Every Time I Should Have Known

A catalogue of the moments in which a relationship cracks and breaks

We sat at the end of his parent’s driveway. I had just left another friend’s house and was happy to be in his company. We chatted about the day. We probably kissed and flirted. I don’t remember except for this: He looked up to the stars and said “Ya know, I don’t see why you’re friends with Maggie and Grant anyway.” Which may have been ok if he was defending me against anything — rather than defending himself from his own pangs of insecurity.

We had been long distance for almost a year — he in Hawaii (Navy), and me in California, finishing school. As I considered post-graduation life, I had two divergent paths to choose from, both requiring not only acceptance to a program, but placement in a specific location: Teach for America, or graduate school. On the phone one night after work I posed the uncomfortable possibility that this might not happen — what then? To which he replied, well then you would move to Hawaii and put off school for two years.

We’d been having lots of talks lately — some nebulous about the “future” as a concept, some more concrete, about the future as it belonged to us. We’d browsed rings and tested the “what ifs” of marriage through a series of (not enough) hypotheticals. I told him I didn’t want him to ask my dad for permission to ask me to marry him. I am nobody’s to give away, or to receive. He asked anyway.

We were facing the looming inevitability of a military transfer. I would be uprooted from a city and a home and a whole life that I loved, for something unknown. This was scary, but I was willing to try to make it exciting, too. I had one request for his dream sheet: I wanted to live in a city where I could find work and make a new life for myself. Seattle. Chicago. New York. Boston. San Francisco. But instead, he included Port Townsend and Point Judith — beautiful, serene, tiny places where any semblance of my career would languish.

We sat on his bed in his parents house as he played bass — an instrument I would never much care for though I understand its necessity and function. I mentioned, as any good girlfriend might, that he was good. He responded “Yeah I’m kind of a prodigy I guess. Like Jimi Hendrix.”

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