with me in the arms of another, albeit those of two different men altogether, contrary to what I’d originally planned for the year. Had I known what it would entail, would I have done anything differently?

I’m not so self-aggrandizing as to say no. I’m not unwilling to admit my regrets.

After my big breakup with Henry on my birthday in April, I spent the next few months trying desperately to reconstruct myself. Without being hyperbolic, I was totally shattered. I wasn’t functional. For six days out of seven, I cried. I told everyone and anyone that would listen that I felt like I’d been forcibly separated from my other half, and I cried. Being that I no longer had an appetite, I couldn’t even choke down a singular croissant; I dropped over ten pounds in two weeks, and I cried. I purchased tarot and rune readings from strangers online, and I cried. I cried more times in less than one month than I had ever cried in all the prior years of my life combined. Somewhere in the Financial District, in an apartment with a balcony overlooking a nondescript alleyway, I wasted away.

Time, ever uncaring, marched forward. Life didn’t stop just because I did.

Nancy, one of my best friends since my undergraduate years, flew into New York to take care of me. She slept on my tiny, uncomfortable couch and spent over a week handling life’s basics for me. She refilled my soap dispensers, bought me groceries, dragged me outside, made me interact with our friends, tangping’d with me, convinced me to stop sending him roses and to instead reserve them for myself, and fed me copious amounts of avocado toast. Slowly, stubbornly, at the most pivotal junction of my existence, she breathed vitality back into my being.

She saved my life.

Long after she’d returned home, I still reeled from my separation from Henry, but life gradually became more tolerable—mostly because I had no choice but to survive. As the months rolled by, I wasn’t fully recovered—and, maybe, I never will be—but I began to function on my own once more. I started eating again, I returned to the gym, I made some new friends, and I spent the summer attending my friends’ weddings, including Nancy’s. I went on a couple of dates. I still cried, but I was down from six to one or two days a week, and then it became once every two weeks, and then once per month, and then not at all. Life moved on, and, though I didn’t feel like it at the time, I suppose I did too.

It’s within this context that I met Beau.

I would later learn that we became acquainted around the time of his birthday (I have a train of thought, for another instance, about my dalliances with August Leos, which they both are). Younger than me by only a couple of years and boyishly handsome, he’s the first man I dated in a decade to be taller than I am. An engineer by training from the University of California at Berkeley, he’d moved to New York to push the boundaries of his craft as a drag queen.

In stark contrast to Henry, Beau was spontaneous, relaxed, emotionally astute, forgivingly kind, and creative. (And—tall.) As we grew to know each other, I was suddenly spending all of my time in the Upper East Side, his neighborhood. He worked part-time jobs and enrolled in coding bootcamp; for my part, I landed a new job. We went to shows together, I joked about blowing my bonus on a jaunt to the Maldives, we found leather pants at a thrift shop that I begged him to shorten for me with his sewing capabilities, I convinced him to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so that I could watch his engineering instincts at work.

When I look back on my personal history, it’s easy to say that I’ve had a bad habit of “accidentally” falling into relationships. I suspect, however, that what actually happens is that I get comfortable, I fall into a routine, and I become reluctant to forgo that comfort, not least because I’ve been coming to terms with my demisexuality and my need to establish a connection with others. In more recent years, the baggage of my breakups has resulted in me dating much more slowly: I no longer rush into the honeymoon phase, and I’m loath to bestow the “boyfriend” label upon anyone without prolonged deliberation (read: at least a year of dating). I struggled to give that label to Beau.

Out of habit, we built each other into our schedules, we intertwined our lives, and, with time, I began to open up to him. I told him what happened to me mere months before. He understood my baggage. I didn’t want him to be a rebound, said those words to him, and, when he initiated the what-are-we conversation, I explained that I was willing to try so long as he kept in mind my recent trauma.

We lasted through the end of the year.

I’m a hopeless romantic, so I refuse to chalk it up to unresolvable differences between us two. Disagreements arose—about emotional support, about our libidos—but—and, perhaps he would say differently—I don’t believe them to have been relationship-ending. What happened was that I, despite all my self-awareness, despite all of my caution, got lost in my baggage.

Although I had someone new in my life, someone who I thought communicated with and understood me much better than Henry ever did, I was overly sensitive. I bristled whenever, during our arguments, Beau called me uncaring, unemotional, unsympathetic. For all the awareness I supposedly possessed, I consistently failed to ask him the one simple question—are you venting or feeling goal-oriented about it?—whenever he was under emotional duress, and he took my habit of defaulting to suggesting solutions as cold and unkind. I resented these accusations particularly given my knowledge that I’d only just cleaved myself into pieces for someone (Henry), that I was capable of more love than the universe has stars, that I doted on him (Beau), that I spent all my time with him, that none of this seemed to matter to him because he was immalleable in his assessment of me.

To Beau’s credit, he didn’t want to break up. Multiple times, when I became overwhelmed and when I was ready to throw it all away because I just couldn’t risk being so deeply hurt once more (within the same year, even), he tried to fix us. He came to me, initiated conversations, and tried very hard to keep us together.

I’m ashamed to admit that I let my baggage, my intrusive thoughts, wrest control of me, from me, once again. I stopped fighting for us. I gave up.

I let him go.

About a month afterwards, I found a package at my door. I was slightly confused as I retrieved it, not expecting to receive anything from anyone, but it all made sense when I tumbled its contents onto my kitchen counter: some of my underwear, a shirt or two, leather shorts, and a note from Beau that read, “Sorry for sending this so late. Thank you for everything and I hope you have the best time in the Maldives.”

There was a pang in my chest as I took it in, everything about it, from his trademark scrawled handwriting to the deliberately measured tears at its edges that shaped his card into a postcard-sized rectangle. I read it over and over again in his voice, and the tone I projected for him while reading was pained. I looked over the leather pants-turned-shorts, which he had dutifully trimmed for me as I had badgered him to do weeks ago, and they took on new significance as tangible evidence that he’d truly cared for me. I pulled out my phone and messaged him: “Thanks for sending everything back. Good luck with your coding classes.”

He never replied, but that’s entirely fair.

Reading this, years later, I feel like an asshole. I sound so cold. When I’m upset, my voice through text messages reads as mechanical, unsympathetic, because I make the mistake of intellectualizing my emotions, to try to convey reasonable objectivity, when, in fact, not everything about love is rational—it’s emotional. Being on the receiving end of that, he must have been hurt. I’ve since learned to never argue with a lover or friend through text messages; they don’t express at all the nuances that are necessary for achieving genuine resolutions.

I’m sorry that I hurt him. Despite feeling at the time that I had already spent a couple of months trying to get us onto the same page, I still feel guilty today because I know he must have been hurt by what must have seemed to be an abrupt ending to what we had—I should’ve known better than to do that, especially given what we both knew had happened between Henry and me. I adored him, yet I hurt him because I felt misunderstood, felt as though I had already been patient enough, and the cold dread in my core had frozen the warmth I’d had for him.

I don’t care that he frustrated me at times. I don’t care that, when we argued, I felt worthless, because I also knew deep down that he was trying in his own way to understand me, and I should’ve been more forgiving—all along, I’d said to myself that I felt more mature than he was, yet still I failed to demonstrate that maturity when it mattered. In the moment, I felt like a stereotype, like the archetypical jerk who does unto others what was done unto him, who hasn’t learned from past mistakes, but, like watching a train wreck in slow motion, I couldn’t stop my anger, I couldn’t stop myself. I should’ve extended to him the grace that I had wanted so badly for Henry to extend to me.

Of all the men I’ve ever dated, it’s Beau whose text messages I’ve never fully erased. Were I to psychoanalyze myself, I’d say that post-breakup deletion is my mechanism of both self-defense and self-destruction—I remove from existence the painful reminders of what was, so that I can try to forget what could have been. Of course, all that ultimately accomplishes is the total effacement of the records of all the good times I once shared with that person, and I become forced to rely solely upon faulty memory when later attempting to recollect joy. But, in his case, I’ve preserved them, and I still beat myself up over my own idiocy on full display.

I choose to remember him as his best self: gentle, tender, funny, sweet, creative, talented, loving with his heart on his sleeve. I choose to remember us as our best selves: waking up early to begrudgingly take a Barry’s class together, sneaking onto the roof of a Bushwick warehouse party, kissing in a crowd of inebriated strangers at an SG Lewis gig, laughing uncontrollably on an L train platform after recreating the Wicked advertisement behind us, identifying the garments he sewed for other drag queens as we binge-watched Drag Race, nights wherein my forehead was pressed against his as he whispered, over and over, that he loved me.

I don’t know if it’s too late to patch things up with Beau, and I don’t know if it’s worth trying, because so much time has since elapsed. I don’t know if suddenly reaching out to him now will upset him because I don’t know if he still remembers me. What right do I have to disturb whatever peace he may have already made? I don’t know if I even deserve his forgiveness. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for what I did to him, and perhaps he has already moved on—and, for the most part, I think I have too, yet I’ve come to learn, from Henry, from Beau, from all the men that loved me until they didn’t, that regret is something my emotional self will carry for the rest of my life; a million regrets, a million unspoken apologies—but I’m sorry.