~
When our lips touched, it was pure sugar. I had only ever kissed men - hungry men with hard lips. Kathryn's lips were soft. Supple. Suckable. Her tongue darted into my mouth, delighting me with its pliant, and then rigid, explorations. It was so new, such a different sensation, to be kissed by a girl. I felt almost like I was drinking rich and yielding air. Her kiss was soft, so soft it was barely there, pulling me in hard and fast with its sweet minty warmth, like gravity from a celestial body. I melted into her as our lips welded together, swimming in pure sensation, not a thought in my erstwhile-troubled mind. Kathryn was a hook-up, a distraction. Or so I believed.
~
Jarrett broke up with me while I was still madly in love with him. It's so hurtful, to fall from being someone's eternal beloved to being their best buddy. Sometimes it's quick -- easy come easy go, little high, little low. But with Jarrett, it happened in subtle degrees - the reverse of the boiling frog metaphor.
We met Sophomore year at Northwestern, and spent three undergraduate years consumed in exploring each other, as much as our studies in Biology. We moved in together after college, but whereas Jarrett enrolled in grad school at the University of Chicago to become a surgeon, I went to work for a drug company, selling pharmaceuticals to doctors and hospitals.
I didn't mind his insurmountable loans, or paying the bills, but I did mind losing his attention, and slowly, it just seemed to seep away. We moved to different schedules and drummers. We preferred different circles of friends. Soon, we lived together but in different worlds. It felt tragic, like blood running out of my veins and into the careless grass. Our paths diverged, and instead of finding ways to grow together, Jarrett became less interested in 'us'. He missed dinners, stopped making dates, took out his school frustrations on me, and became disinterested in sex, or relationship counseling. Each exchange kept getting cooler, until one day, I realized I'd been frozen out.
"Jarrett," I said one evening at 2am, after he'd tucked himself into the bed. "Don't you love me anymore?"
"What makes you ask me that?" he replied, lying on his back. The moon shone through the blinds, casting slats of blue light on his face. His eyes stared at the ceiling. Not at me, though I lay on my side, facing him. Trying to face him.
"I'm not feeling it," I said. "That lovin' feeling."
Silence. I wondered if he could hear my heart, which had begun to pound. How quickly things were escalating, to nowhere that I wanted to be.
"So what I need to know is, is it gone for good, or are you just going through something? Can you talk to me about it?" I was pleading with him now.
Jarrett inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. Not a good sign. The heart knows what it knows, even if the mind reels in denial.
"You don't have to answer," I said quickly, regretting the confrontation. Why had I gone and pushed it? Why hadn't I just let it play out, in it's own time? Why had I brought this pain on myself? I pinched my forearm in vicious self-hate.
You deserve it for pressing him,
I thought to myself.
Girls don't chase boys. Boys chase girls. Boys don't like to be chased.
I pinched my other arm.
"No, we have to talk," Jarrett insisted. "You're right, this is not going to get better." He closed his eyes, and then opened them again, and turned on his side finally to look at me.
"Rachel, I do love you. But I'm not in love with you."
There it was. I think my heart stopped in that moment.
"I care very much about you." He reached out and caressed my face. "You are family to me." He looked away. "But..."
"What changed? What happened? When?" I asked him, now in tears.
"I don't know, Rachel. It's just..."
"Just what? Is there someone else?"
Silence.
"What is her name?"
And then, Jarrett smiled. Just thinking of her made him smile, even as we lay there in the wreckage of our relationship. "Beth. Elizabeth."
"Is she pretty?" I asked. I didn't know what else to do or say. That was the strategy I instantly adopted in that moment of realizing that I was the loser. I became his best friend instead.
And he went for it. I learned more about Elizabeth than I ever cared to, and more about my former boyfriend than I ever knew, when Jarrett felt free, I suppose, for the first time, to gush about his new beloved and anything else he wanted. Now that he was free to pursue her.
He told me, joyfully, that Beth was a little older, already in rotations at a local teaching hospital. Of Indian descent, she had a pierced nose, glasses, and dark skin. What a contrast to my shoulder-length blonde hair and blue eyes! It was a blow to think that he preferred someone totally unlike me, as if he wanted to get as far away from me as possible.
Beth, unlike me, wanted a brood of rugrats. She, unlike me, was continuing her education. She, unlike me, was coolheaded, unemotional and professional. Unlike me, she was mature.
Jarrett even called me one Thursday afternoon, in a state of total moronic exuberance, to tell me that he had proposed to her, and that she had accepted. This was three months after our break up. By then, he had moved out of our apartment and in with Beth, and I was next in line after God and his mom for any emerging news.
