I dated Sarah Hawthorne for two years before I left for college, and she was the first girl I ever loved. I had grown up on Hollywood movies and Christianity, and I think the combination of the two led me to construct a mental concept of love that was pseudo-religious and dependent on monogamy. The idea of ever loving more than one person seemed antithetical to the whole concept of love, so, once I had decided that I loved Sarah Hawthorne, I began to grant her an almost mythological significance, and my newfound purpose in life seemed to be the strengthening of our bond. Everywhere I looked I saw evidence that we were meant to be together. It seemed like we were constantly reading each other’s mind, and I even found what I considered to be scientific proof that we were, in some way, on the same mental wavelength.
We both had this iPhone app called Sleep Cycle, which would monitor the vibrations you made in your bed and determine when you were in REM sleep, NREM sleep, et cetera. The idea was that it would play your alarm tone gradually and wake you up during REM sleep, so that you would be less groggy than if you’d been woken up in the middle of a deep sleep stage. The alarm was moderately helpful, but the thing I found most interesting about the app was that it made a graph of your sleep cycle each night. When Sarah and I compared ours we found an uncanny similarity in the graphs. They weren’t identical, but many of the peaks and troughs lined up with each other to the exact minute. This was long before I came to the neurological theory I described to you earlier. I had no theory behind it then, other than my nebulous concept of “love,” but it seemed that even as we slept ten miles away from each other, our minds were in perfect sync.
When I went to college, however, the alignment in our charts quickly began to disappear. Sarah was a year younger than me, so she stayed in New Orleans to finish high school, while I went up to Charleston, putting one foot forward to the future while the other tried to stay in the past. We agreed that we would break up when I left, but neither of us really wanted to. We each made out with a few different people in the time we were apart, and I think for both of us it caused more strain than satisfaction. At the end of my first semester, we agreed to call ourselves a couple again and make it a long distance relationship. I figured that once we went back to being “official” that it would be easier to get through being separated, but the problem remained that Sarah had six different schools on her list of options and CofC wasn’t close to the top. We wouldn’t be able to do long distance forever, and in the meantime I began to notice that she was getting a lot of attention from the guys in her grade, especially this sleazy but charismatic asshat named David that had a reputation for going after committed girls. He was persistent and manipulative. In one story I’d heard, he’d told a girl, who just so happened to be dating his best friend, that he was depressed— so depressed, in fact, he would kill himself if she didn’t sleep with him.
I told Sarah I didn’t like her hanging around this David character, that it made me uncomfortable, but she just got defensive and irritated with me for saying it. She said I was stressing her out, though I imagine I was stressing myself out even more. I obsessed over it constantly, trawling through her facebook photos and all her friends’ photos, looking for anything that she had lied about or anything that looked suspicious. I stopped focusing on my school work, and my grades began to plummet. One morning she started texting me, and it was like she was trying to admit to something without saying it outright, she kept telling me how drunk she was and how her friends had been looking for her but couldn’t find her, and when I put all the pieces together she started sobbing and told me that she had been blackout from beer and Katharax— it wasn’t her fault. She woke up looking at his ceiling in the middle of it.
After a day of making her feel really guilty I forgave her, but I still felt physically ill when I thought about it. She and I had this psychic connection, after all, and now that she’d gone and gotten fucked by this David guy it was like his dick had literally penetrated and violated that connection. It would never be the same, it was forever tainted, and to make matters worse I knew now that she was taking Katharax. Besides being addictive and dangerous, it was the surest way to forget the things that caused you stress. I was, according to her, the number one thing causing her stress, so I would doubtless be the first thing to get forgotten. Each time she took one, she’d forget me a little more. Our connection would disappear a little more. And each time she took one, she’d be likely to blackout again, and so it seemed it would only be a matter of time before she ended up letting herself get taken home again by David or some other high school asshole.
My concern reached a climax a week before Sarah was coming to Charleston to visit me. She was posting Snapchat videos of a music festival, and I gathered from the videos that she had left the festival early to go to a party, riding in a car with three people, one of whom was David. I immediately texted her. I was angry that she was still hanging out with him, especially after she had claimed he took advantage of her. Why would she hang out with someone who had essentially raped her when she was half-conscious? All I accomplished was upsetting her, and she made sure to inform me that she was now crying in a stairwell at the party. I had ruined her night, she said. I had ruined my own too, because I didn’t sleep that night from thinking she was back with David again, fucking the night away while I lay awake imagining it, as if being forced to watch it from a distance.
It wasn’t until after Sarah’s visit that I discovered that she was back with David again. She’d slept with him that very night I’d upset her. She said, “I was so lonely and sad at the party, and he was the only one that came upstairs to see if I was okay.” She deliberately confirmed what I’d been thinking all along, which was that everything I was doing was backfiring. My own efforts at keeping her faithful and keeping our connection intact were having the opposite effect, and I’d created the situation I meant to avoid. Even as I had lain awake anxiously imagining her sleeping with someone else, I had been manifesting that nightmare through the thought of it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson, and I sought to fix things the same way I had let them fall apart. I tried to shame her and guilt her into never wanting to cheat again. I portrayed David as a manipulative sociopath, even as I was now trying to manipulate her emotions in practically the same way. He had intruded on our connection, and now I was becoming like him by virtue of his presence there. It was driving me insane.
Eventually, Sarah said she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. The semester ended and I returned home for the summer, but she didn’t want to see me. In the meantime, my second semester grades came back, and they were the worst I’d ever had. I lost my scholarship. Sarah didn’t get into her top choice schools, but she go into CofC. She decided she’d follow me to Charleston, only we wouldn’t be dating. I would see her constantly, but never have her again.
For the next three years, I thought about little else but her, even as we grew further and further apart, and that lost connection became all the more irredeemable. She had moved on completely before she ever arrived at C of C, but the less she cared for me the more I cared for her. By the time I graduated, I still felt as if I hadn't moved forward a day. Every girl I slept with was a means of forgetting Sarah, and yet I'd find myself seeing Sarah's face, Sarah's eyes, gleaming back at me in the dark, and these new girls became merely blank canvases on which I could project an image of the girl I still loved, and hated, but mostly loved. I never saw them for who they were, and I never let them see even a glimpse of who I was.
You could say that my four years in college were, collectively, an extended effort at forgetting my first love and finding some self-motivation and self-worth. In that respect, my four years in college were an extraordinary failure, and from this failure sprung all the others-- my grades, my health, my strained relationship with my parents. Even if I could finally forget about Sarah, I would never forget the damage I had let her inflict on me, the damage I had inflicted on myself, or the damage I had inflicted on the girls I used and discarded.
As I said all this to Dr. Bean, talking and talking for so long I forgot he was there, I realized the only way I would ever stop my panic attacks is if I forgot about Sarah then sorted out my life, repairing the things I'd let fall apart. Dr. Bean, it turned out, had a good idea of where to start.
TO BE CONTINUED
