Crimson and Clover

by Lindsay Wilkinson, SUNY Cortland, December 3, 2004

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He’s one of those boys you should never fall for because he’ll never feel the same way about you for as long as you will about him. But you don’t know this until a month or two after you’ve met when it’s already hopeless for you.

One of the first times we hang out, I’m sixteen and ridiculously insecure and uncomfortable with myself and he’s two years older and talks like he really does know everything there is to know and he’s been there and done that. And it’s not until a few years later you realize he was full of shit.

I’m clinging onto my winter coat even though it’s still fall and not nearly as cold, but I feel safer holding onto something that can hide me. I walk out of the house with my head down, hoping I look okay as if I haven’t checked in the mirror 87 times before I heard him honk the horn. He’s waiting in his blue Jeep Wrangler and flashes his high beams at me and I’m silently cursing because I know my squinty face isn’t that attractive. But you don’t know until a few months after you’ve broken up that he always thought it was adorable.

I get in and we smile and decide to go for a drive even though it’s starting to rain and it’s beating loud on the top of the Jeep. He turns up the volume on the CD player and we listen to the radio for a while and then have some awkward conversation loudly over the music. About him. He lives around the corner from me though I never knew him because we went to different high schools, and we drive past his house and he says we can go back there later. I’m wondering what I’ve gotten myself into and I hug my coat tighter and I notice him glance at me and he asks me why I’ve brought my coat. And I tell him, because there is no cool explanation, and this makes him laugh. He takes my hand and kisses it and now I’m starting to relax. We head towards the airport and it’s a long twenty minute ride listening to him talk but I don’t mind because I’m painfully shy and at a loss for words anyway. After you break up, you realize that he’s not aware of how much he likes to talk about himself when he’s yelling at you for not being more verbal on the phone.

We sit and watch the planes land in the dark and it’s almost romantic except for the other steamed-up cars on either side of us. I start to get bored. After watching the tenth plane land, he starts the engine and he drives us back to his place. He’s bragging about how he has the entire basement to himself and his mother has just moved to Hawai’i so he only lives with his two older sisters and he can do anything he wants anytime he wants. Later, you know his bragging is a way of covering up his bitterness towards his parents for not sticking around after he graduated.

We go inside and sit in the dark for an hour or so and it’s almost two o’clock but I’m afraid to tell him I’m tired and want to go home. I lay with my head in his lap and we’re playing with each other’s fingers and every once in a while he tickles me because he’s found out my legs turn into egg beaters when I’m tickled and he thinks it’s hilarious. Later in your relationship, you’ll have to endure hours of tickling torture after this discovery.

After a while, he drives me home and I’m dreading the goodbye. He turns the radio down and says he had a lot of fun and wants to hang out tomorrow. I say the same and am about to open the car door when he lightly grabs my chin and tilts my head toward him and gives me the softest kiss I can remember in the history of my life. I’m almost expecting “Crimson and Clover” to start playing over our heads because I’m a firm believer that life should come with a built-in soundtrack. I go inside and fall dramatically into my bed like a cliché and start daydreaming about what‘s to come. You find out later that a common appreciation for Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album and the shared quality of being fucked-up by parents’ divorces do not equal a promising future.

The next few weeks go pretty well and I’m getting noticed at school because my boyfriend is bringing me to school every morning and picking me up every afternoon. He works at the urgent care in the hospital at night and picks me up in the morning when he’s on his way home. He knows you never eat that early but later, the memories of him greeting you with a danish and Snapple make you sad.

I’m given car privileges a few weeks later and excited because of all my friends, I’m the only one with a license and also the youngest. I’m thrilled to be able to drive everyone to school and he doesn’t like not being able to see me every morning so I let him drive me to work after school instead. One day he’s late and I’m pissed. Granted, I usually make him wait in the car for ten minutes while I figure out what to wear, but this was different. I get a phone call from a friend of his who lets me know he was just leaving a fire call and he’d be there as soon as possible to drive me to work. A few minutes later he shows up with his face covered in soot and to ensure that I get to work on time, he puts on his blue light and as we drive down the road, all the cars part to the side. Every time you hear a minuter now, you’re reminded of him and how annoyed you’d get when a fire call would interrupt the movie you’d rented with him and how twenty minutes later he’d come back and crawl back under the covers to cuddle with you.

A few weeks later we’re not getting along. We’re fighting in Wendy’s, fighting in the mall about holding hands, fighting in the car, fighting on the phone. He’s having parties and I’m not going because I don’t drink and he’s mad because he thinks I’m antisocial. He says I don’t show that I care about him. I’m not affectionate enough. I think he’s possessive and clingy because he won’t even let me go shopping without him and I need alone time because I’ve always been alone, and I’m not used to being with someone all the time. He has another party and doesn’t tell me about it. I find out when I’m driving by on my way over at a friend’s and I call him when I get there and cry for an hour on the phone with him after he tells me how heartless he thinks I am and threatens if I don’t change, he’ll dump me. I think changing means acting like him and so I do. I call him every few hours, hang out with him when he wants, and he dumps me two days later. But he still wants to see me and he still wants to sleep with me. You know now that nothing good can come out of such an arrangement when you think you’re in love and now you curse yourself every time you think about what a fucking naïve asshole you were back then.

So even though we’ve broken up, it’s still not over. I still have his pager he lent me while we were dating so he could page me when I was at work or sleeping and I could call him without getting in trouble. I give it back to him and then I get my own, just because. I‘m getting “143” I love you pages in the middle of the night and I’m paging him random crazy numbers when I know he’s hanging out with other girls. He’s asking me what I want for Christmas and stopping by my work with his friends to give me an Orange Julius from next door. I’m driving by his house incessantly to see if he’s home and when he’s not, I’m obsessing about where he might be. He’s inviting all my friends to his parties and excluding me and I’m hanging out with his friends without him to piss him off. And you can’t understand how you could let this ridiculous behavior go on for as long as it did. And you can’t understand how five years later, you could still talk to this person even though you’re both in two different kinds of worlds now. And you’re surprised you can still enjoy the company of someone who once brought out the worst in you. And now you can’t believe you ever took his crap. And you can smile about it because you know neither of you will ever go back to the way you were when you were together or after because you’re way too different and still are. But you know you can still call each other anytime because he’s the only person who ever really understood the significance of Meatloaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad,” and he’s the only one you can really cry to about how fucked-up you think you are from your parents’ divorce because he is, too.

DESIGNER:
Heather Cheetham, New Media Design, SUNY Cortland, USA

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