I love to long.
I love to romanticize a past that never existed.
I love to create a fantasy of a world that never will.
Yesterday, I got a text that a company I helped start is re-opening in San Francisco after leaving for the shinier pastures of LA.
Ow. Owwww. Why is this hurting?
What the fuck?
I spent the last two years licking my wounds and making peace with being out. I wrote you long diatribes about each stage of my grief surrounding our one-sided breakup. I moved through them. I came out the other side. A phoenix rising and all that.
I see their posts and hear news about their growth, and feel nothing but an “Oh, good for them.”
So, pew, pew—pain should have been forever neutralized.
I suppose, part of it, might be broken promises. Lying sends me into an absolute fucking tailspin, which feels very normal and human.
The broken promise part was when my contract wasn’t renewed, I was told, This wasn’t meant to be the end! No, no, you silly, sad goose. This is just a “see you later.”
Of course, in my heart of hearts, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew this was the closing of a chapter and had to grieve it as such. And I did.
So, why then am I feeling this sinking pit of hurt? What is this gross pick-me-girl part of me that wants them to have reached out and said, “Hey Super Star! Good news: we’re coming back to SF! And we want you back! We’ve missed you so much!” It’s pathetic is what it is, and I hate it.
As a treat, every night before falling asleep, I used to have a little unhinged fantasy starring me and my high school boyfriend. The one who had just dumped me mere months (weeks?) after I followed him to college.
If you’ve been here long enough, you might be thinking, yeah, girl, we know the one. I wrote to you about it briefly back in the fall of 2023. But I’ll dip into it again, because the context is important, and I’d like to add a few more honest details.
I was at Providence College, which, come to find out, was VERY catholic and VERY republican. But who could have known that from the religious name of the school, the tour of the church on campus, and the Bush/Cheney t-shirts on the 18-year-olds? Not I.
Meanwhile, he was across the river on the beautiful side of Providence. Over where the wicked smaht kids from Brown and the wicked talented kids from RISD—his school—got to be all progressive and mingle.
One night, I did my usual disappearing act from my PC friends and showed up at his dorm uninvited, drunk, and reeking of cigarettes, which he hated. I was indeed very drunk, but not drunk enough to miss that he wasn’t happy to see me.
He told me that we just needed to sleep, and we could talk in the morning. But drunk me wasn’t having it.
I jumped up out of bed and accused him of cheating on me. I even looked around his miniature, only-fit-a-bed dorm room for the girl that I was sure was hiding. I swung open the tiny armoire with a lot of “aha!” energy, but all I found was my own desperate delusion.
He finally calmed me down enough to tell me there wasn’t anyone else. It was just me. He didn’t want to be with me anymore.
I ran out sobbing and stumbled down the hall. But then, I heard him call my name.
Oh, thank god. He doesn’t mean it. He wants me back.
I turned around and saw his outstretched hand.
Yes.
I ran back to him.
And through my very blurred vision saw that he was holding out my earrings.
“You forgot these.”
The horror. The absolute earth-shattering humiliation I felt for getting my hopes up was all the fuel I needed to supercharge my descent into total self-destruction for the remainder of that very strange year in Providence.
But it didn’t stop me from longing for him every minute of every day.
So, as I lay my head down each night, I’d close my eyes and press play on the exact same movie.
I’m walking up the steep hill that leads to his dorm. It’s spring. Flowers everywhere. 70 degrees and sunny, slightly breezy.
I’d pause the movie here to check in with wardrobe and pick out just the right outfit. It was 2005, mind you, so there was a going-out top and my best pointy stilettos. Luckily, not only could I walk well in them, but I could also strut the near-vertical incline that made most people hunch over and aggressively swing their arms.
Due to my almost constant binge drinking and the forced removal of my beloved Adderall, since high school graduation, I’d put on the “freshman 15” or so. It is only now, in writing this, that I suspect this is an insane and hopefully outdated phrase. But at this time in history — both for me and the world at large — it was an essential piece of my redemption arc. I imagined I was back to my sickly senior year body. The frail body I thought he loved.
So, I’m walking up the hill, no, no, wait, scratch that, we said “strut.” I’m strutting up the hill, bones on the verge of crumbling to dust due to malnourishment, and now, I’m holding hands with a carbon copy of him, but HOTTER. And WAY more artsy.
I round the curve that faces his dorm room, and he happens to be sitting in the window doing some kind of art project or something—not important. He sees me holding hands with this absolute hunk of a man— very important.
At that exact moment, boyfriend 2.0 leans in and kisses me. The kiss ends, I laugh in the coolest, most carefree way. I shake my luscious hair out of my face in slow motion and happen to glance to my left as we keep walking.
The sun hits me just so, and our eyes meet.
He is GUTTED. The look of devastation on his face cannot be overstated here. He can’t believe that I’ve not only moved on, I’ve leveled up. On top of that? I’ve totally transformed into the spitting image of an early 2000’s Victoria Secret model.
I smile. And not in a mean way, but in a very demur, “Hey, old friend,” kind of way.
We walk a little further uphill, and suddenly, I hear him call out my name.
“Erin! Wait!”
I stop and turn, a beautiful but mildly surprised look crosses my face, but I am also not very surprised at all.
I release boyfriend 2.0’s hand.
Now he runs to me.
He arrives out of breath and desperate.
“You forgot me.”
I pause, look down, and then back up to meet his eyes.
I reply, “I could never.”
We kiss the most passionate kiss ever kissed.
And boyfriend 2.0, gracious gentleman that he is, throws himself over the side of the hill and disappears into the bushes with a soft thud, out of respect for our reunion.
Hello? Are you still there? I did tell you it was unhinged.
A few years ago, I reconnected with him back home on Cape Cod. I always visit with his mom, and he happened to be there with his son, and I was with mine.
It had been almost 20 years since we last saw each other, and still, my heart dropped through the soles of my feet when he stepped out from behind my parents’ car to hug me.
It was surreal, hugging this figment of my imagination. One that was now very real, and in front of me, and also a dad.
All I kept thinking during those few hours together was, I don’t know you at all. You are a total stranger.
I obsessed over you. Needed you to want me back. I built a whole world around the perceived healing that getting you back would give me. And perhaps the weirdest part, you don’t have the slightest clue that I felt all that. At least, I hope to God you don’t. I shudder at the thought.
I’m having lunch with my family when my phone vibrates on the kitchen table beside me. It’s the text from my friend, Shannon.
“Insert company name here is opening a studio in San Francisco!? How do you feel about that?”
Again, my heart drops through the soles of my feet.
I tell her that most of the people who made up the company that I knew have moved on. So, I don’t really have any attachment anymore.
But even as I typed that, with my heart racing faster than I’d like, I knew, more than anything, I was only willing that to be true. I try again with more honesty.
“They feel like an ex I miss but I also don’t know that person anymore so I’m missing a ghost.”
That felt true.
Missing a ghost is a completely normal and human thing to do. We all do it. We miss past versions of ourselves. We miss the moments when something still felt possible. Phases of life that were especially sweet, or maybe just mentally rewritten as such. We miss futures that might have been. I miss the drama. The delicious ache of something being unfinished.
But as I write to you today, I am so proud to say, I no longer lie my head down and fantasize about a world that will never be.
Just kidding.
Of course I do, but not every night. And that feels like growth.
And perhaps, even more growth might be to just let myself have it as a treat sometimes and not think it’s gross or pathetic and hate it.
What if I just let myself strut up the hill? Get excited by the long-awaited message. Let myself feel wanted and missed. I can have a little fantasy and let myself believe that if it did work out that way —just as I’d scripted— it would actually fix everything. That healing could be had, finally and fully, if someone just wanted to have me back.
But I don’t know. Maybe that’s just delusional. That’s the thing about missing a ghost, they’re figments. Echoes. They can’t hurt you, but they also can’t come back to life and save you. Cause they’re ghosts and they’re make-believe. Hmm. Hard to say. I guess I’m just happy that most of the time, I know I don’t need them to be real. Even if I still like to pretend sometimes.
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But you're still friends with his mom...so you win.
Your words gut me but in the best way possible.