Vibing in Love

The following story is part of my collection of personal essays called The Menial Stories of a 21-Year-Old. It portrays my own interpretation of how events have played out in my life— take it as you will. 

On my 11th birthday, my parents were arguing again. I don’t remember exactly what had happened between them, but it was bad enough for me to ask them quietly, “Can we actually have fun together today?” My mother was quick to say, “No, sorry Jen, that’s not possible.” She continued yelling her angry words at my dad. My 14-year old sister Sasha and 9-year old brother Zane remained silent in the back of the SUV with me, sitting on both of my sides and passively watching our suburb’s bland scenery through the car windows. As a middle seat passenger, all I could focus on was the back-and-forth of my parents’ nasty comments and comebacks in front of me for the rest of the car ride. We were driving to Vaniglia e Cioccolato, my favorite gelato place in all of Pembroke Pines, Florida, but that was the first time I wasn’t excited to go.

I was 13 when my mother cried on Christmas morning. All five of us had opened our presents that we had given each other, and my mother had found out that my dad didn’t give her anything at all. She was really sad that day—she locked herself up in the darkness of her bedroom, wrapped in a cocoon of thick blankets. I didn’t know what to do to comfort her because she wouldn’t talk to anyone. Sasha became very upset and angry at my dad. Zane didn’t know what to think of the situation. I just saw it as another tough obstacle to their love.

Another obstacle. Love just seemed to have too many of them from what I saw, so I wasn’t super excited to experience any of it until I found him…

On January 26, 2016, eighth grader me started “dating” someone I believed to be the love of my life: a cool quiet pale Italian boy named Jonathan who had a slender yet athletic build and loved to listen to Nirvana. Notice that I put “dating” in quotation marks because Jonny and I really just had the classic middle school relationship. The furthest base we had achieved was cuddling on his living room couch when his parents went out on a date one Friday night. He surprisingly liked being the little spoon.

Jonny and I would often go out with our mutual friends to the movies, to middle school birthday parties, to our local C.B. Smith park. Sometimes I saw his flag football games, and sometimes he saw mine— regardless, we always debriefed about our plays afterwards on the bus rides back to school. Our conversations, not just those about flag football, were probably the best part of our “dating.” We talked and talked and talked, sometimes until 3AM on weekday night FaceTime calls, talking about our past crushes, our depressive episodes, and what makes us tick, angry, and sad.

My 14-year old self was in love, and I thought I could stay with this person, my person, forever. And I still felt that way even when Jonny broke up with me exactly two months after we started “dating.”

You see, after witnessing my married parents struggle yet persevere in their love for so many years of my childhood, my young mind came to know love as an infinite yet complicated task. Love was persistence and difficulty. And love meant staying with someone…no matter what.

You see, after witnessing my married parents struggles yet persevere in their love so many years of my childhood, my young mind came to know love as an infinite yet complicated task.

So, on March 26, 2016, I wasn’t exactly phased when Jonny texted me on the Kik messaging app that he wanted to break up. I don’t remember his exact text, but it went something like this:

Jonny <3
1 new message

Hey, I think we should break up. We haven’t talked as much lately and I’m just not really vibing with this anymore. 

In conclusion, he wasn’t “vibing” anymore, but of course I just saw this as another obstacle to our love. I told him that I still wanted us to try to make it work (like my parents had always made themselves work). He didn’t understand, unfortunately. I’m sure he pitied me.

A month after our awkward break-up, I discovered through the middle school gossiping network that Jonny had originally gotten with me to get closer to my best friend Holly. The night I found out this dirty secret, I was on a school trip in Washington, D.C., bawling my eyes out in a small hotel bathroom. I locked myself in there until around 2AM, when the tears grew tired from crawling down my face. I was sad like my mother on that one Christmas morning. But because I believed that I loved Jonny, I found myself justifying his actions. This was all just another obstacle to our love, after all. Holly was a glamorously tall skinny white girl, a Barbie, a conventional beauty that any boy in my predominantly white-colored class would crave after. It makes sense.

I was sad like my mother on that one Christmas morning.

My dear Jonathan didn’t end up getting with Holly, though, since Holly loved her friends more than any boy that crossed her path. He ended up dating Girl A, another conventionally pretty white girl, but I knew they were going to end eventually. He was going to come back to me one day because love meant staying with someone…no matter what.

Soon enough, eighth grade ended, summer passed, and high school began. Jonny had other plans in his agenda before he decided to return to me, the love of his life. He stayed with Girl A until September, quickly started flirting with Girl B in October, stopped hanging around Girl B by November, and got with his new girlfriend Girl C in December. Any level-headed girl would see this as toxic fuckboy behavior, but my delusional (egotistical?) self expected it. The reason why he was hopping from girl to girl was because none of them could ever match me in his eyes! I’m his one and only love, duhhh.

So, once the whole Girl C ordeal deteriorated by the end of freshman year and Jonny started chatting me up (in that ooh-I-want-you-so-bad way) the following summer, I was ecstatic. Finally, the love of my life has returned.

When I finally agreed to meet up with Jonny to “make music” (an excuse that I had told my mom in order to hangout with a boy) at his house that summer, we didn’t end up “making music.” We were talking, intimately, for what felt like a long time, in his bedroom, although this talk wasn’t as pleasurable as our past eighth grade conversations had been. He opened up to me about his new gains in songwriting, his asshole friends at school that he didn’t like, and his brotherly love for his sister’s boyfriend, but I caught myself zoning out as he spoke. Why, though? I also didn’t feel like opening myself up to him as much either. Many times, I checked the digital clock beside Jonny's bed, only to see that little time had passed. Wait, did I want to be there with him? Wasn’t I supposed to still be in love?

“You know, there’s someone I’d want to be with…so bad,” he had said, during one of the pauses in our conversation. I remember him grinning at me, mischievously, with his playful yellow-green eyes.

1. I wanted to laugh so bad because of that cringy line he said…there’s no way he said that unironically.

2. For some reason, I didn’t want that “someone” to be me, but I think it was.

I could imagine an elated eighth grader me with her insides squirming in that moment, hoping to snog him right then and there. But, almost sophomore year me had no pinch of excitement in her body at all. Sure, I knew love as persistence and difficulty and making it work, but I was no longer feeling his “vibe.”

I left Jonny's house after a few hours of “making music” and didn’t speak many words to him throughout the rest of summer and our entire sophomore year of high school. I stopped trying to force a love between me and Jonny but unfortunately continued trying to force a love with other people— other crushes, friends, cousins. I wasted precious time trying to catch the attention and energy of those who had nothing to give me.

I wasted precious time trying to catch the attention and energy of those who had nothing to give me.

It certainly took a while for me to become sick of this exhausting act and to realize that not everyone is fit to be an active part in my life. And I think we could all benefit from this realization— to become more receptive to our intuitive vibe-check of love, to learn to put boundaries between ourselves and others when we notice that certain relationships simply don’t work in the way we believe they should.

Now, I am a 21-year-old college girl (woman?) who hasn't been seriously romantically involved with someone since her eighth grade boyfriend. I’m still trying to figure out love and its “vibe.” All I know is that my parents were wrong about it all, and proof of that is their recent divorce after 30 years of persistent miserable marriage. They can’t even talk to each other anymore...

Pops
2 new messages

By the way if you do come on your break. I don’t want to go to dinner with your mom.

Things have changed significantly.

Mamá 
1 new message

Hey Jena I don’t know if you’re really busy or you don’t want to talk with me but anyway regardless I hope you’re able to talk to your friends About what’s going on with me and your dad so that you have somebody to talk to you

...Love is anything other than what I’ve seen—that means that it must be beautiful and kind and relieving. I hope I can find it one day.