I randomly woke up way too early this morning thinking about Alan.

As I became more alert, I started to piece together a missive to help work through this still 30 year old pain. Then I decided I didn’t want to write that missive at all. Walking the story from beginning to end was a massive undertaking and my heart was already breaking over this morning, why would I want to put myself through that?
 
My time with him remains crystalline after 30 years when I can’t even remember what I wore the other day.
 
If you’re a long-time reader, I have talked about him before in spurts. Sometimes years going between thoughts but that does not mean he’s not always lurking around somewhere.
 
Alan is/was, he could be dead for all I know, half Chinese and half Indonesian. For a long time anytime I saw a guy who presented as mixed Asian, my heart would break all over again. I once was in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania restaurant a few years after Alan and I split and saw someone who looked identical to him even down to the glasses. I stared so hard I must have made this man feel uncomfortable. Of course, it was not him. It was never him.
 
For an hour this morning, I did eventually get back to sleep, I walked through the entirety of our relationship, from the missed connection to the day when I beat the shit out of his fiancé.
 
That part I don’t mind relishing again. The story went a little something like this:
 
After a year, I found out he had been cheating on me for a good length of our relationship, so we split. He proposed to her. He kept sleeping with me.
 
 One night after I turned 21, I was at a local club with some friends. I had been drinking, as I was wont to do at 21, probably doing shots of lemon drops and sucking down cosmos, and I was dancing when I saw him appear. I saw him circle the dance floor with her in tow, watching me. I don’t remember how contact was made but it was made, and we started arguing. She shoved her engagement ring in front of my face, and I told her it was cheap, like her, and came out of a Cracker Jack box. Some more words were said, and I decided, feeling more drunk than ever, to walk away. Fuck them. Fuck all of them.

Things would have been fine if she had not called me a whore.
 
If there is one thing you must know is that I don’t sleep around. My few tastes of random sex were enough to put me off.
 
I turned around, charged at her, threw her on the ground, and started choking the shit out of her.
 
You don’t call me a whore.
 
It took two or three bodyguards to pull me off her and I was thrown out of the club. They knew I was drunk, that part was obvious, but they wouldn’t let me get my friend to drive me home. Somehow, the gods were so with me, I drove 10 miles to his best friend’s place, pounded on the door, and collapsed on their couch and probably wailed like a banshee.
 
No one knew what to do with me.
 
That was the last I ever saw him.
 
The end part of the story is always the most exciting as it does seem on brand for me to beat someone up at a club but really, it’s not.
 
 
Thirty years on, the pain may have dulled but it is still there. My heart was aching this morning as if only a little time had passed and not decades.
 
I once looked for him about a decade ago. He was living and thriving in Detroit. Married still, with kids. I never knew if he was a family type of person but that is probably something I could never have given him even though I wanted nothing more than to have his baby. 20 isn’t too young to have a kid, right?
 
 
Thirty years ago this summer I fell in love with a boy named Alan.
 
And he broke my heart.
 

lisa x

 

You've just finished reading A Most Unreliable Narrator: the slice of life newsletter
from a Gen-Xer about town, Lisa Rabey. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram,
or Facebook if you're so inclined. If you dig this, pass me on to a friend!
Comments? Questions? Want to say "Hi!"? Just hit reply and send me a note!