Chasing Fire

(names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty) 

His name was Pedro. He was everything Micheal was not. Suave,exciting, and definitely a little, if not a lot, shady. I loved Micheal but our post graduation breakup had taken him back to his native England and me to Astoria, Queens where I promptly slept with my downstairs neighbor and spent my nights drunk on the N train to and from Manhattan. I met Pedro while he and I were both working in midtown at a sexy asian/mexican fusion restaurant; him being my floor manager, and myself a server. Maybe it was the power dynamic, maybe it was the countless Jameson shots we drank after work, or maybe just being 24, but I soon became powerless over my own but young intuition and convinced myself that he was indeed what I wanted. We started flirting innocently enough, but he must have been able to smell the intrigue and curiosity on me like a dog on a bounty hunt. Night after night of drinking and talking about food, wine, our co-workers, and our very different pasts created a tension that was not only palpable but blinding. 

You can imagine my surprise when Micheal called a few months removed from our break up from across the pond to tell me he had found a loophole in his Visa. One that would allow him to move to NYC for a year. This statement was immediately followed with “that way we can be back together.” My heart sank. I wanted to feel elated, but I felt like this brand new and shiny appearing world had been ripped away from me. This was my new life! My new city! My new “friends” This was the excitement I had been missing from my extremely stable, only one fight ever, continual unconditional love relationship with Micheal I had had. I couldn’t go back to that… could I? Editors note: Most people would immediately say “yes, of course go back to that you fool” but not this fire sign with an affinity for running away from safety, security, and the “known” 

 My relationship with Michael in Boston was one that to this day I relish as the healthiest of my life. He is perhaps, still, the love of my life. Who is now married.  We genuinely adored each other and he wanted to be with me, even after a rocky start that involved a love triangle with someone else…It was messy. But once that dust settled, I had never felt so in love and loved in return. A wonderfully talented and handsome musician, a  product of British manners and good parenting with a genuinely golden heart, Micheal saw me in all my flaws and supported and loved me so unconditionally it felt impossible to believe at times. We were best friends who could sit and watch LOST in our pajamas, eat spaghetti, play guitar together, had our inside jokes, our mutual friends, and a blissful life together. We were together for 18 months before college graduation took us separate ways. I remember the break-up conversation so clearly. Us, at our favorite restaurant, having the most adult, eloquent and respectful conversation one could have surrounding the separation of two people very much in love. I was wildly impressed with us at 24 and 22.  We tearfully yet calmly agreed to go our separate ways and life would either bring us back together or not. Now it seemed like life was bringing him back to NYC so I strapped in and decided I would ride the wave. 

I picked Micheal up from LaGuardia with one of those small signs that Limo drivers hold in a half assed attempt to show him that I still loved him dearly and that I wasn’t totally infatuated with a Peruvian with a bad reputation and a penchant for innocent women. We did fall back into a rhythm and for a while I was reminded of how wonderful WE were together. 

But, after a few weeks, I started feeling antsy and like I wanted out. I felt restricted, shackled to this symbol of my old life, as amazing as he was. It also didn't help that I was working with Pedro almost daily and my scent became all the more intoxicating now that I was officially unavailable. I was half relieved, half terrified of myself and what I would do when Micheal told me that he had to go back to England for six weeks for another inexplicable but real Visa situation. After he got on that flight, I might as well have tied my sneakers on and started running for the fire. A full blown affair blossomed between me and Pedro.  We stayed out late, dirty dancing, him whispering phrases in Spanish in my ear while we made out on the dirty NYC sidewalk, the time difference working in my favor for Micheal to be long asleep when I was engaging in my debauchery.  At first it felt intoxicating, fun, exciting. But that sheen wore off and when Micheal returned a few weeks later,  I was an anxious wreck. I don’t know how people carry on in affairs for years, let alone months, let alone weeks, or days of their life, but I must have lost ten pounds in those two weeks of overlap. What was wrong with me? I had one man who loved me more than himself, wanted nothing but to marry me eventually and adore me, and I couldn’t run away faster. 

After two weeks of actively sneaking around, turning phones face down on tables, and shitting from anxiarrhea every minute, I broke up with Micheal. I recoil in horror at how eager I was to get him out of my apartment so I could call Pedro and tell him the news that we could actually be together. I watched Michael leave, tears streaming down his face as I texted  Pedro “the good news.” I don’t remember him being that excited.  About a week later, Pedro broke up with me. I shouldn’t have been so shocked…this is what karma is right? I knew deep down in my gut that he was not good for me, but I decided to fill my gut with booze and sex to convince myself it was right and ended up on my own for the first real time in years. 

Ten years later…. 

Landon and I are eating Chinese in what he so affectionately calls “house pants” sweats that once are on, signal we are in for the night. And I’m fine with that.  We’ve been watching “The Presidential Series” of movies lately, “Air Force One” “The American President” and so on for a few nights, having deep, funny discussions and couch therapy. This is what we do. You’d think it was enough. 

I had been trying to fall in love with my former best friend, then lover, Landon, for about a year now. After getting my heart shattered by the guy I thought I was going to marry, Landon, the guy whose shoulder I always cried on, decided timing be damned, he was going to throw his hat in the proverbial ring and confess his feelings for me. I had never looked at him, * that way* but I knew I loved being around him, and that I was perhaps the most vulnerable I had been in recent history, so we just kind of… started? I remember our first kiss. Sara Bareilles was playing, it was all very rom-com. I hate rom-coms. At first I convinced myself that I was ok. That I could magically get over the previous ex and  ride off into the sunset with my best friend. I would not run away from what I had known in the past to feel like “ safe love” I was going to be IN this damnit. How could I not want to be with my best friend? It worked for Monica and Chandler right?  However, after almost a year of sobbing jags over the ex TO Landon, and reluctance to be known as his girlfriend around others, I should have cut and run. Done the right thing. But I told myself eventually, I would fall in love and everything would just work itself out. I wouldn't run away from this sort of love again like I had in the past. 

Landon wanted to put a ring on my finger. Not proverbially, but actually. He was 38, he had been single for the better part of a decade and I was his dream woman. We immediately eased into a comfort, a knowing, a feel like we had been together for years. I kept looking within us for the best part of any relationship, the beginning, but I felt like I got robbed of that part. The best part.  We jumped right into what basically felt like marriage. I was at his all the time. He was at mine all the time. We were inseparable, but not in an obnoxious “can’t be apart , madly in love way”  more in a “you’re my best friend and the only person I can be around for this long without wanting to jump in front of a moving something way”. There was a road with two paths in front of me, one leading to a life with him, one leading into the dating abyss that is Los Angeles.  The road with him felt like I could be about 60% happy, with the remaining 40% wondering what was beyond him… The desire to being single again, moving on from my ex with the same aplomb and routine that proved to eventually work in my past; sleeping with randos, drinking too much, ugly crying in the bathtub, doing whatever the FUCK I wanted to do. The other path, an unknown, risking perhaps never feeling this sort of  love again. 

Enter… Travis. Travis was an affable,  tall, floppy haired, guitarist in the ‘90s band I sang in. I have historically always had a weakness for a boy with a guitar. Walking, talking, John Mayer playing sticks of kryptonite that I decide to keep in my bed. Smart. Travis and I met carpooling to a gig in San Diego. I don’t think we stopped talking the entirety of the trip. I was in love with my ex before Landon at the time so I didn’t think twice about him much until a while later during the time where I was still desperately trying to fit my square heart into Landon’s round one. I saw Travis at a rehearsal and we got a drink afterward, him regaling me with stories of his 25 year old situationship/ girlfriend and how he was bored with her, and the only thing he liked about her was her love for The Eagles (the band, not the NFL team) and me dancing around the Landon situation with the expertise of Barishnykov. Somehow portraying that I wasn’t a total shithead and that I loved this person but I wasn’t IN it. Because as I feared,  I was getting more and more into him.  I knew I was careening towards dangerous and familiar territory that I had avoided for the last decade but here I was again, feeling that tension from the spark. The energy circuiting in my body, making me want to flee again.  

Over the next few weeks, we would find reasons and excuses to hang out. I was still with Landon but Travis and I were only growing more and more electric the longer that we hung out. I was once again at a place where I was turning my phone face down and staying out late with someone who wasn’t my lover. He would make jabs about Landon to me, ways of puncturing holes in what he already knew was too porous a shell. It was a game to him, he later admitted. Interested in what he thought he couldn’t have. The thing that I knew all along he would eventually get. 

He kissed me one night in my kitchen. It was a sloppy kiss. My mouth filled with chips, both of us drunk. I knew right then I had to break up with Landon. At least a decade later, I wasn’t going to let an actual affair continue. Been there, done that and while this had been an emotional affair until this point, I couldn’t possibly relive that anxious hellscape once something BAD actually happened. In my head, the line hadn’t been yet crossed but with that kiss, I had just lightly jumped over and it was no longer ok .  I had made bargains with my morality up until that point. “If I don’t text him back it’s ok.” or, “ he left at 3 am instead of 4, so that’s ok “ I texted my best friend about what happened, took screenshots of the exchange and deleted the messages, just like an addict hiding the evidence.

 Two days later, I was with Landon watching the Oscars when he looked over at me and said “ Do you have something you want to tell me?” I felt punched in the gut. How the fuck did he know? I foolishly pseudo lied and said something ridiculous along the lines of “ we didn’t make out, it was one kiss” like the semantics and details would somehow get me out of this. It was not good. I was in such shock that he had gone through my phone as he later admitted that I couldn’t even allow myself to be angry at the invasion of privacy. That I still deserved even as the guilty one. Both of us filled with shame, shock and anger, we broke up. This time, I left his apartment with tears in my eyes and no real elation because at the end of the day, Travis never actually said he wanted to be with me. I called Travis and told him what had happened and his reaction was slightly apologetic with a detected  hint of “ oh shit, I didn’t mean to do that. Do I owe her something now?” I had once again blown up the thing I knew was safe, secure, unconditional in exchange for the unknown thrill of something that never quite satisfies. Travis and I continued for two years in an excruciating cyclical situationship that always ended it’s “round” with me asking for more and being told he didn’t want to or couldn’t give that to me. I’m still not fully over him. Landon and I are back to friends but not without  the better half of a year of many angry conversations, emails on Christmas Eve telling me how shitty I was, tears shed and questions asked. 

When I ask myself why I ran from these loves, I never have a good answer. You could essentially blame it on my youth, but that excuse wears itself thin in your late thirties. I suppose I don’t really know where it comes from. Studies will claim attachment style is childhood based.That the relationship between you and your caretaker during the formative first few years of your life somehow determine whether or not you fall for fuck bois in your twenties and  thirties but yet, here we are. I have discussed my tendencies at length with therapists and friends about why I seem to run away from the stable, sometimes boring, safe and unconditional love and instead run towards the unavailable, damaging, never quite actually love me types. All I know is that here I am at 38 years old wanting the former more than ever and feeling more and more hopeless with each late night swipe session, each boring first date, each lap I take year by year, swimming into a shallower dating pool, eventually banging my head against the ground and running out of options. I suppose one gets tired of running all the time. It’s fun when you're young, you’re being chased, you’re racing something, or trying to get from point A to point B and fast, but now, my feet and my heart are tired.