Keep My Words

One of my biggest fears is commitment.

Besides recently, the last time I thought I might be able to tolerate someone enough to be in a relationship with them was the summer of 2007.

I met him at the bar by my house. I liked him and he liked me. It was easy.

One time when I was at his apartment, I noticed a shoebox by his bed full of letters. I didn’t read them, but I did notice that the return address was from a girl in his hometown. This was a bit curious to me. With all of the technology we have today, someone is still handwriting letters to him? And I assumed that he responded in the same manner. There was a young girl I had seen on his MySpace page while posting a comment. I thought maybe that was his pen-pal, a little cousin or something.

So the days went by and we existed quite happily. Then the time came for his band to go on tour. They were going to be gone for a week and a half, and they were going to pass through their hometown. The time apart could be good, I considered.

The band played a show to kick off the tour a few nights before they left. I met a lot of his friends. He came up to me at one point and said, “My friend asked me if you were my girlfriend.”

“Aw. We don’t have to talk about that now, right before you go on tour,” I told him. And so we didn’t, which was fine. Everything remained as it was – wonderful.

The plan was for him to get back from tour, and the next day leave with me to go visit my family. While he was gone, I received scattered text messages and phone calls assuring me that the shows were successful and that I was missed.

On the evening of their return, I was at the bar when he called and said that he was too tired to come and see me, and he was too exhausted to go visit my family the next day. The disappointment was consuming, but I told him that I understood and that I would see him when I returned three days later.

The day I got back, we decided to reunite at the party of a mutual friend. When I got there, he seemed strange. I figured that it was all in my head, that it was because we hadn’t seen each other in two weeks, and that once we were alone together everything would fall back into place.

We drank. He drank a lot. We went to a rooftop. He put his arms around me. He fell down the stairs. We went back to my apartment and he got sick. He sat on my sofa and I gave him the gift I got for him when I was away. We got into bed and turned out the lights.

That’s when he said, “I have to tell you something.”

Now? I thought. “Okay,” I said.

“When I was home,” he started, “one of my friends and I realized we were in love with each other.”

I remember going numb. I remember telling him that I was happy for him, happy he found someone to love. I remember him saying he was sorry. I remember telling him he should leave.

The girl ended up being the girl who wrote the letters. She was also the girl from his MySpace page. She was 19-years old. She came to visit him a few weeks later, and he took her on the same double date with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend that he had taken me on.

He moved back home to be with her by the end of 2007.

When I told him how I felt, my honesty was answered by him saying he didn’t know what he wanted. And silence. He assured me that he cared.

We don’t talk anymore.