Day 5 Teddy

Anyone who’s ever had a moderate dating experience has that one relationship they will never get over. It just happens. With some level of experience, there’s bound to be a particular instance, a certain person who just made everything different for you, and made everyone else that came after them just not enough. For Ross it was Rachel, for the Cavaliers it was Lebron, and for me it was a boy named Teddy.

Teddy was wonderful. He made me laugh when I was dating other boys and made me laugh harder when I broke up with them. He liked to hold my hand in public and even in the car, even though he drove stick shift and basically endangered our lives every time he changed gears with his driving hand without letting go of mine. He showered kisses on me no matter where we were and no matter who was watching. He brushed the hair out of my face in bed and tangled his legs with mine so that I wouldn’t get up in the morning. Every night, he’d tell me goodnight and wish me sweet dreams.

Teddy’s gone now.

And maybe it’s the stream of vivid dreams I’ve been having or the images of a boy in every one of them that makes me think of those “Goodnight”s and “Sweet dream”s that I’ll never have anymore and the boy I’ll never wake up to. It’s bittersweet. Here was a kid who I was clearly in love with and will likely always be in love with. Like I’ve said to anyone who’s asked, “I will always look for a bit of Teddy in every guy I ever meet.” And I will, because that person, that wonderful, idiotic and sweet person will always have a place in my heart. [Gag, I know]

At the same time, it makes me worry for the long run. They tell you to not compare people in your life, that every individual is different, no two are the same according the Snowflakes rule. But it’s inevitable that you wonder and then you line them up next to each other in your mind. You refer to the checklist that the memory has made for you and start evaluating if what you have measures up to what you used to have. And it’s dumb, because it’s impossible to recapture what you’ve had, and slightly stupid because you were a different person back then anyway, and who even know if this is what you even want now?

I guess it’s a matter of compartmentalizing. The past is there, the present is now, ne’er shall the two meet. Except it’s nothing like that at all. Some look at it in a structural sense: that the past is your foundation, your basement, your lobby; whatever you want to build depends on what’s already there. And that kinda sucks and essentially limits your entire future. So I choose to look at it like a book instead. There are these chapters that you’ve read, your past. You know what happens and you know how it all goes down and you know who dies and who lives. And sometimes you get bored or thoughtful or just plain reminiscent and you find yourself opening that same chapter again. The important thing I’ve learned, is that no matter how much you dive into that chapter, reliving the good, remembering the bad, you can’t get lost in it. Because the fact remains, you know how it ends and more importantly, it ends. Period.

I’ve made that mistake several times now, going back to the days of Teddy and believing that he’s still here, trying to find him in the men in my life until I get a swift slap in the face reminding me that, no, he’s gone and I need to move on. I get hurt and angry and then I look for something or someone to hit back, until I remember that, yeah, he really is gone and I’m really the only person to blame. After all I’m the one looking for a boy who doesn’t exist.

But I’m kind of pathetic so I open that chapter over and over and over again, because well, I love the kid, and I want to remember him. And every time I do, it gets less hard to turn the page to the next chapter, and it gets easier to tell myself that this is an old story that’s been told, and that I need to stop reading dried ink on yellowed pages and start writing the rest of the story.

Yeah, I miss him. Very very much. And I suspect I always will. But maybe with time, I’ll forget the nightly rituals. With a little more time, I might forget the intimacies. And maybe one day in a distant, far away page I have yet to reach, Teddy will be an equally distant, far away memory.

As he should be.