You Lost Me

You are a 13-year-old boy, athletic, with average intelligence and one of those lopsided half-smirks that says you know you’re going to grow up good-looking. You have tiny pimples lining your forehead and nowhere else, your voice still cracks in all the wrong places, and you can’t help but laugh whenever the teacher says Uranus or Homo erectus. In class, you doodle dirty drawings of dirty people doing dirty things and purposely show them to the elusive, quiet girl sitting next to you and traumatize her for the rest of her life. The only thing you have retained from your classes is the first line of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and that density equals mass per unit volume (but you’re not sure what this means).

You are kind of a jerk.

And for some reason, you are my first crush.

By that, I mean my first real crush – not the kind where I’ve suddenly become aware of the fact that not all boys are gross and riddled with mysterious species of bacteria, but the kind where when I walked into homeroom on the first day of eighth grade, you were the first person I locked eyes with and we held this gaze for, like, a very romantic five seconds, and out of nowhere I could hear that annoying, “Close to You” song by the Carpenters (you know the one: “Why do birds suddenly appear….?”). I thought it was fate. I pine from afar. I tell all my girlfriends but give you a secret code name so no one else outside our circle knows who the hell I’m talking about (except somehow, everyone in our grade ends up knowing anyway). I start functioning like I have some claim over your life – YOU ARE MINE, HOMEBOY! But nothing actually happens.

Until –

The day before we split for winter break I somehow get it in my head that now that all the residual pink hair-dye has faded and I’m starting to look vaguely normal, this is my chance to ask you out. I primp in the bathroom for the whole lunch period. I have my girlfriends stake you out every chance they get. I chicken out every time until I take a bathroom break in the middle of science class and see you down the hallway at your locker. I really have to pee. But we are alone in this quiet hallway. It is a Mexican Stand-off – whatever the hell that means. I swallow my saliva, suppress my bladder, and walk over to you. I say something stupid like, “How’s it going?” then launch into a speech in which I pretend to really want to see some god-awful movie about a bunch of teens stuck in some cabin in the middle of the snowy mountains and pointedly say that none of my friends want to go with me. You take the bait. You want to see it, too, you say.

I almost pee in my stupid flared jeans with embroidered flowers.

We set up a time and a place. I float back to science class, still not having peed.
The day of our date, I show up to the movie theatre fifteen minutes early, but stall in the bathroom so I can pretend you got there first. I give myself a pep-talk in the mirror and get caught by a middle-aged woman coming out of a stall. I slink out of the bathroom three minutes after our scheduled meeting time and make my way to the lobby. You are not there. You are not there fifteen minutes later. Or a half-hour later. The movie is starting and I am still standing in the lobby, standing on the outsides of my feet, biting my nails –and you are still not there.

For five minutes, I am humiliated. For the rest of the school year, I am in roid rage.

You stood me up. What the hell, idiot?

I could punch you. I could pull your brain out through your nose with a pair of tweezers and video tape the whole thing so I can send copies to your entire family. But I don’t. And eleven years later, here I am, sitting on the worn, comfortable recliner in my room, writing about you, so I can thank you.

Yeah. Thank you.

Because that day, in the movie theatre, when you didn’t show up, you initiated me. You prepared me for several years’ worth of men not showing up, hardened me and conditioned me into expecting it – forced me to want and demand something more, something better than half-meant promises sealed with semi-good intentions. It doesn’t matter that we were thirteen and dumb, or that soon enough we’d go to high school and I’d forgive the incident entirely. Small as it was, when I look back on it, it was a catalyst, a beginning to a trend that my life has followed almost religiously, a true landmark moment in the history of my love life. Because now, I also understand everything good that was made possible by that irreversibly pathetic moment in the theatre.

This is not what I thought I would write after finishing Junot Diaz’s latest foray into short fiction, This is How You Lose Her. It’s a sprawling, detailed, layered, multi-faceted event of a collection chronicling all the losses and all the thinly veiled wins we all experience when we try our hand at love. Mostly, it’s an ode to all the pain that makes all the joy that much more poignant. The stories follow Yunior, a sharp, self-aware, but infuriating, romantically inept ladies’ man, with each story representative of someone he’s loved, or someone who’s loved him. It’s the perfect patchwork portrait of something we all possess: a collection of landmark “firsts,” and “almosts,” and “maybes” – those handful of romantic interests that have come to influence us and our track record in ways we can’t even begin to dissect. Yunior’s story is punctuated by the sudden arrival of the one true love of his life. After a series of failures, there she is, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so tragically. And only question left, is whether he’s prepared for her – whether he’s been through enough crap to recognize a thing that’s good.

I thought I would write about the guy who matters , the love that matters – the one who stayed, who I’m able to appreciate that much more because of the rest who didn’t. In a way, I suppose, I still am.

So. Thanks, idiot.

 By Jayne Wilson

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.