“Oh, hi Brad,” he said. “This is Chris. Do you remember me?”
Yes. I remember you breaking my heart. I remember you ghosting me after I laughed at a romantic comedy that grossed more than $350 million worldwide and got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
“Yeah,” I said breezily. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering how you’ve been,” he said.
Chris clearly hadn’t worked through his script, so I decided to help. “I’ve been good,” I said. “Are you looking to hang out again?”
A week later, almost three years after we first met, we had dinner at an Alphabet City restaurant featuring board games and a dozen variations on mac and cheese. Chris remained deeply religious but had left the seminary. I had graduated law school and started my legal career. Our banter was easy, the mutual attraction familiar.
We didn’t talk about our previous dating or his sudden phone call. I didn’t learn then that Chris’s conflicted feelings about his future had sent him on a search for reasons to dismiss me. I didn’t know that a friend who had tired of hearing Chris’s regret about our breakup demanded Chris’s phone, found my contact and pressed the call button. That evening, under the table, Chris placed his hand on my knee, and we resumed spending a couple of nights a week together.
A year later, Chris moved in with me. But I still worried he would desert me, so I started snooping on him. If he left his computer’s web browser open, I would search his history, expecting to discover a secret life. But all I found were classical music reviews and Equinox’s operating hours.
I’m ashamed to say I would also occasionally glance at his journal, where I found entries detailing sweet moments we shared, his love for his parents and passages of scripture that resonated with him. Yet I could still seize on anything as proof that we weren’t meant to be. Like when he wanted to go to sleep rather than talk things through after a fight, which would send me spiraling into self-doubt. Or if I wanted to have sex and Chris wasn’t in the mood, I’d treat it as a rejection of us as a couple. Breaking up was all I knew.
