The Boyfriend Chronicles: Craig

The Boyfriend Chronicles: Craig
October – December 1998, July – August 1999

If relationships were measured by the amount of damage left in their wake, my brief encounter with Craig would have been akin to the aftermath Force 5 hurricane chewing through a trailer park. The damage done to him in his childhood was paid forward with interest and deposited in my account. I may or may not have deserved some kind of payback for my own follies, but that boy ripped out parts of me that never healed. He hurt me so bad it scared me, but I have to admit I let him do it.

I don’t know why in the hell I fell for him, unless it was the typical explanation – that he was completely wrong for me. He was Irish* (flag one), an artist (flag two), damaged by non-existent or flaky parental units (flags three, four and five), and literally unable to commit to anything further than five minutes into the future. He was absolutely an impending disaster from the get go, so of course I was crazy about him.

I was living in a one-bedroom apartment over a beauty salon and working for the graphics place where I met Brett (who knew designing Yellow Page ads would gestate into such a hotbed of lust?). We must have run with some of the same crowd, because when I decided to strip and paint the ugly walls in my apartment, I invited him to join the party. He was one of three who promised to show, and I looked forward to that day more because of him than because I was finally going to replace six layers of ancient wallpaper with a paint color of my choice. Five hours into the job, I still hadn’t heard from him and the painting was nearly finished. It wasn’t until two days later he explained he’d been driving down the highway to my house and the piece of paper with my phone number and the directions on it blew out the window. It is a testament to either the depth of my infatuation or the willfulness of my denial that I fell for that.

We got together anyway, although Lord only knows how. He never once kept a promise. He was always late; he couldn’t even make the five-minute drive from home to work without being at least fifteen minutes late. Sometimes he didn’t show at all, like when we were supposed to go to a round of Halloween parties together as Adam and Eve. I spent the whole night being mistaken for Poison Ivy while he showed up on the other side of town as Braveheart. Double dates usually found me trailing uncomfortably after another couple, apologizing profusely for his absence and constantly checking my cell phone. He never called when he said he would, and usually got annoyed whenever I pointed out the rudeness of his behavior. He was a one-man roller coaster on which I occasionally tasted the underside of Heaven, but more often found myself steeping in Hell. We broke up weekly, at least.

During one of those breakups my dear friend Mercy came from New York to visit me. We met up at a popular sports bar near work and when we arrived, Craig was there. My plan to ignore him lasted all of five minutes, at which point he dolefully informed me he was going to be a father. His ex-girlfriend found out she was almost three months pregnant with his child and he wanted to do the right thing. We got back together that night because he said he needed me to be with him through this time, and thrilled to be needed, I vowed to stick around and help with the babysitting when the time came. My knack for emotional masochism was mind bending.

Now Craig was a good guy, I’m sure, but his head was so high in the clouds (and on other substances, as I later discovered) that reality just didn’t click for him in any way that made sense. He had this idea that he was going to raise this kid and make up for all the damage his nonexistent father had done to him, regardless of the fact that he still lived at home, couldn’t manage to pay his bills on time, and never once showed up for anything when he said he would. I would never say the loss of a life is a blessing, but when she miscarried, I am convinced that child was spared a fate not much different from Craig’s.

He was crushed, of course, and I in all my noble martyrdom determined to stand by him through his grief. Which I did, right up until we broke up again. This time when we got back together I must have finally started to see the light, because I told him it was on a trial basis, dependent on his learning a little responsibility. He did well, compared to his behavior in the past. Although he couldn’t seem to remember the brand of cigarettes I smoked, he did remember to buy some. He was still late, but at least he showed up, and sometimes he even called. After three weeks of this kind of improvement, I began to believe there was hope for us after all.

It was about a week before Christmas when his supervisor finally got fed up with his tardiness (the only matter in which he was dependably consistent) and fired him without notice. He was characteristically sanguine about his immediate job prospects, though, and so was I after witnessing the change in his behavior. Within days he’d lined up a promising interview, and I looked forward to hearing about it at the party we were to meet up at later that night.

I called him three times that afternoon to confirm, and when I didn’t reach him, I assumed his interview ran long and went to the party anyway. I don’t remember at what point I realized he wasn’t joining me, but I’m sure I was mad at him for ditching me once again. He didn’t answer when I called him later that night or that weekend, and I reasoned that he was probably trying to avoid the inevitable fight I was going to start. The messages I left with his family and on his cell phone went unreturned, and after four days I started running out of excuses. It wasn’t until after I’d been calling him without success for over a week that his mother finally took pity on me and told me he’d moved. For a second I thought she meant he’d finally rented his own place, and I was momentarily relieved to discover a perfectly rational explanation for his absence. But she went on to explain that he had relocated out of state, almost to the opposite end of the country from me. Permanently.

I was stunned. I have a pretty inventive imagination, but even I could not have dreamed up an ending so disproportionately cruel. Crushed does not begin to describe the condition of my heart and spirit. I cried myself sick, huddled in a dark corner of my still-unfinished apartment. I skipped Christmas completely, too mad at the world to celebrate and too absorbed in my grief to care. I took pills constantly, unable to sleep, eat or hold a normal conversation. I mourned like I’d lost a loved one, which at the time seemed entirely appropriate, but in retrospect seems as unwarranted as his abrupt departure.

I healed eventually, although not neatly. Some of the injuries faded, some left distinctive scars on my heart, and still others have assimilated seamlessly into the whole of me. All of them leave a perceptible echo in my present, though. Whenever I am accused of overreacting to a forgotten phone call or an overlooked promise, it takes me right back to those chilly late autumn months forever marked by the kind of perpetual disappointment only an incurable optimist can suffer. I don’t know if I will ever stop being gun-shy where trustworthiness in trivial matters is concerned.

A few months later, in May of the following year, I was looking over

my calendar at work and realized his birthday had passed without my noticing. I paused to poke mentally at my wounds, testing for tender spots and finding none. I don’t know whether it was perversity or generosity, but when I realized I was more or less okay, I sent a nice letter to his old email address as a gesture of closure. Two days later he answered.

He told me he hadn’t checked that account in months, but was thrilled to see my note and had been missing me. I believed it was more than coincidence, exerting superhuman powers of self-delusion in my effort to justify returning to the Hellmouth. He said he still loved me and I was more than willing to be convinced he had disappeared only because the swelling intensity of his feelings for me freaked him out. I wish I could say he was the bigger idiot of the two of us.

He offered to move back home to be with me, claiming his isolated new lifestyle had given him time to reflect and correct some of his more damaging behaviors. One weekend in July I flew out to visit him, and the surge of love I felt when I saw him waiting for me at the airport began to deteriorate no more than eight hours after I kissed him hello. We ended the weekend arguing about everything from the canister of pot next to his bed to his inability to commit to a date for his return. In the week following I watched him revert to his old habits, forgetting phone calls and not returning messages. A month later, he called to tell me he was coming back, but not to me. He’d had an epiphany in which he realized his previous ex-girlfriend was his destined soul mate and he was going to start a new life with her. I should probably be grateful that the multitude of previous letdowns I’d suffered at his hands prevented me from being too disappointed. I was more upset that he never returned the expensive hairbrush I’d left behind at his place than I was at his second abrupt desertion.

Weeks later I received an email from him. In it, he finally acknowledged the hurt he’d caused and apologized for being, as he said, like a cancer in my life. It was probably the most responsible thing he’d ever done, and with that, I gratefully let him go.

* I don’t have anything against the Irish, per se, it’s just that there are two types of men who prove over and over to be like crack to me; intense, hot-blooded Italians and brooding Irish artists. I can’t resist them, regardless of the fact that I know they’ll emotionally flay me.

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