One Love

He wasn't the first, nor was he the worst. He certainly wasn't the last.
He just... was.
He was neither good looking, nor smart. He was a tedious and dull conversationalist. He didn't have any passions, to speak of. He didn't believe anything. He wasn't a very hard worker, but he wasn't spectacularly lazy, either. He wasn't particularly good-hearted, but he wasn't evil. He didn't seek any kind of greater good; he didn't really seek anything at all.
He just kind of... was.

He was a friend of friends. We ran loosely in the same circles. He was always just kind of... there. He wasn't particularly outgoing or funny. In fact, the only reason I noticed him at all was because I found him vaguely repellent. He had bad skin. Not acne, per se. Not the sort of grotesque acne that, when outgrown, would give him a certain pockmarked ruggedness. He just had random pustules. Mammoth whiteheads in odd places that would stay around for days. I couldn't talk to him without wanting to reach out and pop them. His chin was minimal and it seemed like all of his teeth grew in on top of each other right in the front. He was a little bit shorter than I am, and a little bit pigeon-toed. He laughed at his own jokes and did Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations. We had nothing in common. Except Bob Marley. We dated for six months.

He bought me a One Love bumper sticker for my car, which pretty much guaranteed my getting pulled over all the time. He said we had that One Love. That universal, all encompassing, gather up the world in a happy ganja haze kind of love. I nodded and averted my eyes. I am not a Rastafarian, but I do understand One Love. It's the kind of love that sees a boy whose parents are in the midst of a messy divorce, whose lifelong friend and older brother-figure is dying of AIDS. A boy who dropped out of college because it was just too hard and it made no sense to him. A boy who loved a girl who was maddening and foreign to him. A boy who was trying to be a man and had no idea how. A boy whose heart had been broken by people he loved the most; a boy who needed love. It's the kind of love that sees through the pimples and the pigeon toes and commits to six months of excruciating boredom and squalor because she wants to help this boy.

But people are not puppies or kittens. They cannot be gathered and cared for and fed and then released back into the wilds of their own lives. I mistook my compassion for humanity in general for commitment to this one particular person. For six months he tried so hard to be someone he wasn't, could never be, for me. He hurled himself against the wall of my expectations over and over, always coming up short. Even worse, I degraded him with my loving efforts: I paid his rent, I gave him rides to work when his own car got repossessed, I tried to dress him and feed him and convince him to read. I didn't let him be who he was, find his own way, make his own mistakes because I was so intent on improving him. I am ashamed by the sheer hubris of this notion as I write.

I was young, inexperienced, reeling from my own broken heart. Rather than face my own mess, I went about trying to keep someone else's house. In my effort to hide from myself, I coated my intentions with love, with generosity, with compassion. When he asked me to marry him, I almost threw up. I told him no, that couldn't possibly happen. When he sobbed and said "Where am I supposed to go?" the ornate Emperor's clothing I had constructed fell away. I stood there in my naked cruelty and had no answer for him. He wasn't an intellectual, but even he could see that I had never really loved him. I was in love with the idea of transformation. I was in love with myself. I had been using him for half a year to tell me the things I didn't believe about myself: that I was beautiful, that I was good, that I was lovable, that I was loving. I told myself I was helping him.

I shared this story with a friend who said I made my ex-boyfriend sound pathetic. "I think you should talk more about his good qualities, in more detail. The way you've described him, nobody would want to date or be him." I didn't disagree with this critique. In fact, I spent several hours trying to think of good qualities to balance out the portrait I'd painted. I couldn't think of a single one. Not because they weren't there, but because I had never bothered to see them. I spent six months of my life in a relationship with someone I found repellent, someone I didn't see except for his flaws. I spent six months of my life looking into the mirror his adoration held up for me, admiring nothing but my own warped reflection. I never looked around the jagged edges of myself to see the person who stood before me. No, he was not the pathetic one in our scenario.

He moved across the country after we broke up. I have no idea what happened to him. I haven't thought about him in years. As I remember him now, this half a person I dated but never really knew, I wish him well. I hope he found someone who, unlike me, treated him well. Someone who appreciates him for who he is. I hope that he continued to believe what we used to sing along with Bob Marley: "Every little thing will be all right."