As long as I can remember boys have been my distraction and my muse. Life has played a quirky joke on me, be obsessed with boys and one day you’ll have three of your own.
I met Jason (the names are changed to protect the author) when I was seventeen. He was sexy, spiritual and fiercely independent and we fell madly in love.
When Jason went off to college, I tried to resist the attention of the others but what was a nineteen year old to do? My mother’s words of wisdom became the soul of my existence. Relationships are like traveling, the more men you meet in your life the more life experiences you will have.
I imagined that living in New York City would be the ultimate place to meet some of the most interesting people in the world so after college in Boston I moved to the Big Apple. It was there that I fell madly in love again, with Brett. A funny, crazy, intelligent boy from Connecticut whose love for me was equal to his love for partying and he plunged me into the psychotic world of obsession.
He had a magnetic personality and made me laugh like no other, singing African songs he didn’t know the words to while in the shower. He charmed my sisters and my mother, juggling tomatoes over the Indian carpets and playing scrabble until the wee hours of the night.
While in the city, he dined me at the finest restaurants and after, we made love on dark, anonymous street corners. I was alive, reckless and wild and in complete denial that Brett was not all mine.
The dark enveloped me one weekend when we were shacked up in my NYC apartment and he rose for air to venture out for a cup of coffee. That was when my sister called and reluctantly informed me of the rumors that were flying. Brett had taken another woman to a hotel room one night when he was out partying with his best friend.
I rolled into a fetal position and felt my world tumbling down. Our relationship flashed before my eyes as I rocked back and forth on the floor. Just days before his alleged affair we had been walking through Central Park completely wrapped up in each others arms. He loved me, this I was sure of, but he was a wounded boy seeking attention from anybody who would give it to him. In my fog, I looked up to see his watch and school ring on the coffee table and reality set in, a cold knife digging through my ribs. How had I been so blind? At that very moment he was searching for marijuana on the city streets.
Three hours later he returned from getting his coffee, stoned out of his mind. Man that Harlem coffee must be strong. Booted!
I fled from Brett and the city and moved to Aspen where my sister hooked me up in an unheated room of an 1800 A frame cabin. I worked for National Geographic Photographers and went out dancing every night.
The party life in Aspen does not leave one lonely for long. After leaving Brett high and dry in New York City I started dating Max, four years my junior, but who was counting? In my foggy haze I spotted him in a black leather motorcycle jacket, inhaling shots at the crowded bar at Aspen’s most raucous dance dive, The Tippler. “Groove is in the Heart”, by Deee-Lite, came on and with my body lit up with energy and my head swimming in tequila, I asked him to dance with me. I was ready for another adventure.
Aspen provided the ultimate playground for our romance. We hiked or skied all day and returned to warm each other up in my freezing room in the cabin where we exchanged music and books.
But Max also could not keep his eyes from roaming and I spotted him deeply embraced in the arms of another women in the bar where we had met. Six months after another broken heart, there came a knock on my door and standing before me was Brett. My knees buckled. I listened to his pledges of love and allowed him back into my life.
It didn’t take long for old habits to set in and I found myself rocking on the floor again on the nights he didn’t come home from his DJ’ing job at The Caribou Club.
And then the second, and last, call came again from my sister. This time it was worse. My whole family had witnessed Brett kissing a cocktail waitress, from the club, on a street corner. I went home, put on my pointiest cowboy boots I owned and kicked his pretty little white ass out onto the streets.
The next day my boss at the Dance Institute asked me why Brett’s BMW was heading West out of town, filled with boxes. I told him that he was going back home to his lily white town in Connecticut and we would see him no more. Of course, he returned to torture me for a few more years. He was attracted to me like a rat to cheese.
There were many more after Brett and my poor sisters endured them all; the French boyfriend with black teeth who wrote me love letters that I could barely understand, the spoiled, wealthy boy with a communication problem who went away for the weekend to Crested Butte and never came back, my neighbor who repelled down to my balcony on his climbing rope with his guitar slung across his soldier, the intellectual New Yorker who found me as an irresistible drunken bat holding up my corner of the elevator of our apartment building on Halloween. Everywhere I turned there was always somebody willing to entertain me.
I decided to move and get more serious with my life after a traumatic traveling experience to Turkey with a part time boyfriend from San Francisco. I walked the pier in Turkey looking for an out but when one was offered to me I thought better of it and decided not to become a statistic in the headlines of missing American woman in foreign countries. What was I doing with my life? Aspen was too trivial and transient. The boys were untrustworthy and shallow.
Into my life walked Wade. His handsome face and beautifully soothing pine green eyes seemed so familiar to me. Strangely, I did not know immediately that he was the one. This I cannot explain. I used to laugh when people would say, when you least expect it, it will happen. I was always expecting it. Who wasn’t? always searching for love?
Just a few of my favorites
I love reading ex-boyfriend stories. Thanks for sharing!
Nice post … I always like to think you learn a little along the way kwim?
Jillian, you better not write about all my ex-boyfriends! Love your sister, Melanie
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