Love Is a Turning Tide

His family had Jesus hung above the fireplace. At night, the upstairs light would unintentionally shine just right, casting its glow only onto Him downstairs. I don’t know why, but this was one of the first things I noticed the first night I slept over at his house. It always made it feel like there were never two but three people at 11:00 PM when we would fetch a late snack in the kitchen. With being only 16 minutes apart from each other, I often and only slept over at his house since my father wouldn’t allow him to sleep at mine. Our nights were mundane. We’d have dinner to eat, a period when he’d play video games while I read on his bed, and a TV show to watch that I’d fall asleep amid. It felt like we were already a married couple. Relationships will become mundane, but ours blurred—two lives once divided, slowly washed together by the same tide.

We met in sophomore year of college through a club we were both part of, but I didn’t even know he was in it until months later, when I started noticing him. I thought he was, of course, cute with his luscious hair, but I really fell for his humor that he shared with his friends. Like almost everything in life, somehow, he started noticing me the same time. Or perhaps it’s because I am bad at hiding my stares, that I may as well just be hovering over people.

Before we became a thing, we would study in group sessions with other club members late throughout the night, grab food afterward, but it was really the walk together we both had to take alone after splitting off with everyone (our dorms were in the same area: Southwest) that progressed us, quickly, into dating. When he carried my purse slung over his shoulder on our “date” in Northampton, which merged into a group hangout, was what tied it for me. I thought, for a moment, the purse might’ve looked better on him than me.

He was my first relationship where I didn’t have anything terribly go wrong. He was loyal, kind, patient, and didn’t use his car as a tool to scare me. We had our little knots throughout our first year, as normal, but overall, I’d say it was a good year spent together. It wasn’t until our second Christmas together that I started to feel my life was changing—in a way that I wasn’t actively participating in. I felt we were falling into a rhythm we were becoming defaulted in. It left me with the feeling that something was missing. Evenings were spent side by side, not really together. It consisted of playing video games or scrolling through YouTube, while I’d catch up on my own reading, journaling, or just let my mind wander. It felt there wasn’t a shared curiosity about the world. I often felt like I was living two lives: one that was private, inward, and progressing, and one that paused when we were together.

I am somebody who doesn’t like to let dirty dishes fill up the sink. They either go in the dishwasher or get washed immediately there on the spot, then put back where it belongs. There’s a different version of me that exists in every context of life I live in, with some overlapping characteristics across all. In a relationship, I’ve discovered I am a now-not-later person when it comes to disagreements or arguments. This, to me, would be the very thing I realize won’t change in me. And my seeking for change would drag out that eventually I couldn’t wait any longer now for a potential later.

To pinpoint what exact change I wanted to happen was difficult. Instead, I’d express my desires by wishing it were possible I could just pause life—wondering what would happen if I could dig myself in a hole and sleep until I reached the good part in life that I had no idea what was. I would die, I started to text to one of my friends. Yearning for a nonidentifying matter is how I spent our last eight months before the breakup. It was something invisible that was putting us—me—not in equilibrium. This invisible thing was something I couldn’t accept to settle for. I wanted different. I wanted something to happen. I wanted to know peace, I completed my sentence with, then hit send.

Change is always pressuring us toward something, even if we don’t know what it is yet. Change is something you can create or let happen to you—either way, it’s a must to keep up with it before you’re suddenly getting dragged through Earth’s soil from the roots of your hair. In the process of change can come a revolution, a return to yourself—only sharper, reshaped, and more certain.

In between the few days when we didn’t see each other, there was something about going back to our routine that hovered sadness over me. Knowing that there was a returning made my own life feel disrupted. Spending my time alone—whether that was in the kitchen, in my room, or just roller skating on my driveway—felt like that was the time I was moving forward in a way I wanted to. But returning felt like being pulled backward—back into a confined space where everything was predictable and settled hard into concrete. Slowly, the days I’d spend by myself felt more liberating than when we were together, and it was then I started to wonder what the things were out there I could be doing if I spent every day with myself, knowing there was no obligation to return.

But this is a question we are all faced with, especially in marriage, when we decide to choose somebody. Always, that means sacrificing some things we could or would be doing alone—all for the name of love. And the hard truth: It’s not worth it sometimes.

I knew my life, as well as his, had to start becoming more serious as we were approaching graduation. Finding jobs, me taking the LSAT, applying to grad schools or law schools, and having to mature our own lives was something I knew our stagnant relationship wouldn’t allow. What I needed was to catch up with the inevitable changes around me. But beyond having to catch and grow up, I was mourning the loss of a huge chunk of my skating community. Within December and January, I lost three people who were very involved in my skating career, and a generation of skaters who were coming home from a developmental skating camp in Wichita. I thought about them every day—nearly every minute. What it must’ve been like to die: how cold the river was, how quickly and suddenly their lives were taken, all before they could even realize they were dying. Their deaths felt distant, yet personal—because I had once been in their shoes, flying home after those very same camps. The many bits of an old and uncomfortable identity of being a figure skater was being re-dug and exposed in the darkness of their deaths.

Knowing how to care for a person comes as an easy thought—until it is you who needs to be taken care of in the way that you need. This is when your relationship is put to the true test of whether it is time to leave.

On a cold Thursday, at night and random, was when I ended it. But earlier that day, If I’m being honest, I had no idea I was going to do that. It had been a normal day of classes and living our routine. But when it became dark out, whatever was invisible finally spoke to me while I was doing laundry. You can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this anymore is what it sounded like––at first sounding like it was down a hallway until it was right at my door, then at my ear, and then eventually myself saying, I can’t do this anymore.

What came as a surprise to me was that I didn’t feel anything when I broke up with him. Just relief. Like I could finally rest my head and breathe. This is not to say I held no love in our relationship. If anything, I held so much that I kept trying to force wrong answers into the blanks of a question I wasn’t earlier ready to answer honestly.

But sometimes sorrow comes to me as a quick pang, then gone.

Changes, more changes, were immediate when I ended the relationship, starting with my weight. My appetite was something that had decreased significantly when I was with him, causing me to lose almost 20 lbs. Within my first month of being single again, this appetite increased rapidly in a way that would cause me annoyance. My hunger was a bottomless pit. After two months, I regained half of what I lost. My chest bones no longer show, my stomach is a little softer, my hips are a little wider, and overall I'm just a bit fluffier. Days are easy to get by without having a crash mid-day.

I spent most of my remaining months in Amherst walking by myself, wherever my brain and legs agreed to. They led me to walk all of UMass, downtown, Amherst College, Northampton, and restaurants where I’d walk in and say, “Just one.” My favorite restaurant was Miss Saigon in downtown, a small Vietnamese place that gets cluttered very fast after their opening hour—full of students, parents, families, and many solo adventurers like me. This was the place where I felt most welcomed to come in alone. The earlier I’d go, high school students would walk in to have a quick meal, like it was their regular place too. Closer to 6 o’clock, I’d find professors walking in alone. The same waiter waited on me every time, and I always ordered between two soup bowls: Miss Saigon Special or the Bún bò Huế. The waiter knew each time it was going to be between the two. I ate there at least once a week, sometimes twice, for the last three months. After a few visits, I had a date there. Nothing serious. Pretty random. What I found in my soup bowl that day was extra meat—more than usual—and a teasing smile from the waiter. Well, I never saw that date again after hearing him talk in circles about only himself the whole hour we ate there. 

Back to sitting alone. Oh well.

But there has been beauty within all of this—having autonomy over my own days that sometimes push down hard on me. There was an aspect of not having to share what my activities were with someone and being able to keep them for myself. I like interacting with people and sharing parts of my life; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here writing and sharing this. So, don’t get me wrong there. Privacy is what I enjoy, but not feeling like my life was only an obligatory report by nighttime is what I like most. Keeping my experiences meaningful to me.

I am constantly reflecting on how different my life is and feels now than it did months ago. And while I’m still learning in this process, there are still some things to take away. I once loved, but I also experienced when and how to let go for the greater cause—for myself. I learned the many great qualities a man can have, and I also learned what parts would mean more to me than some of those qualities—to weigh and choose what makes something worth it in the most respectable way possible. I learned who I was then, and I am learning who I am now after all of this. I learned how to reform love for the best of us.

Most importantly, I learned how to redraw the line between us to allow each of us to rebuild the individual lives that had been swept away.