In Love With a Memory

It had been a while since Dean had experienced going through a nervous breakdown. It was embarrassing that it had been wine that led to this all. Wine was for rich white women, the Real Housewives of… Wherever the Fuck, not for twenty-three-year-old college students aspiring to be film makers. It should’ve been whiskey or even cocaine, not fucking wine for God’s sakes. He’d never had cocaine. The most he had done was some shrooms with some girl in the woods in high school and some weed here and there with people he never got very close to. Well, just one person. He had got close to one girl he smoked weed with. That was part of what set this all off.

The fact that a few glasses of wine had made him wander out into his dormitory/apartment complex in a haze as he screamed into the starry skies was mortifying. It wasn’t just mortifying that he’d done it, but that wine was what led him over the brink.

His night was a jumbled jigsaw puzzle of confusion as his hungover mind tried to piece together who were the people around him. There were three of them, but he noticed the one in front of him the most. He always thought the guy was kind of an idiot, but a lovable one, a character straight out of a Judd Apatow movie. He was lanky and wearing a white jersey and had a thick black, curly beard. He was about twenty-one years old and still had this concept that college life was going to be like Animal House or Superbad. This was the first time he’d ever seen him look worried.

His head was still spinning as he heard his mother’s voice on the other side of the receiver. He said that he was ok. No, he didn’t need to go home. She pushed him on it and he pushed back. He’d been going back every weekend. It sounded so exhausting to go again. Part of the reason was that he missed his family, but the other part was that he just didn’t feel like he fit in this college football town. He’d been to parties and he got drunk at them, but he got drunk at them to feel some kind of oblivion so he could handle being at the party, not because he felt like he fit there in any capacity.

People always acted like things get better for people in college, but for him it was just the same shit, different town. Last night was an entirely different level of needing to feel oblivion. He wanted to drink so much he forgot who he was. It was the behavior of an alcoholic, but Dean wasn’t an alcoholic. Dean wished that he were. He wished he were an alcoholic, or an addict or a schizophrenic. He wanted to be someone who was allowed a little lee-way to lose touch with reality.

He kept picturing the woman’s face he had bought the wine from. She was an older, stout woman whose face had become wrinkly with age. He tried to decipher what her expression meant as he bought the product. He seemed to freak her out a bit. He had to admit his energy had been a bit much. He wondered if her expression was judgement, concern or even fear, like he was going to snap, throw the wine on the floor and starting shooting the place up. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to forget that he existed.

Snapshots of the night kept coming back to him like an out of order film he was trying to piece together to make some kind of context out of.

He remembered the phrases he spoke to a ghost:

“You were right”

“I suck… ”

And most of all.

“I miss you!!!”

He sobbed it into the ground and screamed it into the sky as if, if he just said the words loud enough or, with enough conviction, in the right direction she would hear and come barreling back to him.

In his hungover confusion, he remembered the emails. He rushed to his computer and turned it on, hoping he was just imagining things. He looked at his sent mail. There was no way to unsend it. He wished desperately that there were. The email he sent didn’t give him hope. He thought he finally had this under control. He felt ashamed, he should’ve just left her alone. He wrote another one up:

“Please disregard this. I had a rough night and just lost control a little bit. That’s not your concern anymore. I’m sorry. This won’t happen again.”

Everything had fallen apart. He thought he had pieced things back together after they broke up, but the truth was he’d pieced his life together the way four-year-old pieces together a Jenga tower.

Dean thought he was making the right choices. He was trying to get his life on track. He was pursuing his dream of working in film, he was in a film major, he had job, he was living on his own with some room-mates. It felt like is life was on track. Except, everything felt off, like the picture was titled. As time went on that picture kept titling further and further, and now it had crashed to the ground and smashed into a million pieces.

He was living on his own in a town where he related to nobody, right next to a football stadium, even though he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about any sports, let alone football. His mother had set him up with a job that he was terrible at, a leasing agent for a young man who was incredibly awkward and not exactly excellent at math, on top of the fact that his major made it so that he was always late and exhausted doing the work. It had felt just incredible when his mother had said that she thought it was a janitor’s job.

He’d just been fired. His boss was a nice guy who liked Dean, but the boss liked him so much and was so nice Dean had to be the one to broach the subject that he was being fired when he was called into his office. Dean thanked his boss for the opportunity, then slowly began to lose his mind.

He snapped at his film history professor about how this was a waste of time in the most dip-shit arrogant way possible, as if he was going to be the next Spielberg, Kubrick or Hitchcock and this was all just child’s play and busy work. He received an email from his professor about how disruptive he had been and how he was surprised because Dean had been one of his best students. Dean sent an email back about how he’d been fired and he was struggling with his mental health, then never went back to the class and received a deserved F.

Dean wanted urgently to return to a time of comfort, but he knew it was a fool’s errand. Then his phone’s text tone rang out. He looked at it with confusion. Nobody texted him. His parents didn’t like to text, they always called. He looked at the name who had sent the text. It was her name. She had blocked his number months ago. A slew of their old messages popped up, but he only looked at the most recent one:

“I got your e-mail. Do you want to meet tomorrow?”

He stared at it and considered it for a long time, thinking that perhaps it was a mirage manifested by someone who’d gone insane. Finally, he decided it was real and responded:

“You don’t have to text me. I shouldn’t have emailed you like that. Really, genuinely. I’m sorry.”

Ding!

“Let’s meet tomorrow night at 5 at the bookstore we always used to go to?”

“Ok.”

Then, he sat in silence before realizing he’d have to set up things with his parents. He called them up and told them he’d changed his mind.

Dean sat in the car, a bundle of nerves. His parents had been weird about him going out. He just didn’t want to tell them he was meeting up with Katherine. They probably thought he was out here trying to score. That really didn’t make sense. He had no connections except maybe her uncle, and the most he’d have on him was some weed.

Memories of her swirled through his mind. He was really excited to see her again, but it was mixed with guilt with how it was happening. What he had done wasn’t right. He should’ve left her alone. But, still, her standing next to him on the bus stop as they didn’t say a word repeated in his head like a chorus from a song. He remembered sitting next to her at AP English, nervously, but he really wanted to get to know her. She set him up with the poetry club they did at their house. At first, he had said he just wanted to be friends. He was so lonely and he just didn’t want romance to be attached to their relationship. He had not been doing the right things in that department. He had been chasing fantasies like a cliché John Hughes character. The women he was so in love with he really didn’t know at all.

When they did first start dating, they both agreed that they wouldn’t say they loved each other. They enjoyed each other’s company, but they were in high school and they didn’t really understand love. After a few months, they broke. She said it first. It’s not that Dean didn’t feel it, it was just that he was not as bold as she was. He said it back to her, and it wasn’t just words. He meant it. When he was with her, he felt like he fit. The world made sense. It wasn’t what he expected, but it was what he needed. She wasn’t the popular girl who loves the nerd. She wasn’t the woman who’d always been under his nose. She wasn’t a trope. She was a reality. She was a truth. Things weren’t always easy; they didn’t always agree and she didn’t accept everything he said or fawn over him every second. She challenged him and that’s what he needed.

She texted him that she was there. He got out of the car and went to her. The light lit her up like she was a dream. There might have been other people, there, but she was the only one he saw, the only person that mattered there. The way the scene played out it was like it had been choregraphed. She smiled so brightly and it made Dean’s heart melt. She was wearing makeup, and a nice dress that showed off her best features. Dean immediately wanted her again and the way she was presenting herself it seemed like maybe there was a chance, maybe there was a chance to get it all back. As he walked toward this dream of a woman, he hoped he wasn’t having a break from reality. He hoped this was where he really was.