I think I've only been truly in love twice in my life. I'm not entirely sure how to quantify what real love is, and I sometimes doubt if I know what love even is, but only twice have I felt that I unconditionally loved someone, and was sure we'd be married.
The first was Jeff, my boyfriend from around 2009-2013, on-and-off. Our ears were filled with the many voices of our friends and family telling us we were soulmates and that we were going to grow up, get married, and have lots of kids. We believed them. Although we broke up and got back together multiple times, which is never a good sign, what ultimately brought us down was a lack of similar interests as we reached young adulthood and honestly, a little bit of classism on my end. This was back when I still believed that if anyone worked hard enough, they would make the American Dream a reality, and if they didn't, it was probably because they were too lazy. I thought Jeff had no ambition and would never "make it". Now I know better, and kind of hate teenage-me, but I'll give myself a pass for being young and dumb.
The second time was Justin (interestingly, I have a tendency to date J-named Cancers), who I've written about on here probably just as often as Jeff. Spanning three years from 2014-2017, we spent a good part of our relationship in two different countries, and the hopeless romantic in me loved to wallow and brood about how far apart we were while listening to sad love songs. This is where I got my karma; Justin was a white, 25-year-old medical student who came from money, and he constantly belittled my then-retail career and insinuated that he would never marry someone who lacked ambition the way I did. I was pretty depressed for the last year of our relationship, feeling as though I wasn't worthy of dating someone who was so smart and accomplished, but also he was just kind of an asshole in general.
These two men take up a good amount of space in my head, and although I haven't spoken to Jeff in years, Justin and I speak pretty regularly and reminisce on our relationship through smudged, rose-colored glasses.
I surprised myself when upon learning Jeff was in a relationship, and apparently madly in love, I felt sad that somehow we would never have another chance. I honestly don't know where that came from, and I had never even thought about reconnecting with him, so those visceral and knee-jerk feelings that erupted from me genuinely took me by surprise. I think what it boils down to is that me and Jeff have more in common fundamentally than anyone I've ever dated before: raised in Latino households, yet drawn to American counterculture, making us both the black sheep of our families. His new girlfriend seemed to be the same.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that Jeff had taken down almost all his photos, most notably the many photo-dumps of his girlfriend accompanied by long and winding proclamations of love and adoration from his Instagram page, and I was intrigued. Unfortunately, it seems as though he has no other forms of social media, so I scrolled through Facebook, where I still had his mom as a friend, looking for clues. I don't know why I did this, I don't even live in New York anymore and I doubt that we could ever work again, but the lizard-brain in me wanted him to be an option.
That led me to tonight, in between rounds of virtual-pool with my sister and quickly losing my focus, I tried to go as deep as I possibly could to find any information about his relationship status. I came up empty-handed, and my sister tried to give me good excuses to send him a message and strike up a conversation, something I don't think I'll ever have the guts to do. I do actually still have some of his baby photos, so if I'm ever in New York I'll have a good reason to visit his mom and hope he's around (they still live across the street from my mom's house). However, I think it's a little unfair to drag people from my past into my fits of nostalgia and what-if delusions, because I'd be a little annoyed if it happened to me (and it has). I guess for now I'll try to get to know him through sparse and shallow social media posts and imagine what he's like now, 7 years since I knew him last.
