Moving Backwards, Then Gunning It: Six Years of a Broken Heart with Mr. Oil Slick

So I had a moment of weakness. Or eleven.

I just couldn’t help myself. When I hear that voice on the other end of the phone, it makes me want to rip my clothes off then and there. And when that voice shows up at my door wearing an earring and a black leather jacket, that’s usually just what happens.

I know in the long run, the choice I make to take him back over and over again will hurt me far longer than it will make me feel good. In fact, the pleasure I get is so fleeting. Maybe it lasts a week or two, maybe a day. The pain has lasted six years. I hate that I’m so weak. Even more, I hate that this man knows this and plays on it with such ease. He doesn’t care what happens to me after he leaves. That’s not his problem. It’s mine. And it’s serious.

I was emotionally healthy before I met him. I’d just come out of a four-year relationship with a man who adored me. He was honest and faithful, kind and respectful. He never left me. I left him.

When I met Ari I no longer had stability or love surrounding me every day and I suppose I was searching for it in strange places. Like in the Indian restaurant where Ari worked. In the beginning, I didn’t think he was a bad boy. He seemed shy and gentle. We’d talk on the phone for hours, every day for a week before he even asked me out. We didn’t kiss until our third date. He wasn’t very good. In fact, nothing about that experience made me desire him. But several days later, when he sensed my hesitation, he said something that shocked me: “Show me how you want to be kissed.”

That’s every woman’s dream. A customized boy toy! I was hooked from that moment forward. Once I showed him what I liked, he showed me things I didn’t know I liked. Things I’d never felt before. He was a genius in the bedroom. It was like dirty dancing in the belly of a volcano.



Soon, I became a slave to his touch. I’d wait by the phone, taking it with me in the shower, just in case he called. I’d wait up long past my bedtime in case he wanted to come around for a late-night visit. It seemed I couldn’t sleep without him. I couldn’t work, either. I was always thinking about him. He was like a drug. When he didn’t call, I started blaming myself. It must’ve been my hips. Or my ass. I wasn’t a good enough lover. My hair was too greasy.

Because he didn’t want me, I was convinced no one else would either. That’s why I needed him to come back. When he did, I felt worthy again. I was confident and secure. You can imagine, then, that if this ridiculous affair lasted six years, so did my emotional instability. I flirted with highs and lows, vacillating between self-love and self-hatred. I tangled with passion and hung on the edge of frigidity. I lost myself in a big way.

I had a chance to find the girl I’d lost all those years ago when I returned from pastry school in London last January. London was a marvelous place. Full of museums, great boutiques and a steady stream of my one weakness – images of Ari everywhere I turned. It was two years since I’d last seen him, yet now he was all I could see. Every day. On every corner. Standing next to me on the tube. Gathered around a table in a Soho curry house. Talking on a cell phone. And in my fantasies every night.

I sent him an email and his response included several exclamation points and an urgent plea to call him as soon as I got into town.

“When are you gonna make me some pastries?” I could hear him cooing as he typed.

It reminded me of the time he worked at the Cheesecake Factory and acquired an entire pumpkin cheesecake.

“I want to bring it over and lick it off your body,” he teased.

Obviously he remembered the delicious year we spent Thanksgiving together and wanted to recreate it with something a bit more pliable than pie.

But that was then. And this was now. It had been long enough and I’d finally recovered from the last time I was strangled by his disappearance from my life.

I was sweating when he opened the door. He looked the same, but his hair was longer. He had a bigger earring and much more confidence. In fact, I detected the stench of bravado. I stood by his dresser and he turned on the radio. I placed my hands over the buttons on my coat, knowing that as long as I kept it on, I’d be safe. He had different plans.

“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you took off your boots?” he asked.

He had a point. They weren’t helping the sweating situation, after all. I took off the boots. And I might have removed my blouse, too (seriously, it was really hot in there).

He pulled me to him and wrapped his lips hungrily around mine. It was a marvelous kiss. It was tender, yet wild, passionate, yet gentle. The difference between this time and all the others, however, came from the fact that his kiss was no longer enough. Nor was the feel of his hands across my stomach. Nothing, not even the warmth of his breath or the way he pulled me toward him, meant anything anymore. I only came for answers.

“Why did you leave me?” I asked, lipstick smeared across my face.

I’m sure it was a silly question to a guy like Ari. Why not leave? Leaving is what he does.

“I leave when things get too close,” he said. “I was in love once and that was enough. I only want to have fun.”

I wished I could have made him understand how fun it was to sit by the phone every night, wondering why he didn’t want me. On this particular day, however, it was fun looking at this man on the bed next to me, the one with a flashy earring and tousled hair, and realize he no longer had any power over me. He had so little, in fact, that his repeated pleas to stay or the way he looked at me with ink-stained eyes, stirred nothing but pity in me.

How many girls had he flirted into bed that week? Even worse, how many of those women believed they were the only ones? It made me sick to think I used to be one of those girls. A girl who would give everything away for a little bit of adulation and physical pleasure.

I felt very light when I stood up to slip on my shirt and slide on my boots. And I felt happy too. I vaguely remember him saying something about “next time,” as I opened the door to leave.

“Next time, you’ll be alone,” I said, not looking back, moving forward for the very first time.

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Fixing A Wounded Heart: The Electrician Tries to Repair My Faulty Wiring

“I hope that one day I can make you believe just how wonderful you really are.”

Believe it or not, my mom wasn’t the one saying those words to me. It was a man. A man from my past who loved me six years ago and who was standing before me now, just as smitten.

It was a man who is gentle and kind, honest and faithful. A man as open as the Grand Canyon who doesn’t say words he doesn’t mean.

“You are so sexy,” he tells me as he kisses my neck. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?”

No, actually, I don’t. I only know how NOT sexy I am.

To me, the idea of being desired seems impossible.

I spent the last four years of my 20s steeped in a deeply dysfunctional and empty relationship. I was with a man who never paid me a compliment and barely desired me. I was never sure what, exactly, he liked about me, but I think he viewed me as that of a best friend. Hang out, eat dinner, go to movies, never have sex. Yep. That’s pretty much what I do with my best friends.

But it’s not what I wanted to do with a boyfriend. Still, I stuck around hoping he’d come around. But he never did. As a result, I fell deeper into myself, feeling more unworthy with each passing day. You can imagine what that does to a person. It’s probably similar to a dog that gets beaten by its owner. Like humans, dogs are never born thinking anyone would want to hurt them.

But slowly, as that hurt is inflicted on them, they withdraw into themselves. Soon, when their owner comes near, they flinch instinctively. They cower in fear. It’s never a question of if, but only a question of when. Some days their owner pets them and feeds them treats. “Maybe he’s changed,” they think. “He wants to love me now.”

But before they can even wag their tail, they get kicked again.

Even years after they escaped and found a loving family, they can’t shake the feelings of fear and inadequacy that filled their life for so long. It never goes away. So even when their new owners love them all the time and wouldn’t dare hurt them, inside, they’re too wounded to believe this love is real.

I guess I was like a beaten dog. I stopped believing there was anything good about me. I was empty. I didn’t believe a man could ever really want me. For me, it was only a matter of when. When the next one would decide I was worthless.

But instead, this one was telling me how great I was. How sexy and wonderful and beautiful and funny I am. And the crazy part is, I know he meant every word.

“How could any man ever not desire you?” he’d ask. “I have a good mind to beat him up.”

Secretly, I wished he would. I wished someone would hurt him like he hurt me. But I know I need to let that go. It’s time to heal from the past. And this man who wanted me all those years ago and still wants me now might just be the key to helping me do that.

He’s an electrician, after all. He is an expert at fixing broken things.

“How good are you with hearts?” I ask him.

“Mine’s broken, too,” he says. “I know what to look for.”

He looks me square in the eyes and brushes the hair from my face.

“It’s his fault for not seeing all that you are,” he says. “Not yours.”

I think about what he says. It’s been difficult, but I realize now, after comparing these two dramatically different men, that it never really was about me. I spent so many years thinking I wasn’t enough. Not pretty enough. Not sexy enough. Not good enough to make him love me.

Now I’m starting to realize he was the one lacking. He wasn’t smart enough to see how cool I am. I mean, I think I’m cool. The Electrician definitely thinks so.

He’s been working on me for days and I can feel a tiny current coursing through my body. It’s not time to turn the switch back on, but I know there’s a spark inside of me that wasn’t there before.

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A Failed Science Experiment: Hey Kids, Let’s Make Someone’s Heart Explode! A Lesson in Internal Combustion with The Mad Scientist

He would be in Paris in two weeks.

He emailed to tell me this, though I’m not sure why. We hadn’t spoken in a year, yet he emailed out of the blue to tell me he’d be in the most romantic city in the world, which, as it just so happened, was only a two-hour train ride from where I was at the time.

Imagine that. I was studying in London and he knew this when he decided to casually mention his European travels.

“I love Paris,” I remember responding. “I have a friend who lives there and I could visit when you’re there, if you want.”

If you hadn’t spoken to a man you were in love with for over a year and he emails when he knows you’re just a two-hour train ride away, wouldn’t you assume he’s hinting for you to come visit? I did. Stupidly. And the response I got still makes the vomit rise in my throat.

“I’ll be super busy the whole time,” he said. “Besides, didn’t you say it would be hard for you to see me if you knew nothing had changed between us?”

What’s the French word for asshole? Or how about emotional tease?

Creve Coeur. I know that one. Means heartbreak. Finally a French word I can understand.

If life had dealt me a different hand, I might actually be going to Paris – with him. If he felt for me what I was beginning to feel for him right before he dumped me, he’d actually want me there. He’d say something like, “Darling, don’t you think we could come here for coffee after my lectures on electron superimposition into the centrifugal solarsphere?”I would gaze into his eyes and say, “I don’t know what any of that means, but they’ve got brioche as big as Dolly Partons breasts, so yes, coffee would be lovely.”

He is a scientist, you know. One of those traditionally geeky guys who looks at a microscope in the same hungry way a frat boy looks at a woman’s ass, and gets equally excited about encyclopedias and Nova specials on PBS. When I met him I was a jumbled mess of atoms, surrounding a porous shell of what should’ve been a heart. I wasn’t looking for someone else to pour acid on it. So when he looked at me in the crowded bookstore, it was the first time I felt something move inside my chest. It was tiny, almost imperceptible, but I know it came alive that day, in that moment. And later that evening, as we sat on black leather couches sipping martinis, the beat grew stronger. It was practically a bass drum months later, when he came to visit me and touched my bare skin as Billie Holiday crooned gently in the background.

When I visited him, he had a box of chocolates he bought me on his last trip. It was half melted, but I was secretly touched by the gesture. He hid packets of hot chocolate around his apartment and when I found them, we made steaming mugs topped with marshmallows and laughed and kissed while trying not to spill anything. I made him pancakes and he ordered in sushi. We watched movies, made love, drank lemoncello from frozen shot glasses and made love again. It was the most naked I’ve ever been in my life. Naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes but has everything to do with exposing yourself fully to another human being.

By now you’re probably wondering what went wrong. So am I. If you know anything about love, you know it often leaves you wondering. Maybe for years. Maybe forever. He told me I was beautiful. He said I was funny and intelligent. He told his parents about me. We liked the same music, enjoyed independent films, loved culture and travel and he was picking up on my love of food. But as the Bachelor said on a recent episode to a girl he’d just rejected, “You had so much of what I was looking for, but in the end, you didn’t have enough.”

That’s just how it goes sometimes. Does that mean I’m okay with the outcome? Of course not. I wanted to be the girl for Mr. Scientist. I wanted to fit inside his universe. But instead, I got to find out what it’s like to find a man who fits in mine. That’s a very cool discovery, if you ask me. Screw Halley’s Comet or extra terrestrials. I finally found where my heart was hiding.

Someday soon, someone else will find it too.

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