Between the West Side and the West Bank

I was on the floor of my friend’s Hollywood apartment with a microphone in my hand, singing my heart out to our makeshift karaoke. I was high and had made my way down a bottle of wine. Just a couple of hours before, I had texted my World Cup pod to let them know we had to completely change our plans. New Guy had just broken up with me.

Yeah. That New Guy. Maybe I should change his name. It was a thirteen-minute phone call in which he explained he just wasn’t feeling it, something I wasn’t expecting from a guy who told his mom about me a week before. There wasn’t much more to say. No is no.

New Guy and I came from different backgrounds that felt familiar. He never made me feel like I was too much or not enough. I walked into a bar on the West Side of Los Angeles for our first date with my guard up. He didn’t have to try hard to lower it. We made friends with the couple next to us. We made friends everywhere we went.

From the beginning, our relationship felt like it would create expansion, like it was big enough to contain what we both wanted and more. I’ve always felt like I was too much. Too ambitious, too silly, too loud, too serious, too invested, too decisive, too passionate, too opinionated. Too overwhelming for anyone to hold. He made me feel like I could still be more. Like there could be more. More conversation. More curiosity. More room for both of us to be ourselves. Chemistry isn’t uncommon. Ease is. He was just being himself, and I was just being myself.

When I first realized how much I was starting to care for him, I also realized there were going to be people who might see our differences as threatening. I realized I would have to stand up to those people. He would, too. I don’t want to go into detail here. You see, I still really care about the guy.

My friend took a video of me as I sang Shakira’s Underneath Your Clothes and cried about the guy who had broken up with me the day before we were supposed to meet each other’s friends over Colombia’s second World Cup game– a major step in any relationship. Though I spent our short-lived relationship feeling accepted by him, New Guy seemed continuously scared that I’d want him to be less. We talked about it. It wasn’t enough.

Politics had come to define a big part of my life. This scared New Guy. I can’t blame him, because I’m pretty sure I’m the only girl to ever tell him I was going on a policy-oriented trip to the West Bank and needed a bag that was easy to run with.

When I was personally impacted by the politics in my home country, I put my arms up to the sky in protest to God, “Seriously?! I’m not enough of a handful as it is!?” I make a point to bring it up to every guy I go on a date with. It’s a disclaimer. Maybe it’s more of a warning. New Guy smirked and asked me how many men had been scared off by that. The subtext was clear, “I can handle it.”

New Guy was thoughtful, confident, curious. He was smart, witty, ambitious. Our conversations were exciting and comforting. So were our silences. He was independent and difficult to take care of, not because it was hard to take care of him, but because he wouldn’t want you to. I know the instinct. When you carry enough, you start to assume other people won’t know what to do with it.

New Guy cited our differences as part of why he didn’t think we were a fit. What surprised me was that the differences that scared him were the same ones I believed we were navigating together. It hurt me that he didn’t feel safe with me. I wondered if that would have meant letting someone take care of him.

Our differences never bothered me. I, a deeply reflective writer, thought they may be why we got along so well in the first place…why we communicated so well. We both came to the table with a deep empathy for what we thought we couldn’t understand, and I think we surprised each other.

That’s why it hurts. He doesn’t suck. My friend wanted to make a list of all his flaws, to sing about how bad he was. They were fired up and ready to hate the person I was sad about, but I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t have been honest.

Understanding another person, reaching across the aisle, allowing yourself to need another person, maybe all of that isn’t scary because of the action. Maybe it’s scary because of the result. It’s scary because of what it could mean. People can leave. You get used to care and find yourself missing something you didn’t even need before the relationship existed. Interpersonal relationships are complicated enough. Dragging entire groups of people into it is a whole other level.

New Guy was a gentleman. He read everything I wrote and even sent my weird columns to his friends. He cooked for me, held me without warning, playfully tugged at my hoodie to pull me into his arms. I could feel myself growing more vulnerable, entering the potential pain zone. At some point, I decided that was okay. Relationships require you to acknowledge potential pain.

I put the microphone down, noticing I was crying, squarely in the pain zone, afraid that the subtext to his “just not feeling it” was “you were too much.”

Still a little drunk, I went to bed, only to wake up three hours later, knowing there would be no kiss emoji, no funny video, no “buenos días” waiting for me on my phone. Our short-lived relationship, if I can call it that, was one of my healthiest dating experiences. I showed up as myself. That’s all we have control over.

Nausea pulled me out of bed. It wasn’t the alcohol. There were words I needed to get out of me. Still fresh, I put them down on paper as they came up, trying to tie a bow around a relationship that wasn’t cold yet, and using a pseudonym that reads like an invitation.