Blue: Part III

The Story of my Greatest Heartbreak

Please enjoy this audio version, read by me.

After we broke up, in my deepest pain, my friend Kamran asked me, would you rather be back with Leo or wake up tomorrow and be completely over him.

I didn’t have to think. I’d rather be with him again. Always. There was no life without him. No future. Only a dark cloud. A blank. Nothingness. 

I’m feeling a lot of resistance to writing this.

I don’t remember fully why we fell apart. I remember bad moments, scenes. I have ideas, but I’m not sure I know the truth. I can’t be objective, I don’t know what was going on with him.

This is what I remember.

When I got back from France, things had changed. It’d be a rough summer for both of us. We missed each other terribly. This was pre-iphone, so I lived for those prepaid phone cards and a chance to sneak into a phone booth or an internet cafe so that I could call or email him a letter.  There was an epic heat wave in Europe that year, hundreds died from the heat, I didn’t sleep well, I left my window open an was devoured by mosquitos, then my host mother rubbed a cream on my chest that gave me an allergic reaction and I was covered with itchy red bumps that looked like pimples all over my chest and up my neck. I looked disgusting and these bumps lasted the entirety of my trip. 

The theater festival in Avignon, my reason for being there, was canceled because of the actors’ strike. My host mother was crazy, I’m guessing bipolar, she hated me for being mopey, for speaking terrible French. She’d go from zipping around the house in an overly cheerful mood, speaking so quickly I couldn’t understand a word, to laying on the couch watching tv all day with the lights off, not moving, lashing out if spoken to. Her teenage sons resented me for taking their bedroom. I was miserable without Leo. All I wanted was to be with him. He felt the same. He told me about his suffering and longing for me in long, romantic emails, emails he wrote every day of my absence, sometimes twice a day. 

Finally the day arrived when I returned. Leo picked me up from the airport, we made out the whole way back, when we finally got home we tore off our clothes, desperate to touch again. I can’t remember exactly when it began, maybe after we made love, but I remember a slightly awkward feeling crept in. Like, a strange discomfort where there’d never been one before. A feeling of unease. Maybe it was just the jetlag, maybe I was just tired.

Leo didn’t leave our college campus that summer, he had to take a summer class, some required course so he could graduate on time. While I was away, Leo had been hanging out constantly with his friends, a group of “cool” guys who drank heavily, smoked a lot of weed, and did cocaine. A bunch of them were in a comedy group together, performing sketches that degraded women. They treated their girlfriends like shit in front of other people, calling them names, one was rumored to have hit his girlfriend at a party.  Leo said he had needed his friends while I was away, to buffer him, to help him through his sadness, to deal with missing me. But when I got back, it seemed like he had sunken into a pattern of heavy drinking and weed smoking that hadn’t been an issue before. He wanted to go out with his friends more, to stay out until three or four in the morning, he would come home trashed, high. One night he vomited so much I worried I needed to take him to the hospital.

This is where the tension started for me, as I remember it. I thought he had a problem with drinking. The first time I spoke to him about it, he cried and said he would never do anything that would jeopardize our relationship, that he would clean himself up, that he would do better. But that night he was out again, getting drunk with his friends while I lay in bed alone crying.

As far as conflict goes, the two of us could not have had two more disparate coping strategies. I was like a battle ax, head on aggressive confrontation, anger, rage, wanting to fix things now, wanting to duke it out. Leo was avoidant, he would disappear, lie, leave out information, not call or text. This same fight repeated, I raged at his absence, physically and emotionally, he retreated further from me, disappearing into the night.

There were other problems. With me. I don’t want to make this out like he had the problem and I was some sort of perfect person. I was seeing a psychoanalyst, a Yale PhD. At first I went once a week. She sat there silently, listening for the full hour each week, never speaking. Then she told me I needed to go twice a week. Then three. Then four. Each session, funded by my parents, who must have been alarmed by how apparently insane I was to need this much therapy, she would sit silently, listening, never speaking, allowing me to ramble on. All I remember her ever saying was, “why does it bother you that Leo smokes weed?” This set me into a spiral of confusion. Maybe it shouldn’t bother me so much? Maybe I was the problem? 

She sent me to another psychiatrist who put me on medication. Zoloft. I became nauseated, confused, depressed, tired, sexually dysfunctional, unable to orgasm. I complained of the side effects, but instead of taking me off Zoloft, he decided to hold the course and add another drug into the mix, Wellbutrin. This totally fucked me up. I know my mind was not my own, I know I could not self-regulate. I could not function. This compounded with my failing relationship put me into a mental health crisis.  I remember at some point I went home, I can’t remember if this was before or after Leo and I broke up, but my dad watched me, he observed, he could tell that something was off. Then he said, we’re taking you off all this shit, and that was it. I weaned off. 

What are the scenes of our demise that I remember.

My 21st birthday, Leo wanted to go out to a bar with me and his buddies. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t care about drinking, I didn’t like drinking and I didn’t like his friends. I wanted to spend the night with him, alone. We fought. He left. I spent my 21st birthday crying.

One night I became so rageful that I grabbed a hammer and smashed it through the portrait of me from Three Tall Women that Leo had proudly displayed in our apartment. 

Over Thanksgiving break, I was supposed to fly home to see my parents. For some reason, instead of flying out of NYC like I usually did, my parents booked me a flight from an airport an hour away by cab, somewhere I’d never flown from before. I took a $100 cab to the airport, got on the plane, a red eye, flipped out from fear of flying, sure there were terrorists on the plane, got off the plane, took a $100 cab back to my apartment with Leo. Leo was there, confused, not necessarily happy to see me. My parents fumed, the next day I had to go back to the airport and do it all again. All this to say, I was not in a good headspace, my anxiety spiraling out of control.

Over Thanksgiving I sobbed and admitted to my dad some of the stuff that was going on in my relationship. I told him about Leo drinking too much, smoking weed. For some reason marijuana was a huge trigger for my Dad, deeply taboo in my family. We never talked about drugs, ever. My dad flipped out and told me that I had to tell Leo that if he wanted to be with me, he could never smoke weed ever again. This was bad advice. This didn’t go over well. I think this ultimatum may have put the nail in the coffin.

After Thanksgiving break, we fought endlessly, screaming like the couple we had heard next door, the monster we feared seeping through the walls into our bodies, taking us over. I decided for the first time to spend the night in my empty dorm room rather than our apartment, our first time ever apart while in the same city. I took a pillow and blanket and slept on my single plastic mattress, alone, staring at my empty walls.

The next night Leo came by. I presumed to beg me to come home. To apologize for how he’d been acting. 

He started to mumble something, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, it took me too long to figure out what he was trying to tell me. He was breaking up with me.

My reaction to this was the only time in my entire life I have experienced such a response.

I physically could not breathe. As if I’d been bucked off a horse, all the wind knocked out of my body. I gasped for breath, clutching my desk.  

I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I repeated. 

Leo was scared, he held me, he tried to calm me down, to help me to breathe. After a few minutes, once I could finally catch my breath, my panic turned to rage and full heaving sobs.

Get the fuck out! I screamed, a shrieking banshee. 

He turned and left. I could tell he was afraid. I could tell he was sad. I longed for him to stay, to come back. But he didn’t. He followed my command.

I continued to sob, completely broken, my grief so encompassing and black, I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t self-soothe. I needed Leo. To hold him. I don’t know how I survived that night.

After we broke up, it was as if all the confidence, beauty and aliveness that I’d had when we were together was completely sucked out of my body. I was deflated, flattened on the road. I was garbage. Nothing. 

Then began the period of push and pull, here and gone, on and off, this lasted at least a year, maybe two. 

I waited, like a junky, for him to call. I had him programmed in my phone as a specific ringtone, I can still hear it in my head. Every time I heard that ring, sometimes at 3AM, my body would fill with adrenaline, with hope and excitement, Pavlov’s dog. My answer was always yes, come over, I was waiting. Come over. He had usually been drinking. We’d cry, have sex, he’d leave. And I’d wait for my next hit.

I was asked to sing at somebody’s house party. I’d put a set list together of mostly jazz music, I was the hired entertainment. Leo heard about this and showed up to the party. Sat on the couch in front of me and listened to every song, ogling me. He told me I was the most talented person he knew, we kissed. I thought for sure he would stay with me that night, that we would be together, but then he left, teasing the animal and departing.

I must have tracked him down. I remember standing in the street in the snow outside an apartment I knew Leo was hanging out with his asshole friends. I think I’d been drinking, trying to cope with my abandonment. I screamed up to the windows, I called his name, Leo!! Leo!! I begged him to come out. His friend yelled at me to shut up. To go away. I heard them all laughing at me. I slipped and fell in the snow. I cried beneath them as they laughed.

I tried to move on. I attempted to make out with someone and sobbed into his mouth. He said we didn’t have to do anything, but I still wanted to try. I’m good, I said. He stopped me. He didn’t want to hook up with a sobbing girl.

I went on a tour with my improv comedy troupe to the DC area, where Leo’s family was living. This must have been over winter break, near Christmas because Leo was home. I took a cab in the middle of the night to his house. We made love, I spent the night, then slipped away in the morning back to my group. But that next day he wouldn’t return my texts, he was gone again.

Leo and I were supposed to star in a play together as lovers in a bit of an abusive dynamic, Look Back in Anger by John Osborn. I decided to drop out of the play. It was too painful to have to rehearse with him, to play lovers on stage, and then to try to maintain my sanity, my composure. I knew I couldn’t handle it. My good friend Stacey took the role. She asked my permission. Of course, I said, I would love for you to play that role, you’d be perfect. I felt sad, but genuinely happy that of all people, she was taking the role. Someone I trusted.

One night I went to a party and saw Stacey. I asked her how she was doing, I hadn’t seen her socially in a long time, which was weird for us, I used to see her all the time. I asked her where she’d been, what was going on, was she dating anybody?

She looked at me with fear in her eyes. 

Julie, let’s not do this here.

What?

Not here, let’s talk about this later?

What are you talking about?

I was utterly confused. Then it hit me, like a punch in the gut.

Oh my god. Are you dating Leo?

I told you not here.

I fled the party, running down the street, as if the faster I ran away, the grief and pain I was feeling couldn’t catch up with me, that I wouldn’t feel it. I was sprinting, like I was being chased by wolves.

The days after that were bad. I remember lying in bed all day. Not wanting to get up. Not wanting to live. All of my friends were also friends with Stacey, they all knew about it before I did, and nobody wanted to talk about it. They defended her.  I was left completely isolated and alone with my pain.

Eventually, months later, I also tried dating someone else, Drew, a super sweet and funny guy that I was doing a play with, one of those guys that everybody adores, a good dude. Leo continued to date Stacey. 

Then again, I got the phone call in the middle of the night, the junkie ringtone setting off a chemical reaction in my body, drooling, frothing, anything for my drug.

Leo came over and we had sex. I can’t remember the details well, but I think I tried to convince him that we both should break up with the people that we were dating, that we should be together again, that it was clear we were still in love, that we couldn’t be apart. But this made Leo anxious, he didn’t want this. I told him I had to tell Drew, that I couldn’t lie to him. Leo begged me not to tell, he became angry.

I did tell Drew the next day. Drew was hurt. Drew told Stacey. Apparently she was angry with me, like I alone had done this, like this was my fault. Fuck her, I thought, fucking nerve on that bitch. Drew and I broke up. Stacey and Leo kept dating. 

Leo and I were in a playwriting class together, a small seminar workshop type setting. We sat in a circle, everybody facing each other, and shared our work. Leo read his monologue. This was the moment that broke me so deeply, cut me more than anything else. His monologue was about a needy girl he was dating, who was always “grabbing at his cock” and annoyingly telling him, “I love you, I love you” in a cloying way. I sat silently in the circle, stiff, not moving. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. My face didn’t move, but tears rolled down my cheeks. I was too paralyzed to wipe them, to sniff, I couldn’t bear anybody witnessing my pain.

After class I ran back to my dorm room and destroyed everything that I had of our relationship. I’d been keeping treasures. A box of love notes, letters, gifts he’d given to me, pictures, I even had t-shirts I made with his face on it. I tore up everything in a rage, screaming and crying. I threw them in the trash, I deleted all of his love letter emails from our summer apart. This is why I have no momentos of our love, nothing left to show, no proof that it was real.

My brother tried to comfort me. You were only with him for like a year, right? That’s just 1/21 of your life. That’s nothing. That’s such a small fraction of your life if you look at the big picture. He won’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t explain. Nobody understood. My friends, my parents, nobody could comprehend the depth of my love for Leo. You should hate him, my mother berated me. I shut off communication. I stopped trying to explain. 

The summer after my junior year, I went to NYC to do a play in the Fringe Festival called Nikki Goes Goth. I played a ridiculous spoof of Paris Hilton, who was a huge deal at the time. It had a allstar cast of yet to be discovered actors: Billy Eichner and Zoe Kazan written by Liz Meriweather, the creator of New Girl. I got rave reviews in Time Out New York - Julie Lake is the gold lamé sun around this production spins. It was a huge win for me, a huge bolster to my confidence, my belief that I could make it as a professional actress, that I could make it in NY. That I could survive beyond Leo.

Before we opened, we had a huge fundraiser party at a bar. I was supposed to perform, do some jokes, a teaser type act for the show. Then, Leo showed up. I remember my hands shaking, feeling sick. I started taking shots. Shot after shot. I pulled off the act, but after I continued to drink. Then I was vomiting in the bathroom, vomiting over and over, I couldn’t stop. My good friend from high school, Lexi, was there that night. I begged her to take me to the hospital. We made it to the emergency room, a nurse pricked my finger, took some blood. Then I freaked out and begged Lexi to take me home. I continued to vomit, to drink gatorade, to eat rice crackers. I woke up with rice crackers all over my body. A couple days later I had to have a meeting with our director. She told me that my behavior was unacceptable, that I’d embarrassed her, that she’d thought about firing me. I’d never been so ashamed and filled with self-hatred. I fucking blew it. I was a fuck up. An idiot. And Leo hadn’t even so much as spoken to me that night. I was nothing.

Leo was supposed to graduate that spring, but he decided to stay in New Haven through the fall semester of my senior year. I’m not sure if he had classes to finish or if he just wanted to hang around, I think he was still dating Stacey. My torture continued. The constant on and off had cooled a bit, but he was there. I would catch him in the corner of my eye, a specter haunting me, his face bringing back all the pain. Always possibly around the corner, within reach, but gone.

Finally he left. I heard he’d moved to Los Angeles.

With his absence came a long reprieve. I wasn’t over him. But he was gone. And I could try to collect myself, to regain some control, to regain some decency, some pride.

For about a year or two things were quiet between us. I may have heard from him from time to time, but no sex, no tears, no declarations of love.

I graduated and moved to New York City, and right away was having success as an actress. I’d played a starring role in a hit comedy called Heddatron. I was gaining momentum, attention, I was always in a play, always acting.

Then I got a message from Leo. That he was coming to town. That he needed to see me. I felt afraid, but of course I said yes. Always yes. The love of my life. Always yes.

I met him at Grand Central, to pick him up, help him navigate the subways back to my neck of the woods. I was tentative, but won over quickly. He felt like my Leo again, warm and kind, the Leo I fell in love with, sweet and thoughtful. 

We went out to an Italian dinner. He told me he still loved me, that he wanted to move to NYC to be with me, that things would be different now that we weren’t in college, that his friends weren’t around all the time. That he wanted us to be together, to be married, to have babies. 

I’d heard rumors that Leo changed his tattoo from Julie to Juliet, that he’d added a T. He’d played the role of Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, so it made sense that he would do something like that. I asked him about it.

He rolled up his sleeve, and there it still was. JULIE with the heart over the i. He hadn’t changed it. I stroked his arm, I kissed it. He was still mine. Mine. It hadn’t all been a silly dream. I wasn’t a fool. He loved me, just as much as I’d loved him. This was real. True love. I wanted everything he wanted, to be together, to get married, to have babies. Love of my life. Leo infinitely scrolled across the expanse of time

We went home that night and made love, we slept in each other’s arms. My dream had come true. Leo was back.

The next day he had to leave, back on the train. But we had a plan, we were going to finally be together. He was moving to New York to be with me. We were getting married. 

I was on fire, ecstatic, in love. But then, after he left, I started to shake again, a feeling of dread and fear so deep it took over my whole body. The pain I’d felt with him crushing me, I couldn’t go through it again, I couldn’t withstand it. I didn’t know if I would survive it. I feared he would kill me. I feared for my life. I trembled, pale, shaky. 

He wrote me later that day to tell me that he loved me. A confirmation that he wasn’t disappearing this time. That this was real.

I kept shaking, shaking, a scared animal. I needed to put an end to the fear, to the anxiety and the pain. I knew there was only one way to do it. Like at the end of a film when the protagonist realizes they have to kill themselves to finally kill the monster. Or cut off their arm to escape the chasm they’ve fallen into. This was the worst decision I’d had to make. 

I wrote him an email that night. I told him that I loved him but that I didn’t want him to move to NYC. That I wanted him to move on and be happy with someone else. I told him not to call me again, that I wouldn’t pick up.

He responded that he understood. That he was sorry for all the hurt that he’d caused me. That his life had never been taken and wrung out so, as it just had been. That I’d always, even in bad times, made him a better person. That I was his favorite person ever made, fiction or otherwise. That he would love me unconditionally, forever.

This was it for us. I never heard from him again.

Shortly after this, he met his now wife. They had children.

It took me a decade to get over him. 

Whenever I got drunk, not often, maybe once a year or so, I would text him that I still loved him. He never responded, thankfully.

I dated other people, but I was broken. So deeply scarred, damaged. I couldn’t love, I couldn’t be vulnerable.

Finally, at age 31, ten years after Leo and I broke up, I met my husband, Jeff. He healed me beyond what I knew was possible. He loved me with the same intensity as Leo but with a dogged loyalty and commitment that was unwavering. He never left my side. When we fought, he held me tighter. He apologized first. I remember after our first fight, I left our bed and went to the couch to fume by myself. I was filled with grief, sadness, was this the end for us? I lay there in terror, wanting more than anything for him to come to me, to hold me. And within minutes, Jeff was there, on the couch, holding me. He never let me down. He never ever let me go. 

Jeff showed me love that doesn’t cause pain. A love that doesn’t cause chaos, distraction, addiction. Jeff’s love is, like Leo’s was, concrete, like a brick. A brick you can use to build a home, a home to hold your family, to safely protect your heart, to keep you warm, safe from the raging winds, safe from the storm.