Happy One Year-Section 1

NOTE: I’ve been mulling over the past couple of days on whether I should post this or not due to the personal and painful content of it. I’m not an expert prose writer, but I felt compelled to write this after an interesting call last weekend and I was not planning on sharing it. I decided to go ahead and post it more as a part of my healing process on this anonymous forum than anything else. Also, a situation with a friend left a group of people I adore confused by my behavior, and maybe writing this can help explain it more for myself why this is a pattern in my life. Anyways, I tried to keep it short, but it turned into a much longer piece, so I’m breaking it up into parts and posting over a period of time, in between less personally intense posts.

Section 1

It was Oscar Sunday, on an unusually sunny morning in the Inner Sunset, ironically the foggiest part of SF. I had just gotten off the phone with my best friend in NYC after spending a half-hour discussing our predictions for the event (best dressed, not best movie). Afterwards, as I was tidying up my apartment, I hear Mozart’s Symphony No. 5, my ring tone, playing and ran to the phone. I picked it up to see my ex’s name flashed across the caller ID. Usually, I’m shocked when I get a call from him since he is one of those people who is not a fan of any “communication”. But he actually surprised me by returning my phone call from the night before when I tried reaching him while I was re-watching “Manhattan Murder Mystery”. I had called him at 11pm that Saturday night, forgetting that it was 2am in NYC.

“Hey Sugar, guess what? My One Year is coming up on March 9th. Who would have thought?”

One year sober, who would have thought? BP, the man that gave me so much, but took so much away, the man that made NYC so special for me, yet so disastrous, will be celebrating his one year.

And I’m proud of him.

****

I first met BP at the beginning of my second year in NYC in 2004 through a family friend who went to school with him at Penn State and wanted to introduce me to him. I remember first seeing him standing in the threshold of the bar, inhaling the last bits of his cigarette against the noisy August night of the West Village before he entered to join us. He was skinny (105 lbs to be exact) and was dressed in a white long-sleeved stripped shirt tucked into a pair of khakis. BP looked like a little boy wearing his father’s clothes. I was introduced to him and immediately was not attracted to him. He smoked, was a “corporate bastard” from Wall Street, and just didn’t fit the image of the artsy boys that tend to go for. I even got annoyed that he didn’t know how to use chop sticks and ended up giving him an impromptu lesson when the group ordered sushi and it came with no forks. Even though we were sitting next to each other, after the chop stick lesson, I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the evening, instead chatting with my friend to catch up.

The following evening, I was out with the same friend and we eventually ended up a club where BP happened to be with the group from the previous night. I wasn’t feeling the music at the club, me being more of a Brit-Pop sort of girl, so I sat at the edge of the dance floor, drinking my Bacardi and Coke to, hoping the buzz will make the music more bearable. BP wasn’t much of a dancer and sat with me as he sipped his club soda. We both began talking, me commenting about the music and he shared the “wild times” back at Penn State. I remember thinking “oh, he’s just someone to talk to for tonight” not realizing that the dancing group kept looking over to see if there was any chemistry between us. BP invited me out to the smokers' patio for a cigarette break and, even though I don’t smoke, I welcomed the opportunity for a new group of people to watch.

BP lit his cigarette and took a drag while I tried to look through the haze of smoke.

Then BP randomly asked me: So, what’s your sign?

Me: Huh? What is this, 1972?

BP: No really, what is it? Hey, I just wanna make conversation.

Me: Uh…Pisces.

BP: Oh, really? I know a couple of Pisces. You guys are some of the nicest people on earth and that’s why people walk all over you.

I gave him a nervous laugh, knowing that he was speaking the truth about us astrological fishes.

We spent the rest of the evening going in and out of the club, with him asking me questions about what got me interested in studying therapy, my teaching experience, being a Californian in NYC, again, trying to “make conversation”. Before the night let out, we exchanged numbers, thinking that for me that it would be another friend. In NYC, while I loved the anonymity, recently I had started feeling incredibly lonely in the sea of people. I was lucky to have my best friend from CA on the island, but with him in Harlem living with his boyfriend, and me living by myself in a tiny studio on the Upper East Side, we barely saw each other. BP lived around the corner from my school and he suggested that we grab dinner some time. At the time I was working three jobs and going to school, so having dinner with someone new seemed like a welcomed break from eating yet another slice of pizza as I poured over case studies, my evening ritual.

*****

A couple of weeks later, BP picked me up in front of school. It was a warm September night and I was waiting outside, standing under a street light, trying to read a book. I was in jeans and a t-shirt, with my curly hair wrapped in my usual bun, perfect attire to have dinner with a friend. I didn’t hear BP come up behind me and was startled when he tapped me on the shoulder. He laughed as he leaned down to pick my scared book off the ground and handed it to me. Through his giggles, he asked whether I was craving Mexican or Italian; apparently he made reservations at two restaurants, not knowing what I would like. I immediately got nervous since I never thought that this was a date, just dinner with a friend. But I decided to go along with it, after all, it had been a few months since I had a dinner date, plus I could, over a free meal (hey, I was a poor grad student) could kindly tell him that he just not my type.

I chose Mexican and we walked across the street to the restaurant. During the meal, I complained how the food wasn’t authentic (I am from CA, after all) but I was also enjoying the conversation we were having. BP was born and raised in Philadelphia where he was an only child in a Bengali family. He got into his Wall Street firm through a friend and enjoyed the feverish pace of the stock world and the lifestyle that came with it. I also learned that he had been arrested for a DUI five years ago, went to AA for a year, and had been sober since then. Only recently had he started having the occasional wine with his meal. With me getting my degree in counseling, I ignored his confession of drinking and was more interested in hearing more about his recovery process. What was it like to be in AA? Did you complete the 12 steps? How did your family react? All these so-called “shrink questions” that he answered with tremendous candor and it piqued my interest in him.

During dinner, he got a call from his boss, asking if he had left the office. I would later learn that his boss, and all his co-workers, were excited that he had made dinner plans with me, considering he hadn’t been on a date since he began working there a year before. His boss was afraid that he might have blown off dinner to do more work on a project. While that phone call confirmed with me that this was a date, I was strangely excited by the fact that someone wanted to have dinner with me, a bookish, somewhat quirky girl who had a secret of her own. .

As BP was walking with me along Broadway to the M79 bus stop after dinner, I kept on glancing at the little man next to me, surprised that I wanted to spend more time with him. A little bit had to do with the fact that for once I wasn’t spending a lonely night in the Big Apple, but that there was something intriguing about him in the way he carried himself. Here BP was a recovering alcoholic, making a new life for himself after going through a recovery process. I needed a taste of inspiration for the things I was dealing with.

As the weeks went on, BP and I found ourselves spending more time together. Another dinner here, a party in Jersey City there and we found each other getting closer to each other and it scared me. I never shared with him my secret, but it was obvious that I was in my own world when we were together. On one of those warm evenings, he took me to Hoboken to see the Manhattan skyline and there BP confessed, with the lights of the city illuminating behind him, that he liked me and wanted to pursue a relationship. Instead of being elated, I panicked. It wasn’t fair to him that in my state, someone should start a relationship with me. I was just too damaged that I felt that no new person, even BP, could support me with that, in spite of being lonely.






*****

Two months before I met BP, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger in the back of his car. As with many victims of sexual assault, I was traumatized, shaken. Not only did I lose faith in others, I lost faith in myself. I felt violated and became distant and hypersensitive. This, compounded with the fact that I was in NYC, far away from anyone I knew, made my suffering a very solitary experience. My best friend and his partner RJ were amazing and were there for me, but I needed more. I put myself in therapy to deal with the trauma, but therapy is only an hour and there were still 23 more hours in a day, 167 more hours till my next session, to still deal with. I don’t remember ever crying about what happened, not even in therapy, instead I became more withdrawn forming an invisible barrier around me. I thought of telling my mother, but decided against it, scared that her over-protective side would come out and she would make me move back home, not letting me out of her sight. I thought I needed to be stronger and threw myself into school and took on two more jobs so I could avoid reliving the event in my head. Also, I wanted to show the people who knew what happened that I was alright and I moved on from it. Outside, I knew I appeared fine to my classmates and professors, but inside I was falling apart. It was analogous to my apartment at the time, where there was a mess inside with items strewn on the floor, but I could just close the door, lock it, and no one would know. I even contemplated suicide, but after remembering what a friend’s parents went through after her own suicide a year before, I knew I could not put my parents through that sort of grief. I was a living corpse when I met BP and yet he saw something in me, a sparkle perhaps. I was exhausted from putting up a front. Even though I wanted something new, bringing someone new into my world while I was working through things just didn’t sit well with me.

I decided that I had to tell him before it got too far, before either one of us became attached. I invited him out for some midnight calamari at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, wanting to tell him everything. I picked up on the fact that he was a little bit nervous when he emerged out of the subway, especially since I pulled him out of bed to meet me so late. As we sat down, I took a couple of breaths, trying to prepare myself for the confession. After the third deep breath, I began to tell him what had happened to me, how I was coping, and why I could not invite anyone new into my dark world. I kept my eyes focused on the tea mug in front of me, letting it warm my clammy hands, causing a weird sensation. I never looked up at him as I told him more than my therapist knew, more than anyone knew about what happened that night. BP got every single painful detail. As I relived the event, my emotions becoming stronger, tears forming in my eyes, finally feeling something after many weeks of feeling numb.

I heard BP lean forward and felt one of his tiny hands around my shaking hands, while the other wiped the tears streaking down my cheek.

“I’ll be there for you.”

I felt drops of life seep back into me. Little did I know that I would come alive only to have it evaporate six months later...