Twenty-four.

Or, the men who loved me until they didn't.

In my head, the subtitle to A YEAR WITHOUT WATER is “or, the men who loved me until they didn’t.” Although my reflections are structured around the narrative of one specific breakup, the broader purpose has always been to discuss how and why I loved the men in my life and vice versa.

My introspection on the topic began when I parted from my first actual boyfriend, but it’s a natural result of a youth spent reading and losing myself in my own inner world. I was a dreamy and idealistic kid whose imagination was stoked by book series including Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House, Gertrude C. Warner’s The Boxcar Children, and, of course, K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs. Reading taught me to imagine not just how things were but also how they could or should be, and it instilled within me the curiosity to want to know why. As I parsed my loss of who I'd considered to be the one man that got away, I thought about my third boyfriend and the baggage I carried with me as a consequence of that relationship.

In my mid-twenties, I dated a guy named Jun and wound up giving him more years than I have to anyone else to date. We had some good times, but it was a mistake I knew I was making as I made it, and I didn’t extricate myself from that situation because I was complacently comfortable. It was too easy to be able to rely on having him around, too easy to have a fairly agreeable partner for whatever I wanted to do.

I liked him, but I knew I was dragging out our relationship just to postpone the inevitable because the inevitable would be unsavory. So, one year became three, and suddenly we were living together to save on rent. It was a month before the coronavirus pandemic hit New York when he broached the subject of breaking up. It was another six before we were able to cancel our shared lease.

It wasn’t fair to him, either. I know he felt belittled or inadequate because his conversational input was limited to whatever memes and excerpts he’d read on social media about anything we’d discuss, save for music by Mariah Carey or K-pop artists. He once asked me whether I thought he was an intellectual, to which I easily answered no because, in all my years with him, I never observed him reading or learning about current events, civics, anything at all, not even the pop culture he so assiduously consumed. In a huff, his response was to create a dedicated Twitter account to subscribe to various news outlets. I told him that I didn’t expect him to become an expert on anything overnight, that I’d known before dating him that he just wasn’t the kind of learned person the word “intellectual” entails, that I had chosen to date him not for his intelligence but for his kindness. I know that that, too, must have felt like infantilization to him.

He never did log back in to that Twitter account, but I didn’t mean to patronize him. I was just frustrated that I could never have with him the same sort of discussions I have with all of my friends, about anything and nothing, and that he was only ever sycophantic in his back-and-forth with me. For his part, he thought I was uncompromising, uncaring, unaffectionate.

Honestly, he was kind of right. I resented feeling like the older, wiser partner. But, I only felt that way because I was arrogant and because I couldn't resolve the dissonance I was experiencing, that I wasn't brave enough to end our dead-end relationship. He wanted to be treated as an equal; I never saw him as one. It wasn't his fault that there was a two-year age gap between us. It was my fault for wielding that fact for my own self-aggrandizement.

I know he was probably thinking the same thoughts about our long-term prospects because, eventually, he was the one to initiate our separation. I didn't love that conversation, but I remember feeling impressed by his bravery in beginning the decoupling. He was finally standing up for himself, and he had every right to do so.

Jun wasn’t unintelligent. He was the type to lose himself in the Wikipedias of his interests, which I don’t deride when I specify that they were by and large limited to anime, manga, and K-pop. (I said earlier that I never saw him learning; I am, of course, an unreliable narrator.) He was fiercely loyal with a tender heart, qualities that supersede smarts. Obviously, our three years together weren't all that bad, but our interests just weren’t wholly compatible. He was a sweet and devoted partner, and I still had a hard time adjusting to his absence after we split.

I was twenty-four when we first started dating; I was twenty-seven when we stopped. After I had blocked his phone number so as to make permanent our disassociation, iMessage would glitch every now and then, and some of his messages actually slipped through the cracks. Even six months later, he sent me songs that he thought I'd enjoy. Alone in my studio apartment, arduously procured in the immediate aftermath of our pandemic breakup, I clicked the YouTube link he'd sent me and listened. He was right.

As I began dating my fourth boyfriend the year after Jun exited my life, I was determined not to make the same mistake of getting trapped in the wrong relationship. But, I over-corrected: I took too long to wholly commit to this new man who'd been all in from the start, and I left him feeling, frankly, unloved. My most prominent emotional baggage was a giant piece of luggage that screamed hesitancy, and I vacillated. I made not the same mistake that I'd made with Jun, but its polar opposite, and the end result was the same—yet another breakup.

Years later, I heard through the grapevine that Jun had found a new boyfriend who, perhaps ironically, shared my first name. I confess that the irony made me laugh, but it wasn't out of malice. I just thought he'd probably already made that connection himself and disliked it.

I went into my phone and social media settings to unblock him, even though he doesn't have my new phone number and likely doesn't think to check my online profiles, because he didn't deserve it. If he sees this, I don't mind him knowing that I'm sorry for how I treated him. All things considered, he was one of the good ones.