Playground Love — A Short Essay on Young Relationships & Breaking Up Badly
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My first real girlfriend broke up with me via email.
The subject line read, “Sorry, I can’t do this anymore…Loser.”
Or something like that.
And maybe my memory’s a bit harsh as to the exact title of that email due to years spent mentally tidying up that trashy semester, but I guess that’s just the way I remember important things communicated through the internet. And even though email was still a fine and novel form of communication 10 years ago, her content chipped my soul like a climber chipping fragmented shale from a misplaced hand-hold, falling, thinking in a moment of insanely clear clarity, “Things always look better from an arms length away.” But then the rope snaps to attention and cinches the harness around his waste like a dogs collar cinching its neck as he’s choked back to reality by what ties him and his bruised trachea to the earth. “Next time,” the dog thinks, “I’ll get her next time.”
I say first real girlfriend because there’s a difference between the girl you ponder life-altering decisions with and the girl, Sally what’s-her-name for example, whose hand you held while uncomfortably squeezing down the tube-slide during first grade recess.
The pain associated with being dumped is always something extravagantly uncomfortable, right? Even little Sally what’s-her-name had untidy burn marks on the back of her stumpy, little legs from going down that tube-slide with so many different boys. Talk about painful. Friction burned holes right through her heart-patterned, raspberry-pink tights and singed the remaining baby fat from the back of her purple knees. She never seemed to mind, though. She’d slide with any decent looking, no-glasses-wearing, elementary-school-jock-in-the-making as long as it prompted envy in the other girls’ eyes. She loved elementary school, loved that slide. She may still be on that slide today. I can picture her, the 39-year-old version of little Sally what’s-her-name, red lips pouted, blond hair seared, waiting anxiously at the top of that slide to squeeze on, ride, feel the wind on her face and put a few runs in her stretched out, cellulose filled, raspberry-pink tights.
And when a girl chips your heart, the subsequent pain originates somewhere outside of reality. Like running through a dream world and all of a sudden you’re falling and then there’s ground. But you don’t wake up before impact like you’re supposed to, yet you don’t die in your bed either. You just lie there, somewhere between reality and dream, splattered all over the floor of that ravine, slowly trying to find the pieces and glue yourself back together.
Because we all know what it’s like to fall. We’ve been doing it since we were kids on the playground, stumbling to be the first in line to ride with little Sally what’s-her-name with the raspberry-pink tights. No one called us failures for falling back then. They called us clumsy; going through a temporary stage to be grown out of with age. Clumsy kids. So cute.
But when that first real girlfriend sent me that email containing all sorts of flowery words and run-on sentences about how much she was going to miss me but that she needed to be with someone who was closer, well, that felt like a serious lack of coordination. Like my heart turned clumsy, and I was the dork with glasses and mom-made buzz cut. My heart, excavated and dry, tossed down that tube-slide, screeching and burning the entire way down like little Sally what’s-her-name, landing aorta down, embedded with gray pea gravel and black silt. Then fat Harry, the kid who never rode the slide with anyone in first grade but now owns a corn syrup processing plant in northern Indiana and a neon green Porsche, came sliding down behind my heart and landed ass first on top of it. My metal-burnt, torn-out cardiac musculature, sat on by squirming, fat Harry until he finally stood and ran off with half my ventricles wedged between his two, pudgy cheeks.
Damn childhood obesity.
I associated failure with women for years after that first breakup, and the hard lesson to learn was that women don’t embody my failures, and that I’m really just like everyone else who’s ever shot for love and ended up shooting himself in the head instead.
So there I was, a freshman in college, unabashedly burnt out with a big, bloody, self-imposed hole through my skull. A hole just big enough to have read her email on the computer screen behind me and catch a glimpse of fat Harry driving away in a flash of green, my heart valves peeled from his brown, saggy khakis, caught in his German-engineered door as he sped away.
Here’s to growing up.
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{photo courtesy of Alex R.}
