And old record shop. Complete with rickety floors and a scratched LP playing in the distance. Joe and I smiled. Olivia had no idea why this was exciting. At first, we cautiously sauntered down each aisle, flipping through the records in the different genres. Olivia looked at the novelty socks mostly. I stood next to Joe, of course he was looking at some old heavy metal hair band records and I was scanning the room to find the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s section, only because I had always wanted to hear big band or jazz on an actual record. Olivia joined us. And almost on cue, it happened.
“I Want You to Want Me,” by Cheap Trick came on. I tapped my foot. So did he. I mouthed the beginning lyric at him, but I didn’t move my body. “I want you to want me. I need you to need me. I’d love you to love me. I’m begging you to beg me.” He laughed and picked up his part and the second “I need you to need me.” We started swaying and snapping our fingers at the hook and by the time we got to the “didn’t I’s,” we were in a full 80’s dance party swinging our arms back and forth, down low and up high, as we skipped down the aisle to the register where I promptly bumped into the clerk. “Oh sorry!” I told him.
“It’s okay, it happens all the time.”
We left the store dancing, singing, giggling, and for some reason, super hungry.
Finding a place to eat late on Christmas Eve wasn’t easy, but we did. The sweetest café on the sweetest, narrow street with cobblestone sidewalks and old fashioned lights that had Christmas lights strung back and forth across the tiny one lane road. We sat by a bay window and ordered. We talked, laughed, and shared stories of Christmases past, and while we sat and drank hot chocolate with too much whipped cream, it began to snow. Gigantic flakes falling amidst the red and green, blue, and yellow hues of the lights.
It was magic.
I wept. He smiled, wiped my tears from across the table. He looked outside, then back at Olivia, and then back at me. His lip trembled. He brought his hand to his mouth. “You two are my family,” his voice broke as he said the words. “I love you,” he nodded towards Olivia. “And, I love you,” he looked at me.
It was perfect. It was the most perfect Christmas Eve that I had ever experienced with the most imperfect man. But it was those kinds of moments that settled deep into my bones. “Please,” I whispered to myself. “Please let this moment stay.” And then I quietly prayed between my breaths and hard swallows, that this time would be the time. He reached out across the wide, wood table and touched my hand. “I promise,” he said. “This time is the time.”
And he delivered. For the next several months, there was nothing but Christmas Eve moments. We fell in love again. We spent the entire rest of the winter remembering why we wanted to be together. We held hands and created memories. We started traditions and kissed each other goodnight, every night. There was never anything new on his iPad. It was over. The nightmare was finally over.
We went on a cruise that spring. We spent a week in Mexico and another week touring Southern California. We went on a bus tour in Ensenada and laughed until we couldn’t laugh anymore. We rode horses into the ocean. We looked for ghosts on a haunted ship. We walked on a pier. We bet on horses and walked through Hollywood. We stood next to celebrity wax figures and giggled. We played games and parasailed.
We went to the observatory and stood under the stars, the same stars from the night we met, and he held my hand as we looked into the vast sky naming off the constellations.
It was the same scene. He was looking at the sky, and I was looking at him. Memorizing it all.
He looked down at me and I smiled. “I love you, Joe.”
“I love you, too.”
And in that moment, standing in the warm air atop a mountain so high you could almost touch the moon, I believed him. I breathed him in again and held my breath so to never let him go
Then It Happened
Almost immediately after we got home from the cruise, things changed. I ignored it at first. There still wasn’t anything new on his iPad, so I decided I must have been making up things in my head. I talked to myself all the time.
He’s probably late because he got a late client.
I can see his location – he’s at the grocery store. Again.
Taylor is married now. Surely she’s going to be faithful to her husband.
Amy? The new co-worker? She’s too pretty for him.
No, stop. He’s not cheating. He promised.
Emme is living in another state.
Who knows what happened to Number 3.
And then, in the middle of that summer, Chloe got sick. She grew a large tumor and within a month or so, he had no choice but to put her down. It was awful. He did not deal with loss well and this was no different. He grew distant again. No matter how hard I tried, we were losing the moments again. We were falling out of the Christmas Eve moments and I could feel him pulling from me.
And just like that, the next time I checked his iPad, there was a picture of a “for rent” sign. I called him out on it, you know. I told him I just happened to be in the same area and I saw him pulled over taking a pic of it. He denied it. He said I was imagining it and it wasn’t him. A week later, he had a screenshot of a text from some random number saying “I’ll be there at 10.” On a hunch, I texted it and asked if this person had a rental.
“Yes, but it was rented this morning.”
That was on a Thursday.
It took five excruciatingly long days for him to tell me.
I was making a pot roast.
He walked in and, with a nervous smile on his face, told me he was moving out.
Maybe he was confused by my lack of surprise, because in the next sentence, he backtracked. “Well, I mean, I haven’t signed anything yet.”
Lie.
“I haven’t decided.”
Lie.
“I haven’t given them any money.”
Lie. Lie. Lie.
“Goodbye, Joe.”
Panic hit him. I’ll never understand that. Did he want me to fight for him? Did he want me to fall to my knees and sob on the floor the way we did that one Christmas? Did he want me to finally just disintegrate and die? Did he want a “Lifetime” movie ending where I end up going mad, jumping over the counter, stabbing him, and then eating pot roast over his body?
No, I had had enough. I was done. I could not take any more. I just couldn’t. And I didn’t care anymore. Not for one more second. In one moment, I just decided that I no longer gave two shits about what he did. One – glorious - moment.
He tried the look. Didn’t work.
He tried to blame me. Didn’t work.
He tried to follow me into the other room. Didn’t work.
“Listen, I want to explain.” He was breathless. He was rattled. He was frantic. I had never seen him panic like this before. I had never seen him desperate. Don’t get me wrong. I saw him paranoid many, many times. He often thought somebody was “out to get him.” He often thought I was “setting him up.” In fact after a few times when we had broken up and met for dinner to “talk,” he thought I had people waiting in the parking lot to jump him. He thought there was a monster that lived inside his body for fuck’s sake. He thought he was possessed. The man was horribly scared all the time. But, I had never seen him like this.