Chapter 39: EX-LOVERS MEET

"Hey Isa, it was great catching up with you yesterday evening. Let"s do it again some time, today. I have something important that I want to tell you if we do catch up." Isabelle received a text message from Calvin with a beautiful card for wishing Ethan a Happy Birthday".
"What does that mean ? Will he ask me to get back together again if we catch up again ?" contemplated Isabelle in her mind. "Tell me now," texted Isabelle.
"I"m not sure if I can tell you over the phone," responded Calvin while teasing her a little bit.
At this point, her curiosity drove her crazy and she texted, "Come on ! Don"t do this to me. Just tell me. You know I'm busy preparing for Ethan's birthday party today."
"Well, I wasn"t going to tell you over the phone, but..." and then a few moments later, Calvin texted, "You looked really cute with that cappuccino moustache yesterday at the club... haha."
"Lol ! I'm going for a cake pick up. If you want we can meet at the restaurant for say, half an hour," texted Isabelle.
"Sure ! Send me the name of the restaurant and the time. See you soon, Isa !" replied Calvin as he got up to get ready.
Their relationship had been healthy — she was the gregarious yin to his socially awkward yang. They were two 20-somethings from similar backgrounds looking to make their mark on the world but in different fields.
They immediately hit it off, navigating that time of life when they were both young adults, but actual responsibilities had not yet surfaced and the future was the infinite possibilities they had imagined, spread out like stars in the summer sky.
Isabelle fiddled with her band on her left ring finger. She never knew what to do with her hands, especially when she was nervous.
"Maybe if I fall in love with my anxiety it will leave me too," murmured Isabelle to herself as she waited for Calvin at the restaurant.
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end. When we're in the throes of the nights that seem never ending or sunrise and sunset with arms wrapped around a person whom we love, we think that those times will go on forever.
Calvin had a devil-may-care outlook and a stellar smile. He wasn"t a male model but he should have been who was adored by the fairer sex for his Teutonic-gold hair. He seemed moulded from a different cast as he had an androgynous look uncommon to most people especially in their university.
Isabelle knew quite well that the past was a good place to hang around as long as one remembers that caution, friendliness and nostalgia are their best tools when approaching an old flame.
Isabelle's were thoughts interrupted when she saw Calvin at the door before he could see her. She watched him look around the room. Her heart was fluttering so fast that it made her feel dizzy.
Romanticizing the first love is easy when you've not seen them in a while, and you've no idea what was going on in their life. Getting back together for even a meeting with your first love comes with many mixed emotions which they both felt.
Isabelle was transported to eight years back: surrounded by Gothic architecture of her East Coast college campus when the quarterback she rooted for during football games and when the flame of first love got ignited as they both shared looks across a library during the finals.
"How many times have I imagined this meeting in the past eight years ? How many versions have I played through my mind — the angry, the passionate, the blasé version — now that we"ve both moved on and I'm married to our common friend, Kenji and had kids, I don"t understand how to react," Isabelle thought as he approached her table.
She rose to hug him. Their bodies still fitted so well together that she had to pull away fast.
Her palms were sweaty and her heart was beating so fast. Calvin, being always considerate, pulled some humour off with finesse to make Isabelle comfortable.
"So, ex girlfriend, what have you been up to since I saw you ?" Calvin said in a playful tone so as to make her laugh at the fact that he was referring to her as his ex-girlfriend.
"Nothing much, just busy with hospital and kids. How about you ? What have you been doing ?" asked Isabelle.
"I've been sitting for the last 5 minutes trying to count the wrinkles on your face in my mind. I think you've about 3,257. What do you think ? Did I get it right or am I way off ? Maybe 4000 ?" Calvin questioned in humour.
"I don"t have wrinkles !" exclaimed an indignant Isabelle.
"Oh yeah ! That"s right ! You have perfectly clear skin, more glowing than before" Calvin complimented.
By now Isabelle was laughing, giggling and feeling comfortable as he joked around with her like that, to put her at ease.
"Anyway, so I paid for the coffees the last time we met in college years back. Now it"s your turn. Take me out for an expensive dinner. Wine and dine me, girl" Calvin kidded as she laughed..
Calvin had always been very confident, funny, charismatic, charming and masculine in the way that he approached interactions.
"Did you tell Kenji about our meeting ?" he asked after Isabelle sobered up from her laughing fit.
"Hell no !" Isabelle replied. "Do you want me to tell him ?" she questioned.
"Of course not ! It would just worry him," Calvin responded as he reached across the table for her hands.
Calvin smiled and Isabelle saw the boy she loved in the man sitting across from her.
"Can you believe it"s been seven years since we last saw each other ?" Calvin remarked in surprise.
"Eight," Isabelle corrected and quickly added. "So you"re in town for this fundraiser ?" Isabelle asked, as Calvin nodded in approval then waved his hand in the air as if to do away with any small talk.
"I found some of our emails," he said. "When I was moving a few years ago. Our exchanges back and forth. I saved them all, you know ? Some were from our best days in college; some were during the bad ones, long distance," he added.
Ending a long-term relationship wasn't easy but getting over your ex-partner was even more difficult. Each day brought up some sweet memories of special moments or reminiscence of bitter fights, which made life after a break-up seem like an endless struggle.
"Through all of it —" he cleared his throat and continued, "We were really in love," Calvin remarked as if it was a newsflash.
"Yeah," Isabelle replied "Of course ! You seem surprised now."
"We were so young," Calvin remarked.
Isabelle nodded.
"And yet, we knew !" Calvin exclaimed.
Isabelle nodded again as she said, "I knew."
Eyes hooded with tears, obscured Calvin's vision.
"Are you crying ?" Isabelle asked.
"No," he said while crying. "It"s just really dusty here. This ketchup is really spicy," Calvin added, gesturing to the untouched food between us.
They both laughed, which suddenly made her cry, too.
"Why are you crying ?" he asked. "You miss me as much as I miss you ?"
"No, Not at all ! I miss my youth ! I'm crying because I'm reminded of the pain I felt in losing you, in losing us and I regret the time I lost in romanticizing the past with you in it. Where does history go when the relationship ends ? Is there a storage locker in the unconscious that keeps the memories until you meet up years later at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere ?" Isabelle asked.
"It was real," Calvin remarked.
"Yeah ! It was real," Isabelle concurred.
"It doesn"t make what I've known any less real or great, but it still makes me sad sometimes," Isabelle murmured, glancing down at her plate. She was surprised by her own honesty.
Calvin dumped her, saying that he didn"t want to be weighed down by a girlfriend while he was spreading his wings and seeing the world.
So they broke up, while she was still in college and he had already graduated and was overseas on a fellowship, they both wailed on the phone at international long-distance rates.
It wasn't as much a breakup as a severing, physical pain. When they hung up that night, he called her best friend and requested her to go to the dorm room and stay with her. She did.
Isabelle loved the way he loved her, even when he was breaking her heart.
She was barely nineteen the night they met, at a dorm party. Isabelle was punch-drunk and overconfident, lit up with a combination of cheap beer and his electric eyes searing through her.
She told him that she was going to be a writer someday.
"What will you write ?" Calvin had asked, leaning closer toward her, "Mystery novels ? Biographies ?"
"No, the kind of poems with love in the title. I'll write things that break my heart," Isabelle replied, the young, inexperienced girl"s innocence glowing in the words she said.
She didn"t know what heartbreak was at that time. She thought she did, but what she had known up until him were bruises to her ego, nowhere near her heart.
Two years later, for her twenty-first birthday, he gave her a beautiful writing pad with a note from him: "For all of your poems with love in the title."
"Do you publish your poems, as I want to follow your love poetry," Calvin asked now.
"I'm not following my poetry hobby," Isabelle replied. "Lately, I'm a professional doctor then a sandwich-crust-remover and boo-boo kisser. I spend more time in the hospital and grocery store than I do at my desk writing poems."
"Don"t give up now," he encouraged.
Isabelle always felt he was responsible for her becoming a poet. He thought she was extraordinary and made her believe it, too. It was a platonic love.
It was around lunchtime now and a large crowd had descended in the restaurant and every table around them was taken.
It was noisy, yet all she heard was him. As if picking up from where they left off, they were talking, overlapping, and interrupting each other, excitedly, without segues, like they used to every night in their college"s dining hall.
But now the topics had changed.
Isabelle talked about her children, their Lego sets, and their favorite books. They were two old friends who were just making up for lost time.
"Why didn't you marry, Calvin ?" Isabelle asked seriously.
"Seeing my friends, I felt marriage is lonelier than I thought it would be," Calvin whispered as he leaned forward across the table. "It"s til death do us part, but I've seen couples growing apart, not closer together as the years pass," he added in dismay.
Isabelle nodded emphatically, not saying aloud what she had secretly wondered for years: that marriage might be the slowest possible way to kill a once loving relationship.
Love and lust are replaced by micromanaging and keeping score over who last loaded the dishwasher. On the worst days, low on sleep and patience with a spouse, some married couples do ask themselves if they are with the wrong person, or if this was the nature of marriage, especially while raising very young kids.
But these thoughts Isabelle would never tell her ex, Calvin. After all, they are too fleeting, too damning.
And then, Calvin said while taking a deep breath right before, making her realize that what he"s about to say might be the reason he invited her for coffee.
"I've no doubt we would have been ridiculously happy together if we had gotten married," Calvin revealed his deepest feelings.
"Then why didn"t we ?" Isabelle blurted out, instantly feeling guilty as if she was cheating on her husband and her kids, just by asking it. "Why didn"t we end up together ? Why did you end it ?" she questioned, she couldn't stop herself from asking.
She knew the cost of asking those sorts of questions. She was suddenly as angry as she was eight years ago, feeling it all again.
She was betrayed by her emotions: If there was still that much anger, there must be a lot of love left, too. She wondered.
After Isabelle told Calvin about her engagement with Kenji, Calvin was quite disturbed at that time and they mutually decided that they shouldn't remain in touch, even though there was so much they longed to say.
"When I was shut out, I was just so crushed with guilt that I broke your heart," Calvin revealed now, almost eight years after their final email. "I"m not kidding when I say, you haunted my dreams. I would be having a perfectly normal dream and then you would be there, upset with me and angry with me telling me that I'm a terrible person," he confessed.
His apprehension quickly faded though, as the banter flowed casually and unforced. The comforting familiarity came long after each of them had moved on with their life and careers, long after things in their relationship went spectacularly wrong.
"I truly am sorry for putting you through all of that pain and all of those things that followed," Calvin apologized. "It was certainly not my intention and I don"t know if I ever said it before, but I mean it from the bottom of my heart. I never meant to put you through any of that," he sincerely said. "Even though I agonized over the breakup, Isa, I cared so much for you. I felt so horrible about inflicting so much pain to your tender, loving heart," he clarified.
They never had 'threw a glass against the wall' kind of fight. They never called each other names. They never did anything to achieve any sense of closure.
The relationship had been so good for so long and the ending so non-confrontational, so polite, that her engagement sent him into a tailspin.
Now, well after eight years, she has gotten to an age and stage where, when the siren of the past calls her then she knows she's blessed and enjoying a hectic but rewarding life.
"I was too ambitious and thought something better would come along," Calvin replied honestly. His eyes filled with tears, and she didn't have to ask him if something better came along.
It's not how Isabelle imagined it, in the version where Calvin admitted he messed up.
Instead of feeling better and vindicated, she felt awful and bad for lonely Calvin.
"I told you," Isabelle said, trying not to raise her voice. "I still remember my words from eight years ago. This doesn"t come along twice in a lifetime. I begged you at that time to reconsider."
"I didn"t know then that real love, once blossomed, never disappears," Calvin admitted with his head in his hands.
"Well, why not ?" she asked as she already knew that it was a pointless question.
She wanted to throw something at him. Overturn the table. Scream at the top of her lungs. There were so many things she wanted to do and say but couldn't.
Nostalgia's really powerful but every thought she had, made her feel disrespectful to her children and her husband. They were sacred.
Isabelle looked out of the window at the PlayPlace. Kids were screaming, carefree, as they rode a merry-go-round shaped like a hamburger.
"But now that I have children, I don"t believe in regret. My kids are my life. If things had gone differently, I wouldn"t have them. So, you know, no regrets !" Isabelle said as she wiped her face.
"Ahh ! But I do wonder what things would have been like," Calvin exclaimed.
"I have to leave," Isabelle declared.
"Stay," Calvin requested as he reached across the table for her hand.
At that moment, she thought of her children, the true loves of her life and her husband, who chose her in spite of knowing that she was abandoned by his dear friend, Calvin and continued to love her every day.
After the closure today, it seemed that ill will was a thing of the past. Any hostility that existed was long gone.
"Life doesn"t follow a script. For a long time, I defined our relationship by how it ended," Isabelle said to Calvin. "But now, I look back on it in the context of what was happening in my life at that time and you were such a big part of it. You should also let go of your guilt and move on. I don"t know if that time period helped you like it did to me but you deserve happiness and another chance at love," Isabelle smiled as issues of the past were cleared up.
"That time period means something to me, too, Isabelle," Calvin fondly replied. "'It defined me'. Thank you for forgiving me and everything you said, coz it's here today that a wave of appreciation washes over me and all the guilt has gone after what you just said. For so long, I thought the end meant I never mattered when, in fact, I always did. Thank you, Isa," he gratefully said.
"It"s ok, Calvin. Time didn't necessarily heal the wound as much as it helped us realize that we were lucky that we got to know each other," Isabelle replied as she had gone on to have a wonderful life and fulfilling career. "I don"t feel bitter about the breakup any more too," she added.
She no longer felt a strain or discomfort in their relationship, unlike the previous day. She, or rather, they both needed this closure.
"The breakup and what followed dogged us in different ways, but led to the lives we each have now," Calvin remarked. "I, on my part, never looked for love after we parted. It was just too painful," he admitted.
"Our love life experience enables us to now look at the past with wonder instead of resentment. I found joy with my love, my Kenji and stopped missing you for a long time back," Isabelle revealed. "But, what I didn't stop missing was the time of my life you symbolized: the discovery of what I wanted to do, the fun of going after it and the promise of youth that you fully understand only with age," she added. "You should follow your heart too, Calvin. Don"t let something in the past become a hurdle for a potentially happy and love-filled life."
"It"s just that we both meant a lot to each other. And I think that is really satisfying and enriching," said Calvin. "Isn"t it ? However, you are right. I need to follow my heart," he agreed.
Isabelle's hands had stopped shaking now, and she finally knew what to do with them.
She squeezed his hand, then waved him good-bye. Closing the loop which was left open eight years back as she, too, had felt the tug of nostalgia often.