Melissa Greenwood
A Lasting Love
Chris and I connected on Match.com in January of 2011, four months after my last boyfriend, Daniel, left me. Daniel was only supposed to be gone for ten days on his annual Labor Day trip to the Black Rock Desert—but when he came back to LA from Burning Man, he had a new girlfriend in tow who quickly became his fiancée, then wife, then baby mama.
I was in no state to be meeting anyone at the time but craved a distraction—anything to keep me from picturing Daniel and Zoe’s limbs tangled up. Yet, when I walked into that hipster North Hollywood bar, and our eyes met—my big blue to Chris’s kindly, soft brown—I smiled a little too enthusiastically and mentally mapped out our future. Hey, neighbor, I said as I took a seat next to him on the red velvet couch.
Two months in, and Chris was my boyfriend. Nearly twelve years my senior, he was my plus-one to my twenty-seventh birthday, just as Daniel—who also had over a decade on me—had been to my twenty-sixth. Geminis of similar ages, Chris and Daniel also both stood at about 6’2, had wavy brown hair, and wore oversized spectacles. The resemblance (and my type) was unmistakable, although Chris’s hair was darker and his build thinner. But the similarities stopped there: whereas Daniel—the guy who, unbeknownst to me, already had a girlfriend when I met him; wouldn’t be my friend on Facebook; didn’t invite me to his own birthday party; and regularly went out with a female doctor friend until the wee hours of the night, dancing and tripping out on Ecstasy—had devastated me, Chris would never disappoint.
That night, Daniel called to wish me a happy twenty-seventh. Giddy at the sight of his missed call, I sneaked into the bathroom to listen to his message: “I think about you often, and I hope you’re having a fabulous, fabulous time—because you are…fabulous.” I couldn’t focus on the party or my new boyfriend. All I could think about was the fact that my ex, who said I was “fabulous” didn’t think I was fabulous enough, good enough, anything enough to still be his. I went back to my party, trying to replicate my pre-bathroom face—the face of a girl who was enough—enough for her friends and her current boyfriend, who really was fabulous. I threw back a few glasses of champagne like it was New Year’s on a year when I wasn’t taking a sleeping pill and going to bed at nine. I talked too fast. I forced my cheeks and mouth to form a smile—all evidence that I was the happy birthday girl. But my eyes were already glassy. A few false lashes had broken free of the adhesive that was keeping them stuck (like me, I later reminisced).
Luckily, the crowd was thinning. My gracious new boyfriend settled the bill, then helped me to navigate my way to the car on my wobbly heels with my wobbly post-bubbly balance. He drove me home. Unzipped my dress. Assisted me out of my too-tall pumps. Pulled the covers back. Lay me down. Did his best to strip away the sick feeling, the emptiness, the abandonment that he had no part in creating. He did so much, and I simply fell apart, glue bits and eyelashes stuck to my face—long curls of black against my too-pale skin. I couldn’t bear it, this man I didn’t deserve, treating me with such care. Handling me like the fragile thing I was when a ghost haunted me still.
Chris didn’t run or leave me to cry alone in my bed. He didn’t tell me to “f*ck off” either, as he rightly could have. He curled up next to me and held me tight, even though he had to be at work early the next morning. At the time, he was a Product Manager at Disney Interactive. (I couldn’t tell you what that means, except that he’s the Chandler Bing of his inner circle.) His coworkers had once voted him Best Personality, and now I knew why.
“It’s okay, everything is going to be okay,” he said to me as I sobbed. He stroked my newly-shorn hair (I had “cut off the assh*le,” post-Daniel) and collected fallen falsies from my so-wet pillow.
Why didn’t he go when he saw I was yearning for, hurting because of, someone else? Why didn’t he drop me at the door and never look back? “It was hope,” he later confided. “Hope in you. Hope in us. As naïve as it sounds, it was hope that made me stay.”
Chris continued to stay. We were a couple for three years and eventually lived together, too. The kindness he had shown me on my birthday was the kindness he showed me every day: making dinners for me, making room for all of my things when I moved in with him (he let himself be booted out of his own closet), and even making room for Daniel’s ghost. That fractured relationship continued to weigh on me and my self-worth. Even as months turned into years, the perceived loss pressed heavily on my chest, sometimes constricting my air.
Daniel’s ghost notwithstanding, things between Chris and me were serious: I met his family back east, we sent out a joint holiday card, and I even bought a cream-colored dress I thought I might wear to our future-wedding. I was always planning ahead. But whereas Daniel and I had been all about the sizzle—it’s the only thing we had—Chris and I, romantically, were more like a fizzle. We had to acknowledge the painful truth that we were better off as the best of friends who, nevertheless, needed to part ways.
My dad Norman was more upset about the breakup than I was. He and Chris had developed a special bond over the years; in fact, Chris was instrumental in bringing my father and me together. Pre-Chris, Dad and I had a strained relationship. He’d been an emotionally-absent father, but as I entered adulthood, he wanted to make amends. Chris and my dad understood each other. They are both soft-spoken and enjoy chatting about a good TV series or movie. (Chris was a film major.) An electric car geek, my dad even helped Chris to broker his own EV-deal, staying at the Nissan dealership with my then-boyfriend past midnight until the numbers were exactly where he wanted them—down to the penny.
When it came to my dad, Chris was happy to do the work I was resistant to doing. He accompanied me to dinners and made reconnecting with a formerly-estranged parent feel more relaxed and less awkward. To this day, Chris will visit my dad at his photo shop, which Dad has conveniently outfitted with a car charger. Then, they might catch up over burgers and a craft beer, or three in my Dad’s case. I’m grateful they keep in touch. Grateful that Chris was there to act as a go-between at a time when I wasn’t ready to go it alone.
Chris and “Norm”—as Chris calls him—remain close, and Chris and I remain close as well. More than a decade after we met and eight years after we broke things off, he’s still my go-to guy. After my wedding (I bought a new dress—this time once I was actually engaged), it was Chris who drove my husband and me back to our hotel. The three of us have a WhatsApp group chat that I named “The Boyzzzzz.” We are constantly checking in—sending one another funny messages or pictures or filling each other in on stories about our days or the latest low-emissions news (we’re all Team Electric). It warms my heart that my husband has welcomed Chris into the fold—into our joint-lives. Chris, my husband, and I—along with my dad and his longtime-girlfriend, also an EV-driver—even celebrate special occasions together. We refer to ourselves as “The Gang” whenever we sign our names at the bottom of a birthday card.
I have tried and failed to remain in contact with other exes in the past. Perhaps it was easier for them to make a clean break, but after things were over, they never seemed to want anything to do with me. Chris is the exception. Hope made him stay on my twenty-seventh birthday, and nearly eleven years later, he’s still here: one of my boyzzzzz; part of my gang. While he no longer has to scoop up my body, errant lashes, or splintered emotions, he’s always just a phone call—or text message—away, available to make an airport run or pick up groceries, dry cleaning, or the pieces, wherever they should fall. He still has the Best Personality, and he definitely also wins the award for Best Ex.
Melissa Greenwood, who writes both CNF and poetry, has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She has been published—both under her real and pen name—in Brevity; Lunch Ticket; Annotation Nation; The Los Angeles Review; the Los Angeles Review of Books; Meow Meow Pow Pow, where her flash piece was nominated for a best small fiction award; the Pup Pup Blog; The Manifest-Station; Poke; Neuro Logical; The Erozine; Moment Mag; Sledgehammer Lit; Screenshot Lit; Pink Plastic House; Impostor; Jewish Literary Journal; Potato Soup Journal; and forthcoming in Rejection Letters, Drizzle Review, and HOOT's Cookbook Anthology. Melissa lives in LA with her Canadian husband (an elementary school teacher), and—when she's not reading, writing, or singing—teaches and practices Pilates.