A Cup of Coffee

The end of the affair

We met through a common friend. This common friend became my boyfriend for two of my college years, and during this time, I became close to some of his closest friends. So close, in fact, that when my boyfriend went on a long trip to Peru and Bolivia during summer vacations, the guys kept me company and took me to wals in the Botanical Garden (my favorite spot in the whole world) and to the movies. The guy I mentioned in my first sentence was a Medical student, short, plump, which fit my mental image of a hobbit. He was shy, but once you got to know him, he was very entertaining telling the same old jokes over and over again. He loved the Beatles, I preferred the Rolling Stones. He loved Pink Floyd, I almost gagged listening to "Atom Heart Mother". He liked the Yes, I liked Lou Reed. He was a Trekkie, I was a Star Wars fan. But we seemed to like the same movies, and I made him get hooked in The Lord of The Rings. He could be so proper sometimes, and I frequently made him blush.

Once my relationship with the old boyfriend was over, things didn't change much. The guys kept me company constantly (even the former boyfriend, after a while). I camped and travelled with them. I felt like one of the boys, in fact. But then I started to get closer to the Medical Student, go out with him without the others, travel with him (the others got mighty jealous, I have to say). Finally I realized that I was falling for the Medical Student, and that he was as scared of me as fascinated. I hit on him shamelessly. He was paralysed. After a while, I didn't care too much anymore. I started going out with other guys, and decided to leave for Europe. On New Year's Eve he popped up at my parents home with a bottle of champagne, took me to the beach and spilled his heart out in a very muddled way. It was too late.

I spent one year in Europe. I came back. I got married. The Medical student wouldn't talk to me (in fact, he had made a fool of himself after getting drunk in my farewell party). In the meanwhile, in fact, the Medical student gave up medicine. He started studying History. He started to jog seriously (something we had started doing together), and lost a lot of weight, and looked less and less like a hobbit. He started dating around in such a way that my old friends made fun of it. I separated from my husband and days later I met him by chance at the movies, naturally. I invited him for my birthday party a few days later. Then something funny happened. In the middle of the party, he took my hand and said that there wasn't a single day in the last three years in which he had not thought about me. Now tell me, who wouldn't fall for a line like that?

I did. We started dating. Six months later he moved into my apartment. I had a job and financial independency. He was still in college. It took him four years to finish school and get his first job. Then I got pregnant once, twice, three times. I thought it was going to last forever, but it didn't. It lasted 14 years, full of ups and downs, and who doesn't have ups and downs with their SOs? I didn't think I could survive the end at first. Then I discovered that I could, barely. Then I started realizing that I wasn't missing him anymore. Finally, I look at myself and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, left there. My heart became a huge wasteland, for love when is gone leaves an empty room and the heart becomes like a glass half filled with water, half filled with air. Air which is invisible but it is certainly there.

And the morale of the tale is that if one can survive the end of a 14 year relationship and an even longer friendship, one can weather most anything.

posted by Livia de Almeida @ 9:45 PM