Too Many Tears for Chinese New Year

I sat with Jeff on a park bench in Chinatown watching teenagers in t-shirts toss a football to one another. It was nearly fifty degrees today after weeks of temperatures that hovered around zero, so warm sunshine and the lunar new year brought a sense of lightness to the park around us.

My hope when he invited me to come with him to Chinatown today was that we'd find our shared space again - the space where "he" and "I" are "us".  

We talked quietly about what lead us to break up; how I wouldn't have applied for a job out of state if I'd known he saw a future with me, and how me applying for a job out of state was the beginning of him falling out of love with me.

In seven months, he'd never spoken the words, "I love you" to me. Today he spoke them twice, and while it was good to hear him verbalize his feelings for me, it wasn't romantic or special the way it should be when those words are spoken to someone for the first time.

I watched a lanky Asian boy gracefully catch the football his friend threw.

Instead of sharing the words, "I love you" with a sense of excitement or aniticpation, I heard them from Jeff for the first time with a football landing in a teenager's hands, and a vacuum-like sense of emptiness in the pit of my stomach.

The words, "I love you" weren't followed by a kiss or a hug. They were followed with a request that we be "friends."

"I don't want you to be my ex-anything," he said to me. "I don't think of you as my ex-girlfriend. I think of you as my friend."

Kids laughed and an old man shuffled by in clunky black tennis shoes.

A hawk flew down from the sky and clutched a mouse from the sidewalk between its talons. As quickly as it landed, it flew away again. I'd never seen anything quite like that - such a breathtakingly graceful gesture, but one that ended in the death of a living thing.

I'd never felt anything quite like what I was feeling then, in the park, when Jeff finally admitted that he loved me, but followed it with a request that we be friends, either. 

Some things just aren't built into our natural, biological, or intuitive sense of understanding. Hearing "I love you" followed by "I want to be friends" is one of them. 

"I want to be your friend, but I'm not even sure how to do that," I told him. 

I'd have my opportunity to learn how to do that a short time later as we entered a party thrown by his coworker, Ed, who promply introduced me to someone else as Jeff's girlfriend.

I was proud of myself for smiling, not crying, and making small talk with the people there. I was proud of myself for doing everything in my power to be Jeff's "friend" when so deep inside my heart, I feel pulled to be the girl he loves and holds and takes care of  - not the girl he's friends with.

"This is my friend, Melissa," he would say to people as he introduced me.

I am his friend, Melissa. I would think to myself, rehearsing this new role that I've been forced into.

We went to the roof of the building, and I looked out onto the streets of Chinatown. Colorful scraps of paper littered the streets from the parade earlier in the day. 

Nearly two weeks after accepting my new job in Missouri, a sense of the scale of that decision hit me firmly in the chest as I stood looking out on Chinatown from that rooftop.

I'm leaving New York, and in deciding to leave, I'm also turning my back on one of the best things that's happened to me in a very long time; my relationship with Jeff.

The tears started then, as this sense of perspective hit me, and Jeff and I said a quick goodbye. He squeezed me in his arms, but it wasn't the same as it used to be. 

I wiped away a few tears there on the roof, but tried to hold my composure until I reached the street outside of Ed's building, at which point tender sobs grew out of my hurt.

I walked crying through Chinatown, to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I cried as I walked across it into downtown Brooklyn. 

Through Brooklyn Heights and into Fort Greene I cried.

I cried as I walked through Fort Greene Park, down Dekalb Avenue, and onto South Oxford Street, where I sat for a few minutes on the stoop of our brownstone, taking it all in, and letting a few more tears stream down.

That was hours ago, but tears are sliding down my cheeks again now as I write this, in my pajamas, in my little bedroom in my shared apartment in Brooklyn - a place I can't call home much longer.

I'm not his girlfriend anymore, and soon I won't be a New Yorker anymore either. I pray that this decision I've made is the right one.