Love, in writing

On a good day, when the R train's extra speedy and my favorite barista at the 'bucks puts a touch of extra sweetener in my green tea latte and I get a new play idea while in the shower, I look back on the men of my past and feel incredibly pompous about how much smarter I am now. Look at me! Look how many positive life choices I make! Look what a fantastic boyfriend I have! Recently, on a day when I was feeling especially cocky and 'changed,' I decided to idly check out an ex's facebook page.

At which point I discovered that said ex wrote an article about how getting a dog saved his relationship with his fiancee. The same fiancee he swore he was going leave for me two years ago.

There's a huge difference between pining for an ex-boyfriend and still feeling affected by an ex-boyfriend. I fall firmly into the second category. TB was my mentor, and a very good friend for many years before a long-awaited reunion turned into something...other. TB is in no way the reason I am a writer, but we met at a time when all the circumstances in my life seemed to be pointing me away from theater. And TB single-handedly dragged me back from the edge and pumped me full of inspiration and courage. So, 5 years later, when TB came to town for just one night for a reading or one of his plays, of course I went. When he suggested that we go for drinks after, I said yes to that too. And yes to the next two bars and the next three drinks. Even though I knew that he had been in a relationship with a faceless woman back in Texas for the entire time I'd known him and this was undoubtedly breaking some rules. I said yes, because it was him. Us. And when TB talked me into taking a cab with him to Fort Greene and then leaned over in the backseat and kissed me...well. Honestly. I never said yes to that part. But I didn't know how to say no either.

The next few months were a disaster. TB and I conducted a long-distance affair so lopsided and manipulative that it pushed me back into therapy and nearly derailed my second year of grad school. I alternately felt loved and desolate, and what started as a seemingly inevitable joining of two hearts quickly presented itself to be the worst romantic (and professional) decision I had ever made. Only weeks after dragging myself out of the epistolary abyss that the demise of my 'relationship' with TB, I met the man who is now my boyfriend. I will call him Pennsylvania here. Penn was quiet and unassuming, wore a knitted cap in late spring, when we met he had completed a British parody play about aliens. He played no games, was my intellectual equal, kept me feeling safe and distracted during Hurricane Irene. I think I loved him from the beginning.

In our less exciting moments, Penn and I sometimes idle away in front of my computer, watching anything and everything Penn can think of that might make me laugh. I'm determine to someday own a corgi and so our attention is frequently drawn to videos of the little dogs hopping here, there, and everywhere on their fuzzy, smaller-than-average legs. More than a year into our relationship, Penn has now fervently promised to someday buy me a corgi of my very own. He may even let me name it D'Artagnan if it's a boy dog.

Anyway. I digress.

 Reading TB'S article in the Times gave me the briefest moment of envy -- envy for his professional success, for his talent. More importantly though, that article was a stark reminder of all the reasons I should never have been with him. In the article, he gives a frank and damning version of his relationship with his forever-fiancee, presenting himself as victim and her as the cold she-beast he just can't seem to slay. And it's bullshit, of course. Because in reality they are two sad people who have chosen a lifetime of making each other even sadder. Staying in any kind of entanglement with TB would have kept me as his passive muse, the subject of his tortured (if eloquent) prose. At the end of the day, I'm more than happy to leave that to his fiancee. And when it comes to dogs? Penn and I may eventually get one because we're ready to take the next step in our life together. Not as a band-aid over the bullet holes we've launched into each other.