Excerpts From the Quiet Chronicles.

There’s a lot I needed to do tonight, and coming home stumbling drunk at 7pm didn’t really help that.  It was a long and ridiculous day, and when the opportunity presented itself to meet a few friends after work, yeah, I took it.  And Grey’s Anatomy is a re-run again tonight, so here I am.  I’m staring at the phone, at three missed calls, and listening to a voicemail I’m not planning to return from my most recent ex-boyfriend.

Mr. Quiet and I dated for about a year during my last year of law school.  He was a very sweet, very nice guy, but we would have made better friends than romantic compatriots for two key reasons: (1) although I came to greatly care for him, I was really only looking to pass the time, which was incredibly selfish and wrong; (2) I was his first girlfriend ever.  His first holding-hands person, his first kiss, the whole shebang.  Definitely not my first.  It was a bit awkward, to be honest.

The thing of it was, though, that we just got along so well.  We really were glorified best friends, but of course like any relationship that ultimately ends in combustion, there were some loose wires that ultimately proved fatal.  He wasn’t sure he wanted kids, for one.  There’s nothing I want more than to be a mom.  Not too soon, sure, but I see little magdas on the horizon, no doubt.

Church was also a pretty serious divide between us.  It would take a skilled imagination indeed to cast me as any kind of devout, but faith and tradition are really important to me.  Mr. Quiet was not so much into that.  He flat-out refused to come to church with me. “It’s not for me,” he’d say.  I’d talk about how my dad’s faith has been so instrumental in the way I’ve shaped myself, and he told me straight up—more than once—that he was never going to be that guy.  It was easy for me to dismiss these differences because, once again, I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere.  The scars from some pretty detrimental relationships were still pretty fresh at that point, and I was enjoying the glow of just being, just finding appreciation in another’s eyes with minimal effort.  I later learned, and none too soon, that this just isn’t what love is about.

Just after we’d crossed the year threshold, I moved to DC. It fizzled, and fast.  He wasn’t one of those guys who can carry a conversation telephonically, and that hit hard.  I found myself saddled to a man who wasn’t there, who wasn’t want I really wanted, and who couldn’t fill the void of loneliness and longing that moving somewhere foreign necessarily opens.  I ended it, after about a month, and another month found me dating J.  Even had it never gone anywhere, I saw in J a spark I knew I’d never draw out of Mr. Quiet.

I didn’t tell Mr. Quiet about J, at least not at first; our friendship was thus (perhaps fraudulently) preserved.  I finally fessed up when I was home in August. It was awkward, but it was ok, and I legitimately thought I’d lose him.

Au contraire, the stars say, chuckling.  Our conversations remained a calm constant, but since the new year, Mr. Quiet appears to have gone aggressively on the offense, presumably on seeing that J and I are still together.  Why now? Why this week?  What, does he think I’m finally going to realize that he’s the one, leave J, and move back home?  It’s all rather depressing.

He’s been sending long-winded e-mails about how hard he’s working, and what his ambitious career plans are.  He’s asking me about nice restaurants around home, if he ever took me there (um, NO, we were in school on student budgets, but whatever); he says he’s making a list for when I come home next.  It’s like he’s painting himself as Mr. Spectacular, despite the common knowledge that I already have one of those.

But it goes on.  His last installment talked about how he can’t wait to have kids.  Then he tells me about this new church he’s found, and how he goes to the 8am mass Sundays before heading to the office to bill more hours.  He said he read the whole bible last year, and this year would like to really study it.  He says he never realized how spiritual he was. 

Ok, hold it, wait just a moment.  He’s no longer playing fair.  I feel like I’m being manipulated, which hurts a little bit because really, aside from the selfishness and J-concealment, I really thought we were on pretty solid ground as friends.  I also don’t really like that this seems to have come positively out of nowhere.  Where were these pages of perfection when I was trying to make it work?  Why now, now that I finally feel happy and settled?  I think it’s possible that I may have hurt him far more seriously than I realize.  For this, I am truly sorry.