Looking at the photo, I felt ill.
* * *
Mr. SYS and I go back much further than seven years. We go back thirteen years to elementary school, to childhood. We met when I was eleven and grew up together in middleschool and highschool, where we were both part of a tight-knit group of friends that remained in touch and involved in one another's lives. One of the last memories of I have of my father, who passed away when I was sixteen, was the night Mr. SYS and I were at our brother's (who are the same age) middle school graduations. After the ceremony I had traipsed across the grass to talk to Mr. SYS. My dad teased me relentlessly afterward.
"You were flirting, weren't you Mouse!" he chuckled. Mouse was his nickname for me.
"No, no I wasn't!" I turned beet red. Had I? Did I have a crush on him? It occured to me that maybe I did.
When we finally go to high school that fall, Mr. SYS had lost the glasses and braces and was now muscled from joining the water polo team. At orientation on my way to the book room to be given my texts for the year, I remember crossing his path and not recognizing him until he said in his familiar, low voiced sort of friendly way "Hey Lindsay!" and thinking he was cute. But he was my friend. Just my friend. And I had another freshman girl crush on a soccer player named Matt anyway.
* * *
I am sure my friends, especially my best friend, are sick of me making constant reference to Mr. SYS. But like thick tissue on a scar, it is hard for me to ignore the place he had in my life, and he had a monumental one.
In high school, we became very close friends, mutual confidants. He knew he could call me to talk to me about nearly whatever was on his mind and I would not judge him, and in turn, I could do the same. I came to know him well, so well in fact that near the end of our dying relationship he claimed that sometimes I knew him better than he knew himself.
In sophomore English class together his whimsical and undying belief in me overwhelmed me when he exclaimed things like "You're going to be famous someday. A writer," or "you're amazing." He saw me in a way that other people refused to see me because I was a smart girl, and being one of those in high school is never easy, even amongst the nerds.
When my dad died my junior year of high school, Mr. SYS bought me a card and called me to make sure I was ok. That year we both had advanced chemistry together and he sat next to me and he'd steal things out of my backpack to annoy me. I'd end up chasing him through the hallways just to get my keys back. He asked me to Winter Formal that year the last day before Christmas break and I agreed. My girlfriends dared me to kiss him after the dance and I did.
Right before my 17th birthday, he asked me out and we became an "item," as much as you can be when you're a teenager. I spent time at his house and with his family and his brothers and dog, and he would swing by my house to bring me small things, like his mom's amazing cookies. On my birthday that January, he and our friends ambushed me and took me to Denny's at six am for a surprise breakfast in my pajamas and he gave me the Greenday CD that had just been released. Swim season was starting in a month and we'd both soon be in the pool training.
I slowly felt him anxiously pull away from me until the day he gave me a breakup note that is somewhere hidden away in a box of teenage letters that are safeguarded in California.
* * *
The day after we broke up, he called my cell phone.
"Are you ok?" he asked.
"Are you ok?" he asked.
"Yeah, yeah," I tried to be brave. "It's just like shifting gears with you. I need time to shift
gears." I choked back silent tears.
* * *
The truth of the matter was I was still so attached to him. I started dating a senior but the first time I kissed him, I saw Mr. SYS's face in my mind. Writing is my therapy, and so I did what I do best: I wrote him a letter everyday that I never gave to him. I needed to suck out the venom. Little did I know that the following seven years would be nothing more than a pattern of this: me wanting him, him telling me he just wanted to be friends, me holding my tongue, him confusing me, and me feeling crippled internally under the weight of our history.
* * *
January 2006: Mr. SYS is accepted to West Point. Over the dishes one afternoon, he calls me to tell me this and something about it scares me and makes me start crying over the sink.
* * *
January 2008: Mr. SYS invites me to a ball at West Point which happens to fall on my birthday weekend. He says over the phone "but you know, just as friends," to make sure things are clear between us. I pack a champagne colored strapless dress and get on a plane to JFK where he picks me up and we spent the weekend in NY and on the gothic towered ghostly stone West Point campus.
We share a bed, with no funny business, in the hotel that weekend and all I want to do is hold him.
* * *
Until the end of college, Mr. SYS calls me whenever he gets drunk. To tell me things about his friends named Tequila and Jack. All I can think is that drunk men say what sober men think. That we are both cowards who have been beating around the bush for years on end at this point. I hide my pain in letters that I still write to him but never give to him. I am in agony.
I am also convinced that it is all in my head, that it is my fault for imagining things and wanting things to be something they never can nor will be and that I am the one who needs to set herself straight.
One night fall of my senior year at Berkeley, I am at home visiting family and about to make the drive back over the snaking altamont in my little black car when he calls. He has just branched infantry, as he dreamed.
I get into my car and roll out of the drive way and blast music as loud as I can the whole 90 minute drive while I cry alone in the driver's seat.
* * *
The hardest part about my relationship with Mr. SYS is that my love (yes. love) was absolutely one hundred percent unconditional. No matter how much being that close to him hurt, no matter what he did to me, I loved him no less. I could never control loving him. I just did. It was one of the purest and truest things I have ever experienced.
* * *
Before I leave for France right after college graduation, Mr. SYS's mom invites me over to the house. Mr. SYS is away for the summer doing training camps, but she gives me a book on Paris on behalf of the family and also a small American flag at her son's request. Her own mother, Mr. SYS's grandmother, is French. Married a WWII GI and came over the states.
This is the darling Frenchwoman that calls me that December once I am in France and we chat on the phone and she gushes about how highly Mr. SYS thinks of me. I start fighting my internal battle with myself, because the gesture makes me feel like part of the family.
* * *
To deal with it all, I joke with my best friend that one day I'll find someone and be engaged and Mr. SYS, at that point, will realize what he's missed. He'll have missed the boat and come flying down the aisle and object to me marrying and I'll want to kill him. My BFF knows if that ever happens, she has full permission to take Mr. SYS out and get him rip roaring drunk.
* * *
That spring, Mr. SYS starts Ranger School. He asks all his friends to write him letters. So I do. I write him nearly a letter a day. My writing is one of the only ways I have ever known how to wrangle my relationship with him into a form where I can understand it and so I write him. Never much about us, or so I remember. But he tells me later that his superiors made fun of him.
"Hey, who's the bitch from France?" they ask him. He gets angry, he tells me, and tells them to fuck off.
* * *
December 2011. I fly home from Paris for one week right after Christmas. I know he will be home. I know I will see him. I am nervous. I think I am over him, that I've let him go, that I am in a place where I am finally ok just being friends.
Wrong.
He shows up on my doorstep and grins a full body grin that seizes my heart straight out of my chest cavity and he stays to catch up with my family. On New Year's Eve we both are drunk and he asks to talk to him. I agree. Then he says things I have been waiting to hear for so, so long. I do not know what to say, except that maybe I provoked the situation. I expect him to pull his usual manoeuver and deny everything later on and retreat.
Wrong. He does the opposite and tells me he wants us to be more than friends.
I ask to talk.
The night before I leave for France, hours before, actually, I climb into his truck and we talk and he holds me and I weep like a hurricane into his shoulder. He can no longer make up his mind, which is how it has always been.But he tells me one thing:
"I am not good for you, Lindsay. You give and give and give and all I ever do is take."
Hearing those words out of his mouth startles me.
* * *
In France, I tell him to take a week to think. We take a week. I think a lot. I overanalyze. No matter how much I analyze though I know how I feel. And I realize that I am going to have to call the shots for us.
We talk. I tell him end of all ends, end of the line, end of the story, we will not do this. We will be friends, only friends. Is it possible for men and women just to be friends? We are both crying again.
I hang up on skype.
* * *
Several weeks after, Mr. SYS has a girlfriend. I find out via Facebook. I am furious. Do I have the right to be? I told him we weren't going to attempt a relationship because he couldn't decide--and he never could--if he wanted me or not. But he could decide he wanted her?
It is a slap in the face. I let it slide, waiting to see if he'll get in touch. He does and acts non-chalantly, like nothing at all happened.
I tell him off. I bite him to the bone with my words. I am going at delivering calculated, emotionally mortal blows meant to inflict utmost harm, without a single vulgarity encased inside. I am wounded and bleeding out, my heart is seeping out all its contents. He is my assassin.
I have not spoken to him since. That was March of 2012.
* * *
I make less and less reference to him, but there are days I still do talk about him, within a very constrained circle. BFF tells me one day: "You have to understand, Lins," she says. "It wasn't that SYS chose another girl. SYS chose SYS."
* * *
This is the emotional burden that follows me when I date other people, the fear of their indecision. This is the scar I push back into the realms of my unconscious, where it will heal and keep fading. It is getting lighter by the second, less pronounced.
But I know it is still there.
* * *
I am glad Mr. SYS is back alive, unwounded, and safe. I wish him no ill. I hope he is happy. I have only ever wanted that for him, with me or with someone else.
But I had to get to a point where it was me or him, and for once, I chose my own survival. He threatened to emotionally obliterate me, and I chose me.
I chose me.
* * *
In his return photo, SYS is thin and smiling. But I recognize the tired discomfort in it, the false curled edges. In moments like this I miss what we used to be as kids, and it makes me want to reach out to him and say hello.
But I can't. So I don't.
I keep my distance, in a photo, across the Atlantic, seven years and six thousand miles from where we started.
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