About a year after Leo and I broke up, I was talking to my therapist about him, again, still grieving, still trying to regain myself, to stop falling apart, to stop crying.
You know, my therapist said, all you ever talk about is how wonderful he is. Did you notice that?
I do?
You never talk about what was wrong with him, you only focus on the ways that he was great. Why is that?
What’s funny is that even now, 20 years after the relationship ended, when I think of him, of us, I remember what was good. I remember the love. What made me love him so deeply with such astonishing force and passion that I’d sacrifice it all. I’d sacrifice myself.
I walked back to his dorm room and he turned on a playlist of music he’d concocted and burned onto a CD. Within moments we were kissing.
This was not my usual makeout session, strange teeth and cracked lips, elbows, and hard confined bodies, awkwardness and a feeling of urgency, pressure, rushing, lacking all pleasure.
Kissing Leo was like my lips had found what they were made to do, their purpose, their home, the soft bed where they could rest and be loved, warmed, renewed. I’ve never done heroin, but I imagine this is how it feels. The most ecstatic, relaxed and pleasurable feeling one can have.
We lay on top of each other, skin to skin, and our bodies fit, we fit perfectly together like his crooks and crevices were made for my body, puzzle pieces, or two bodies split at birth but somehow ripped apart and healed over where the other used to fit. His skin was soft and warm and every touch and caress filled me with tingles of ecstasy. Somehow, all of this, with no anxiety, no social phobia, none of my usual demons around, they all left and let the angels sing.
Leo’s playlist was not the typical college boy makeout playlist, rap or some fucking techno crap with a incessant beat that made your head throb.
He was playing folk music, a female singer with a high soprano and astonishing lyrics that I couldn’t help but listen to despite being consumed by the magic of Leo’s body.
Who is this? I asked.
Joni Mitchell. He said.
Oh my god, she’s amazing.
I know. She’s my favorite.
We continued kissing. The soundtrack of our passion echoing its intensity, beauty, and depth.
I could drink a case of you, Darling, and I’d still be on my feet, I’d still be on my feet.
I’m sure I fell in love with him during Case of You by Joni Mitchell. I fell in love with him during this song. I know because I felt something in my body flip on, an emotion so deep with knowing, tears of recognition. That this person was not a stranger, not a first time hookup, he was a long lost lover, lifetimes of passion we’d had, over and over again in past lives, we’d been separated and now I’d finally reunited, in this lifetime, for another chance. Finally he was back in my arms, where he belonged.
I think I told him I loved him. At least I stuttered, stumbled with words.. . I feel I feel omg, I feel I’m so I feel I…. I don’t know if the word love spilled out, but the intent was understood and he affirmed that he felt the same. We looked deeply into each other’s eyes, my eyes welled with tears.
This feeling, of knowing, of reunion, I had it only one other time in my life, when my son Max was born.
We made out all night, and when the sun started to rise, he played Chopin and smoked a cigarette. I watched the smoke dance to the music, as the piano glittered with soft crescendos and falls, I was sure that the world was filled with magic, with beauty so encompassing, beauty I hadn’t turned on to until this moment. Until Leo.
When I got up that morning and started to dress, preparing to leave, I felt a bit of fear. Was this all in my head? This was the most intense love and passion I had ever experienced, and it was just one fucking night with this person I’d gone home with from a party. I had a horrible fear I was about to get burned, abandoned. That maybe I was a fool.
I told him that I was afraid, afraid that maybe I wouldn’t see him again. He laughed and held me and asked if I wanted to get breakfast together.
We waltzed into the dining hall holding hands, smiling like idiots, tired and disheveled and fully in love. We ate Special K Berries and giggled, googly eyed. This was real.
From that night on we never spent a single night apart. We slept night after night on his single dorm room mattress, thin and long and not fit for two people, but big enough for two people who couldn’t be separated, who couldn’t stop touching, stop kissing.
I remember telling him, or maybe he told me, that he wanted to unzip my skin and crawl inside and live in me. That he wanted to be shrunk into a tiny person and have me carry him around in my pocket. He wished that we’d been born twins so that we could have always been together our whole lives, never miss a moment of each other’s existence. We couldn’t get close enough, our bodies confining us, we needed to be one. He played silly games, like kiss animal, a creature that would sort of drift off with a lost look until he spotted my lips, and then his eyes would go wide with happiness and he’d kiss me, then back to the lost creature until again he saw my lips, then more wide eyes and kisses.
We had such shameless intimacy with a lack of self-consciousness. I’d never been confident in my body, my boobs, I’d had an eating disorder for a bit, but all that stopped with him. He loved my body, worshiped my body. We would both walk around naked, sit on the toilet and talk while the other pooped, it was the closest intimacy I’d experienced, the most myself, the most free, the most at home in myself when I was with him.
Leo had a worn tiny pillow he called Blue that he’d slept with since he was a baby. It’s edges frayed, stained and off-white, not blue, as it once had been. I’d admitted to him that I’d been very attached to my baby bottle as a child, and sometimes even when I was older and would get super upset, my mom would make me a chocolate milk bottle. Leo went to the drugstore and secretly bought me a bottle, filled it with chocolate milk, and gave it to me one night when I was having a hard time. To be that accepted, for him to be so thoughtful, to eviscerate my shame with love, those gestures meant everything to me.
Shortly after we got together, we went to our beloved professor Toni Dorfman, the head of the theater department, and sat in her office together holding hands.
We have something to share with you, we said.
Oh?
We’re in love!
She cackled and clapped her hands. She hugged and congratulated us.
We want you to marry us.
She said she’d be honored.
We had no plans for a wedding, but whenever it happened, she was to marry us.
We walked to a small shop together and bought used silver wedding bands and wore them always on our ring fingers.
Leo continued to introduce me to all of my favorite music. Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, The White Stripes, Chopin, The Strokes, Outcast - he somehow found the best albums and the best songs, and he played them while we spent time together, the music uplifting and enhancing our already heightened experiences together.
At the end of the semester, I was cast as a large role in the main stage musical, She Loves Me. My character, Ilona, was a gorgeous dummy who was always getting used by men. Until she goes to the library of all places, somewhere she’s never set foot in, and meets an optometrist Paul, who helps her find a book. They fall in love and get married.
I sang, “A trip to the library, has made a new girl of me, and suddenly I can see, the magic of books.”
And who was cast as my optometrist? We would sit backstage in the wings on a set couch and makeout in the dark while the show spun around us. The stage manager, Brit, who was super serious as a stage manager should be, called us out in front of the group and told us it was unprofessional to make out backstage. We just laughed. We didn’t give a fuck, nobody could stop us from kissing, nobody could pull us apart, we had no shame.
When the semester ended and summer rolled in, Leo moved off campus into an apartment, and even though I still had a dorm room claimed for the following year, I essentially moved in with him, my dorm room empty save one box of random crap.
Leo decided he needed a desk, so he bought the largest and heaviest desk you could possibly imagine, solid dark oak. Together we carried it 5 blocks to his apartment and then because it wouldn’t fit in the elevator, we carried it up six flights of stairs. I cried when we finally got it inside, just because it had been so heavy and such a colossal effort. We set it in place and then of course made love on it, claiming it as our own.
I had a collection of paper mache dolls from childhood, some with kites and stars around them. I’d put them up in my dorm room ceiling before I met Leo, watched them spin above me as I drifted to sleep. I thought of them as good luck fairies who watched over me. Leo surprised me one day, bringing me into the bedroom.
Look!
He’d hung all of my fairies from the ceiling and had even bought me a brand new one that he’d found somewhere in downtown New Haven
I cried with gratitude, not certain why the gesture hit me with so much emotion, but his effort to make his apartment my home, to put up a decoration that was so girly, that other boys might scoff at, to make me feel loved, to make me feel home.
I’d been in a play, 3 Tall Women, and the ingenious art department had somehow superimposed my face onto a large painted portrait of a woman from the turn of the century. It looked completely authentic. It was this 5 foot tall painting in a thick wooden antique frame, the print slightly translucent so that you could see through it on the stage. Even though I found it kind of embarrassing, Leo loved it and insisted that we put it up in his apartment. It took up so much space, it was ridiculous, but that didn’t matter to him. It had my face in it.
Leo had been talking about tattooing my name on his arm since we first got together, he’d been planning it, trying to figure out the design. Finally he had one of his best friends sketch it for him. Leo secretly went to get the tattoo and then revealed it to me. My name, JULIE, was drawn in thick black lettering spanning the entirety of his forearm, with a heart over the “i”, my signature way of signing my name, always with a heart over the “i”. To this day, nobody has ever done such a romantic gesture for me. Such a force of enduring permanent love. Others thought we were crazy. We were crazy. The craziest love. The absolute craziest kind of love. The deepest craziest love. I would run my fingers over his arm. Kiss it again and again.
I remember laying in the grass with him, my head on his lap, listening to music, thinking, when I die, when I’m on my deathbed, let me come back to this moment and live it again, let me revisit this, right now, let me feel this again.
As we made our new apartment home, we started hearing vicious fighting behind the walls. A couple screaming at each other, rage and full voiced bellows, an intensity of fighting I’d never heard before. We cradled each other in bed, like children afraid of our parents arguing, we felt scared. Not us, we thought, our love is forever.
Before I got together with Leo, I’d applied for a summer program abroad in Avignon, France to study theater and French. That time was coming up on us, and we dreaded having to part. Neither of us wanted me to go, but I’d paid, I couldn’t back out now.
The day before I left, Leo gave me a gift. A CD of the White Stripes, Elephant, the Beatles, Abbey Road, and a red and black striped thick bound notebook, so that I could write in my journal of my travels, write songs. These gifts he gave me touched me. He knew me. I listened to these two CDs on repeat all summer. I wrote Leo love songs in my notebook.
Leo took the long trip with me from New Haven to JFK airport, a 3 hour trip by train and cab. He carried my bags all the way in, got me checked at the desk, hauled my luggage up to be weighed. Walked me to the security line. Held me crying, kissing me, hugging me, never able to get enough, unable to hold each other deeply enough, long enough.
He stood at the edge of the security line, watched me walk through the entire way, the long weaving mess of people, the whole time he cried. Tears streaming down his cheeks, streaming down mine, Both of us a mess, both of us unable to stop crying. I passed through security, turned back, waved again. He kissed his hands, he blew them to me, he was still crying. I turned and walked away, an invisible thread connected to him, to his heart. The love my life. Forever.
After taking three steps, my flip phone rang. It was Leo.
I love you, angel.
Stay tuned for Part III next week, the final essay of the series.
i want you to believe this is a true story from your life but even if it isn’t it’s great.. and I can’t wait for III
Damn this love story is intense. I gotta see how this falls apart.