Category: love

Oregon was burning. It was the end of summer running into fall, and wildfires had taken over much of the forests surrounding Portland. Each morning people would wake up to see their cars covered in a coat of ash. The horizon looked like a permanent sunset, with a red and orange glow coloring the outline of the hills.

My friend Peter told me about the fires when he visited me the same year. He said it was like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which we had both read two years ago in college. Every evening after class I used to go back to my small, leaky house in Southwest Portland and pour our dried goods into different jars. Depending on my mood, I would decide whether we needed the beans or the oatmeal when we would inevitably have to run away—whether the couscous or the rice would be the safer grain.

We were still years away from the fires, but the more I read, the more I was convinced that we would soon have to run. I dreamed of fires every night, and talked incessantly to my roommates about them. It became a joke between us—that sooner or later we would grab the jars of food I kept on a bookshelf in the kitchen and load up the shopping cart that was abandoned in our front yard.

The fires, said Peter, were most alarming because no one was alarmed. People brushed ash off their windows in the morning and rescheduled hiking trips. Everyone adapted their lives for them, like frogs in hot water.

I had only really seen fires of this magnitude once before, even though I grew up in California. The summer when I was 20, my mom and I drove from Portland to San Jose. We spent a night in Ashland and stayed at the Holiday Inn. We were there during the annual Shakespeare festival in the beginning of August, and had tickets to see Antony and Cleopatra. We had dinner at a restaurant that served me wine, and then walked down to the small center of town, coughing from the ash in the air. 

The theater was outside, and at the beginning of the show, the stage manager came out to tell the audience that, for the safety of the actors, they might have to shut down the performance midway. The ushers all had masks on their faces, and some of the audience members had tied scarves over their mouths and noses.

I have read many descriptions of fire that talk about its power and wildness—these qualities meant to liken it to an animal ruggedness, a spiritual closeness we’re expected to share with our greatest evolutionary tool. But that night I spent in Ashland, the only word that came to mind was oppressive. As my mom and I left the show early to go back to our hotel room, I felt as if the smoke in the air was suffocating me.

A year later, I met someone who remembered the fires too, a boy from Ashland with curly hair and feet that pointed out when he walked. We met at a bonfire where I had to ask him his name over and over again, and he helped me crush forgotten beer cans with the heels of our feet.

We went to the coast on one of our first dates, and missed the sunset. We lugged a tarp out to the beach and sat with it folded around us like a tent, drinking wine. Eventually, we gave up on the tarp and sat out in the rain, both of us laughing hysterically. When we walked back to the car, the bottom of the paper bag I was carrying the wine in collapsed, and the bottle shattered at my feet. I looked up to see him smiling, and felt for the first time what it was like to find a home in another person.

We spent all our time together after that night, staying up late with a sort of hunger to be around each other. It made me tired in my classes, but I was so happy I felt like I could burst. He was kind and smart and sweet, and even when I slept next to him I dreamed about him. It was with him that I saw Oregon the way most people see it: the lush green that stretches on beyond belief. We went to rivers and hot springs and up and around mountains, and he’d make up the origin stories of those we didn’t already know. When I think of him now, I prefer this image: swimming or laughing in some faraway place where we could have been the only people in the world.

I think he always knew I didn’t want to stay in Oregon, the same way I always knew it too. The week that he and I drove down to Ashland was only a few weeks after he had told me that long distance was not an option for him—that if I wasn’t going to stay in Portland, he didn’t want me at all. We took separate cars down the highway, and I counted the mountains he had pointed out to me months ago, the ones I will only ever know by the names he made up for them.

His Ashland was different. We stayed at his parents’ house in the woods, isolated from everyone else. There was no fire, but instead rain and wind. We left our windows open at night and slept under layers of blankets, holding onto each other tightly enough to insulate us against the impending future.

We jumped in the cold lake and had our first real fight, and one night while we sat in his living room I decided that I would stay. I would stay wherever he was. No job or place could replace this person—this person who I loved more than I ever thought possible, this person who I would have given any piece of myself for.

A few weeks later, he clarified to me that it wasn’t just about distance. He didn’t want me no matter where I was. I was too much of a burden; I took up too much of his life. He had only wanted me for a length of time, and that time was up.

I left Portland in the middle of the night, without telling anyone. I packed my things and duct-taped my bumper to the front of my car, and made it to California just as the sun was rising. I cried until I laughed, and then I cried harder.

In the end, I didn’t need to pack the dried beans or the oatmeal, because in my version of apocalypse, these things were plentiful as the road to California is studded with convenience stores. The absence that I felt, the thing that precluded my survival, was a person. My person, who I had left behind without explaining where I was going or why.

It took me months, but in the end I made it to New York. That’s where Peter told me about the fires that had been raging since I left, in a small bar on Houston Street. He was in New York to see a girl, a girl who he had brought to the bar with him. They clung to each other that night, sitting across from me as if offering a glimpse into the life I had left behind.

I don’t think we were happy in the end. I don’t know if there is a way to be happy once you know the person you love is going to leave you. We adjusted ourselves to a new normal after we decided to break up, and when I look back in time I see a split, as if there were two different relationships that I was a part of. Though, the strange thing is that even when I miss him so much that it physically pains me, even when I have to lock myself in the bathroom while my body spasms from grief months later, there is a strange sense of pride that followed me to New York. There are never any nights when I don’t miss him, but there are also never any nights when I wish I had stayed. And even though I hug myself when I lie in bed and pretend my arms are his, this feeling of pride has yet to go away.

I have spent a long time trying to understand if the fires and the end of my love are correlated.

I want to see them as some sort of vindication—that the landscape of my home is now as scarred and gnarled as I am. And yet I cannot seem to make sense of it.

I do not believe in randomness, but I do believe that things can lack meaning. Perhaps things happen, not because they were meant to or because they had to, but only because they did. And perhaps, while I sit in a small bar and Peter tells me about the summer when Oregon was burning, it is enough for things to have happened, only because they did.

Almost two semesters into college, and I still feel like I let him slip through my fingers. I wonder what I could have done or what I could have said, if the relationship could have ever even worked given its predestined expiration date.

A little over a month before I left for college, I met a guy who was seemingly perfect for me. He blew my mind— or maybe it was my extremely low expectations that I had for Tinder dates, but I thought he was truly amazing. In high school, I hadn’t had the best luck romantically, and when I met this guy, I thought it just might be time to release myself from this trend. We talked with so much ease and had incredible sexual chemistry. I was dying to explore where this relationship could go, but I was faced with the hard fact of having to literally pack up my entire life and move to a different state in a matter of weeks. I was overwhelmed with virtually unanswerable questions: it takes a while for relationships to develop naturally, would ours have enough time? Was it realistic to invest time and energy in this relationship if it seemed to have a set expiration date? Would he even consider this? Was this fair to either of us?

Despite the fact that I was leaving so soon, I went for it. I figured that life is way too short to waste opportunities like this. Plus, it took almost 19 years for him to come around and I didn’t necessarily feel like waiting another 19.

He had just finished his freshman year at a college in my city, and stayed over the summer to continue his job. We had very similar academic interests and cared about many of the same things. We hung out a lot that month, often avoiding the sauna-like August weather inside his heavily air-conditioned dorm. The sexual chemistry was still strong, but my emotions became more and more cloudy, making it hard for me to communicate with him. I buried my emotions in sex, and didn’t allow myself to verbalize how I felt about him because I was unsure of the validity of our relationship. With the way that hook up culture influences our relationships today, I felt pretty confident that my reservations were valid. Among the people I knew who were already in college, there seemed to be a widespread idea that the beginning of college was an important time to be single and explore all of your options. I had heard of many established relationships crumbling when one partner left for college. So what would happen with me and this person I had just met?

I think that he had similar thoughts running through his mind. He would open up and become vulnerable, and then wouldn’t text me back for days. He would ask me to go out on a fun date and then change his mind last minute and decide to Netflix and chill. I recognized those moves from guys who had blown me off in the past so I became cautious about asking too much from him, but this situation felt different because he continuously showed he cared. His inability to commit to scenarios that required a deeper connection suggested he was also indecisive about where this relationship was headed, even though we both really seemed to like each other. 

As the weeks passed, the pressure to share how I felt about him grew, but so did my lack of confidence. These feelings were so fresh and different than anything I had ever felt before, only making them that much more difficult to process. I knew that I wanted to express my feelings to him, but I struggled to understand them myself. Even if I mustered up the confidence to open up about my emotions, I didn’t know if he would accept or reciprocate them because I had to leave. I remember pausing outside his door after I left for what would be the last time, trying to give myself one last chance to figure it out.  

The short window of time forced me to act fast, but some things simply can’t happen quickly, no matter how hard you try. I was confident in my sexuality so it was easy for me to express how I felt sexually, but I was less comfortable with allowing myself to be emotionally vulnerable. I wonder what we both buried in all of that sex. It was loaded with feeling and seemed to replace our emotional expression. I was afraid of discovering where the relationship was going, and ironically he was the only one who could help me figure it out. The end seemed drearily inevitable, so instead, I chose silence.

The transition to college was hard. I had to adjust to a new environment, people, and a new social culture. During syllabus week, I found myself drowning in a sea of single, horny people looking for instant pleasure and one night stands. All I could think about was that he was probably in a similar environment, and I had no idea if he was participating or not.

Over the course of this school year, I’ve tried to let go, but I can’t push how I felt about him out of my mind. We talked, and I searched for the closure I needed, but I never found it. I tried removing him from my social media, I even made a conscious effort to stop bringing him up entirely. I expected my feelings to fade over time, but I still frequently mull over what could have been. The harder it was to forget him, the more it made me remember how important he was, and that feeling keeps me wondering.

Now I realize how important it is to communicate your emotions in relationships. We were never able to figure out what page either of us were on because we never really shared how we felt. Our relationship lacked the time it takes to develop trust and comfort. Going forward, I want to be more conscious of relationship habits, and practice patience with myself and others. No matter how badly I wanted this relationship to work, I need to realize it didn’t. And remember that I can’t rush myself into someone new, no matter how perfect they may seem, and that “perfect” is probably far less real than I might have once tried to convince myself of anyway.