From a young age, I’ve been quick to anger.
Screaming matches were common in our household. Not entirely from my end. I wasn’t always directly involved. But with loss comes anger and anger is a feeling my family doesn’t know how to cope with.
Anger is the root of my problems. Anger and Anxiety.
Often I wonder about Calvin. Mostly about his past.
Mostly about his past with his last girlfriend.
It’s horrible, I know.
Is it fair of me to hold him accountable? It’s not. I don’t need anyone to tell me that.
Do I though? Yes, because I’m someone who doesn’t know how to deal with anger.
Alisha was a senior my freshman year. She was originally accepted into the studio as a BA so I’ve been told, but worked her way up to a BM in saxophone performance. The other older undergraduates rolled their eyes at her, she was nice, but a bit strange and not a player to their standards. I never really understood her. She was never directly mean to me, but she wasn’t entirely welcoming either. I guess I should say she was nice. Eh… I don’t know. She was friendly towards me. It’s kind of hard to tell, thinking back on it now.
Mostly, she was a person I could never accurately understand. This is what always made me wary of her. That which you don’t know of is dangerous. And she was a kind of person I had never tried to associate myself with before. She was all glitter and glam – girlish to the extreme. Deeply religious – never cut her hair, wore skirts due to her faith and family. She had a nice smile, but everything about her seemed to move in slow motion. Her affect hardly changed. To me, she always seemed very superficial. Not particularly intelligent, not very many outstanding life goals, a person motivated by an unknown desire.
I honestly never really thought much of her because there wasn’t much to her. She was who she was and not too much beneath the surface. At least, I wasn’t going to take the time to try to scrape the surface. I’m a thinker. My mind never shuts off. “Perks” of an anxiety disorder and my introverted nature. People that don’t appear to be thinkers don’t really interest me usually (reasons why my infatuation and love for Calvin has never ceased to confuse me since his way of thinking is so incredibly unique. Probably why I am so infatuated and in love with him, but that’s besides the point here.)
I had maybe 1 close “girlfriend” in high school. It wasn’t until my senior year that I clicked with Christine. Christine has a humor much like mine – nothing like a “girls”. My best friends were and are all guys. Alisha was a whole new kind of creature to me. The only reason why I conversed with her was because she was in the studio and good friends with Calvin.
Calvin and I had started to become better friends the second semester of my freshman year of college. It took less than 2 months for me to start crushing on him hard though. As much as I hate to admit it and as little that I knew him, he had my heart then and there. I’ve been hooked for a long time my friends.
But when he told me that he liked Alisha, I was crushed. It was blatantly obvious that she liked him. She almost never shut up about him, like myself. Two, very different girls, hearts completely at his mercy.
He’s naive and doesn’t/didn’t understand this. Maybe young would be a better word.
I’m also the kind of person that when a guy comes to me and tells me who they like, I go with it. I don’t necessarily give up until the deal is set and they’re officially together, but I’m not one to try to intervene blatantly.
They were dating by… I don’t know… late March early April? I was really upset then. But I could see how happy he was. So I let it go. He was a guy that I crushed on, but I was at a big college with plenty of other fish in the sea. It wasn’t the end.
Here we are, two years later. I’m currently in his bed with one of his over-sized t-shirts on, cat lying on my arm grooming himself/playing with my hair to get my attention, while he’s in New York with his family. Our texting is rather sporadic. We’re not very good at this yet, letting technology and distance be our communication. We’re much better in person.
This leads to an array of anxieties, but that’s not the point of this particular post.
Alisha will always have this power over me. No matter how Calvin deflects her constant attempts at a post-relationship “friendship”. No matter how much distance they have between them. No matter who Alisha is and has been dating now. At least, this is what I have been blaming my insecurities with their relationship on.
Calvin lied to me. He told me he was a virgin. Apparently, they had tried. At least once without a condom and at least once with. I was upset for a number of reasons when he told me. Off of principle since he had maybe not necessarily lied to me but because he kept the truth from me. I know he has reasons, but that’s not something you can hide from your sexual partner. One of the more important reasons why I was upset was because he told me of this only after I had seen my gynecologist. I’ve been honest with him from the start. I lost my virginity at 17. Calvin was not my first. Not even close. But he is only the second guy I have slept with. Seeing as he told me he was a virgin though and I know my first sexual partner hadn’t had any other partners before me, I didn’t see a huge need to get a pap smear. Usually they tell you as soon as you have more than one partner to get one or when you turn 21. My gynecologist felt the same as I did. More so, because I explained my situation, she thought it would be safe for me to wait. Even though Calvin didn’t count his encounters as explicit intercourse doesn’t mean it doesn’t count period. I had to make him explain exactly what he meant by “tried to have sex” and even then he was vague and embarrassed. I tried to tell him I needed to know strictly for health purposes and just needed to know if there was contact. There was. Then I was furious. But why?
Health, of course. The whole hiding things doesn’t sit well for me either. But there’s been this underlying reason too.
Part of me feels like he picked Alisha over me. Of course, this is only partly true because he knew her at the time a lot better than he knew me probably. But part of me was able to mask those feelings because I was the one who truly got him. I took his virginity. I’ve slept with him. This sounds like a sick power-trip thing that I have, but it’s mostly that I treasure that he let me have something so precious. Although, he was very quick to give.
Like… just over 24-hours after we decided to officially label ourselves a couple quick.
That always struck me as odd.
Of course, there was that first night in September. That night where we flirted extensively, then he was on his bed, I was on his desk chair, our foreheads touched and he whispered, “so close,” and we kissed and he tried to sleep with me then. When he told me that he didn’t really like me after I tried to talk about what was happening. Processing. Or attempting to.
It all made sense then. He and Alisha had tried to have sex. Explains why he was so willing and eager to jump into bed with me.
I remember my therapist telling me that it probably would have been okay for me to have slept with him that night. Not that I would have been a slut or anything, but that she felt that eventually, he would have fallen for me given our past.
But it was never okay with me. It still isn’t.
And I have come to realize that it isn’t Alisha I’m angry at. It isn’t Alisha I need to forgive and let go. She isn’t apart of this. My view of her has changed extensively though with my knowledge, but I have no grounds, reasons, or desire to really blame her. I view him in the exact same way.
I need to forgive Calvin.
I need to forgive Calvin for being with Alisha. I need to forgive Calvin for not telling me fully about his past sex life. I need to forgive Calvin for that night in September and the hell that he put me through in October. I need to forgive him for picking her over me. I need to forgive him for not thinking as much.
But oh, how non-thinkers make me angry.
Forgiveness is something that usually isn’t too hard for me to come by. I’m quick to anger, but when I think about a situation, put myself in that persons shoes and try my best to understand, I can empathize and forgive.
I can’t forgive what I don’t understand.
And his lack of knowledge, his lack of understanding of how the whole situation drives me absolutely crazy, makes things worse.
I’ve become the girlfriend that I fear for my friends. The one who asks to read messages the ex sent him. He grants me this without a qualm. I ask questions about her constantly it feels like where he couldn’t give a damn about my past boyfriends.
Probably because he knows just how disconnected from them I am and how much nothing is ever going to happen there again.
But I don’t believe it. She still tries. She has a boyfriend, one she’s been with for as long as Calvin and I have been together. He’ll always have “a special place in her heart” (direct quote.)
I’m becoming what I fear.
I fear my anger, for wrath is always what destroys me.
This Strange Place 