For a dead guy, you've gotta a tight grip...

I was young and easily impressed by a sly smile. Had I only known then what I do now: sly smiles usually hide something. Granted sometimes that something isn’t a bad something, but in this case, it wasn’t a good something either. In this case, that sly smile hid the face of the man I would see long after he disappeared. That sly smile hid the right hook that would come nearly 13 years after I’d forgotten his middle name, or the warmth of his touch, or the taste of his kiss.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Lauren’s father, Jamie McHone. He and I met when I was foolish enough to still believe that love (apart from any other factor) is enough to change a person. (Let me share something with all you 20-somethings who don’t yet know: Love is not enough to make a man or woman, for that matter, change. Not by itself. There has to be something else – another factor.) My father tried to warn me; nothing doing but for me to jump on in to a relationship with this guy and give it and him my all. It ended horribly. I was heart-broken and pregnant. Jamie moved on. Rapidly. Not long after he moved on, he shot himself.

Please forgive my unvarnished, unsentimental retelling of this love affair. I am a romantic. I wish this story were filled with long, slow kisses and dancing in the rain. I would give my pinky toe on my right foot – the more important of the feet, as you know – for this to have been a romance to rival any other in the history of romance. However, in order to have a romance, you have to be with someone worth romancing and apparently Jamie didn’t think he was. And sadly, neither did I. So I was content with his hand-me-down affection so long as I had the hope of a brighter future. And hope I did. Even after his funeral, I still daydreamed about the man he could have been. After a while, that became exhausting and keeping up with it all became pointless. Eventually, I conceded to the truth: Even if Jamie had lived, there was nothing to guarantee that anything would change. So I thought I let it go.

Until today when I experienced what can only be likened to being punched in the stomach while watching your parents make out naked while your grandmother sacrifices a kitten to a dead clown but then brings you fresh, soft chocolate chip cookies after. There was hurt, shock, loss of the ability to breath, and finally warmth.

I was hurt to realize that I’ve ended relationships and picked people apart not because of something they’d done, but because something they did was so similar to something Jamie had done. It was almost as though I could sense the hurt and embarrassment and feeling of betrayal that would inevitably follow those actions and I would rather hurt a little by my preemptive strike than a lot by ignoring it.

I was shocked because I hadn’t realized that Jamie still had such a tight grip on my happiness. I knew that I probably had issues with abandonment but I never thought about those coming from him. Or that they may not be abandonment issues at all. They may instead be self-preservation issues: I don’t ever want anyone to make a fool of me again. Cause that’s what Jamie did. He’d made a fool of me. I trusted him with my love, money, car, body and soul and he burned me. I chose him over my family and he threw me out like a ragdoll. He wanted only the light, fluffy parts of me. And when I refused to be only light and fluffy and things got real, he ran. Fast. So fast, in fact, that he didn’t completely end things with me first. Yeah, that sucked.

So there I was, sitting on my therapist’s couch, tears rolling down my face, while I tried to find the words to say what I was thinking, not to mention the breath with which to say it.

“I…I…Every…I…Every time…has…been…I…can’t…” Finally I blurted out, “Every time I’ve sabotaged a relationship has been because of something Jamie did.”

Perhaps not exactly, but very close. For example, I dated a guy who drank. Now Jamie never drank but he did smoke weed. Jamie never hurt me, but he tried to control me, which may very well be where I developed my control issues and my fierce sense of independence, who knows. What impressed me more than all that was the awareness that I suddenly, in a moment, had reason to hope again. Warmth spread from my face, down my spine, into my arms and hands, and further down into my back. I felt energy cracking through my skin and breaking down walls that I never even knew existed. Oh, I knew I had walls, to be sure. I just had never thought they were made of Jamie bricks and held together by years of unsaid things.

Ask anyone with issues if they enjoy having them. The person who says yes is lying to you. We all want to be as near to perfect – or at least a better version of ourselves – as we can get. Realizing that Jamie still had a hold on me made it so much easier to understand how to begin the improvement process. So crazy as it sounds, I think tonight I will write him a letter. I will forgive him (and myself) for the foolishness of our youth. I will share my dreams with him. I will give him permission to observe from afar the progression of Lauren’s life (and mine). I will not assume that he looks on me with loving regret. I will not assume anything. I will not give him a voice at all. I will pretend that he is listening to me and the sound of brick walls crumbling as a new Wendy steps out from the rubble.

I hope she likes Mexican food.