End of a Love Song

The love song starts like this:

When they are fourteen, she tells her friends and herself that she loves him, despite his skinniness, despite the jeans that are too tight at the ankle, despite the shirt—too cheap, and the wrong color too—he’s tucked in with no belt, and despite or maybe because of his monstrosity of a nose, with long and wide nostrils that face out, and with which he holds up his crooked glasses. His hair always needs to be cut, and even when he doesn’t bother to shave, it doesn’t cover the ugly splotches of pimples across his jaw line.

Even so, she comes to think of him as her inverse reflection: she is chubby, but her reflection looks back at her as morbidly and irreversibly obese, and she’s loud and awkward, with ex-step-families all over the country. His thinness, his sarcastic silence, his apathy, his calculated success and all-American family—they all make her hate the side of the mirror on which she is trapped. I’m doomed, she thinks, in the teenage style, and when she breathes in deep the smell of the bitter black tea he nurses, she shivers because she loves him. You drink too much tea, she says. He rolls his eyes at her, and tells her not to be so dramatic.

When they are seventeen, they’ve already dated and broken up—his decision, not hers—and she’s puked into sinks (several) thinking about him kissing other girls (several). He’s forgotten that she once loved him, or maybe he never knew, and she keeps on writing bad poetry about how she misses him. Stop being so dramatic, her friends tell her with italic inflection on different syllables each time they repeat it, but she can’t internalize their words because they’ve turned into the refrain of a catchy song. She continues to sing the verses, which sound like this:

When they are nineteen, they’ve gone to college, and he’s casually apologized for “breaking her heart” (stop being so dramatic, says the chorus), and she’s begun to sleep with men just to remind herself that they aren’t him. She writes bad poetry and mourns the loss of her innocence, while taking “great joy” in multiple orgasms produced mostly by men whose last names she does not know.

You love someone else, one man tells her. I don’t love anyone, she lies. Another man says, we don’t love each other, do we? She turns toward him, naked on his bed, and rolls her eyes. I’m only sleeping with you to forget someone else, she tells him. And to herself, she says, stop being so dramatic.

When they are twenty-two, and she still tells people that she’ll be twenty-one next summer because she’s afraid of getting old, she calls him every month or so to check in. I thought of you today when I saw your mother at the store, she tells him. Did you, he says. Yes, she lies. She hears him roll his eyes and sip his tea.

When they are twenty-five, she moves in with his cousin, whom she has dated for four months and who hits her and regularly sleeps with other women while denying it to everyone but her, when he’s drunk. She sees the one she’s always thought about at family functions, where he looks disapprovingly at the finger marks, getting red now, on the arm his cousin has just grabbed. Stop being so dramatic, she means to say, and he knows, so he rolls his eyes and sips his tea, the smell of which makes her shiver like a love-struck teenager.

When they are twenty-six, it’s over with his cousin, with whom she still sleeps, but she accepts an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their relative, who (along with the rest of the family) thinks they are still together. I’m going to run a marathon, she announces, awkwardly, and the one she’s always thought about looks skeptical because she’s gotten even fatter in the last twelve years than she was when she first thought she loved him. I’m training already, she says, and he doesn’t believe her, but it might be the first true thing she’s said to him in years. I’m a different person now, she says, but she thinks, that’s debatable.

They go to a bar that night, with several of the cousins. The one that she’s lived with gets drunk enough to pass out in a booth tucked away in the corner, and the one she’s always thought about looks at her over a drink. Not tea, she says. Not tea, he says. They’re a little drunk, and after all these years, they finally hold eye contact.

Someone drives them home, but neither of them remembers later who it was. Thirty people, at least, sleep in extra bedrooms and on couches at this uncle’s house, whose name she never knew in the first place. There’s one unclaimed couch left when they get back from the bar, and she sits on it between the cousin, who hasn’t woken up since they pulled out of the parking garage, and the man she’s said that she loved since he was a boy. He turns the television on and keeps it low. He slides the remote to her over the couch cushion and says, you choose, with that throaty sound in his throat she knows, from years of trying to forget about him, means sex.

Slowly, their fingers find each other. (Stop being so dramatic.) His hands feel cold, and she doesn’t like it.

Stop, she says, but she doesn’t finish the refrain. And after twelve years, two months, and ten days, the song, abruptly, has reached its end.