I got the fuck out of “Dodge” back in 2000 and moved to San Francisco lured by the dot-com bubble that was, in actuality, already popping. I’d been offered twice as much money as I was currently making and a position in a three-person shop working for someone I really respected. K__ and I weren’t seeing each other any more, I’d been looking for just such an opportunity, and two weeks later I was on one plane and all my worldly possessions were on another.
K__ put me up my last night in town. We fucked during a lightning storm. If my life flashed before my eyes, that image would be right at the top. It was magic and I don’t believe in magic. She cried. The next morning she drove me to the airport and cried again at the gate. I didn’t turn around. I knew it made me an asshole, but I was leaving, and whoever leaves is already the asshole.
After the initial craziness of moving, I found an apartment and started to settle in. I did what I find myself doing now — going out a lot, talking to strangers, going on the occasional date. I remember being seriously annoyed that I could not help comparing all my dates to her. She’d been the high-water mark, and I’d walked away. It was the kind of fucked-up, one-true-love thinking that led me to propose.
I’m not so much having the exact same problem now, it’s something far worse — I’ve spent the last decade with this one person, and almost everything that I identify with my adult life is tied to her somehow. Food, books, movies, art. Entire fields of study I wouldn’t otherwise know anything about. Many of the things we didn’t share, that I’d otherwise consider trying now, were things she enjoyed.
Tonight I traded messages with several new strangers. I don’t compare them to her, but I do sometimes find myself wondering how long it will be before my honest answer to their latest comment is, “K__ and I read / watched / listened to / ate that for the first time together.” My memories of so many wonderful things are wrapped up in memories of her. There were not-so-wonderful things too, but those are easy to leave behind, to adjust the pack on my shoulder and resist the terrible urge to turn around and take one last look.