Supersucker.

I lightly touched on the point that a high school connection didn’t have a clue that Vinny and I were ever involved. I’m not sure that I mentioned her close connection to Vinny. They were friends in high school. Close friends really. So when I read her text message whereas she disclaimed knowledge that there was ever an ‘us’, I painted her tone with incredulity and shock. Less ‘oh cool’ and more ‘are you shitting me?’ 

I got it too. I get it now. You think you know someone and then you learn something that feels incongruous to the information you already possess and it turns you on your head. You try to line everything up but your efforts may be fruitless. There’s no making sense of the outliers. There is only acceptance and justification. 

This woman took what she knew of Vinny and took what she knew of me and tried to line those two notions up and it was a no-go. We weren’t terribly close in high school but we knew of each other. I wasn’t necessarily front and center, but I also wasn’t someone who hid in a corner. I was social and participated in extracurricular activities. I was shy but comfortable enough in my own skin. A good number of people likely had some general sense of me. Not granular details per se, but a hint of things. A notion. Vinny? He was PRESENT. And where he and this woman were concerned, she knew his relationships. His girlfriends and crushes and obsessions. She had a fairly solid notion of his romantic life and thus, this new information didn’t make a ton of sense. Surely her general sense of me in the world married with a more intimate sense of Vinny would produce an understanding me and Vinny, no? 

I feel like I’m getting too far into the weeds with this aspect of our chat. You get the point. He didn’t talk about me and I allowed myself to be a secret. The end. 

But why and how did it happen? Did we sit down and come to some sort of agreement on what our public presence would look like? Nah. That shit occurred down the road in my life, but so far as Vinny was concerned, it was a more organic trip to ignoring-ville. 

I would like to set the tone and have you understand that this romantic-ish clusterfuck was pre-cell phones. We would pass a note (oh yes, a written note on loose leaf) or exchange a word or two in the hallway (quick and quiet) to agree on a plan and then, we would execute on that plan. And then after that plan, he would pass me by like we hadn’t written a note or made a plan.

I remember the feeling of the torn sheaf of lined paper under my fingertips. Smooth and well worn. I remember the feeling of holding my breath until I could lay eyes on the entirety of any given message. I remember passing by him in the hallway, with barely an acknowledgment, and then pressing my thumb and forefinger into the folded paper in my pocket, fingers bleached of color save splotches of red that emerged from the effort.

I’m not sure if I felt embarrassed. I definitely didn’t feel angry. I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t pissed. I was confused and definitely hurt and without question sad. I wasn’t enraged. I didn’t feel self-righteous, like I ought to stamp my feet and demand more, demand better. 

What I learned over the years (and I’d like to be clear that this isn’t just a romantic relationship/man thing, it’s a people thing) is that people don’t necessarily change their behavior in that regard. He wasn’t disregarding me as some immature antic. I mean sure, we were young and unknowing, but still, that bit didn’t change so much. What I found, and please forgive the generalization, is that people who were apt to do that to others, recognized at some point in life that they had to verbally articulate their intention to be a shithead. Unspoken ignoring leads to impossible-to-win fights. Clearly expressed emotions (i.e. so sorry but I’m just not feeling something more serious…) sets the stage for the whole ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ business or pave the way to a good ol’ ‘I told you what I wanted…’ disclaimer. 

Here’s the problem, and yes, I recognize that I am taking the long way to get there. Sorry. My brain is not fully functional today. Once you’ve accepted the silent delivery of shit behavior, the verbal affirmation changes nothing. Why? Well, I mean, you know the answer to that don’t you?

You have already gotten comfortable with the notion that you can be someone’s secret. You’ve already accepted that someone else’s needs come before yours. You’ve already jumped into the strange realm of navigating in a world that makes someone else comfortable and while making you feel pretty squirmy. Once you scale that wall and jump over to the other side, getting back seems precarious and damn near impossible. It IS possible, but it doesn’t feel that way. Like where the fuck is the rope that I used to scale that giant wall? How am I supposed to do this?

Why did I get there to begin with? That’s easy. It was a simple calculation in my head. He was asking for something he wanted. If I didn’t give him that thing, he would walk away. Then I would be without him. Therefore, I must get to a place of okay with that thing he is asking me to do or the person he is asking me to be. You see, don’t you? All this shit. All of these bad decisions, early in life and late in life, they all boil down to that bellyache inducing fear of loss. I couldn’t even contemplate the notion of surviving the loss because it felt too scary. At no time did I say ‘well, fuck you sir…if that’s what you want and I lose you because I refuse to give it to you, it’s clearly not meant to be’. Oh and also, ‘no loss there’.

Some of this might feel redundant to you and I apologize. It is. That’s the problem. That’s the truth of it. That’s what I am trying to tell you, in vain. These things, these bad decisions, they become habits. They become ingrained behaviors. There is no story that starts with ‘one time I….’ It’s every fucking time. Every time I turned on myself. Every time I betrayed myself. Every time I chose what felt safer over the fear of the unknown. Every fucking time. 

I was a baby. I was 15 years old. I had braces on my teeth shortly before that time and I still slept with stuffed animals and I was picky as shit about food. I knew nothing about the world and love. I knew something about the fear of loss though, and so, in the face of that niggling feeling in my belly, I moved forward. I moved in. I chose compromising compromise. I chose Vinny, over and over again. And then I chose other Vinnys. I chose Vinnys who looked different and smelled different and came from different homes and all said the same shit. But yeah, it wasn’t them. It was absolutely me. I wasn’t willing to step forward into the perceived void of solitariness. I wasn’t scared of the ‘what if’, the possible regrets, the implications.

And so, I chose resignation. I painted it on my chest, a permanent emblem. Supersucker.

I just recently began to peel that suit off. 

Just recently. So yeah, don’t lose hope. You aren’t too old. It isn’t too late. I want to talk more about the spiral, but we have to talk about what happened between Vinny and Mike. That space is critical. 

Talk tomorrow. 
x

L.