The Death Of A Hopeless Romantic

The Hopeless Romantic that was me collapsed and died a horrible flaming death in the December of 1990.

For once, this is story which I can actually say involved exotic locales, whirlwind travel, lovely women, and and ending so final in its execution there would never be a sequel.  Almost a sort of spy thriller, except without the major star leading hero.  Just me.

In the summer of 1990 I took a 6 week sort of "study abroad" in Budapest, Hungary.  It was - to a political science major - a magical time:  Communism had just fallen and so even as we went to see an open country, the remnants of it were everywhere.  We sat through lectures with various professors (I heard an actual, unrepentant chain smoking Stalinist explain away the horrors of the Red Terror as a "misunderstanding"), saw the bullet marks in buildings from the 1956 uprising, and ate enough Hungarian Paprika for a lifetime.

I also managed to fall in love with another student.

To pre-Collapse Hopeless Romantic Me, this was no trick.  I regularly fell in love about 5 times a week.  The reasons for this are something I never really looked at as I should have (and now likely never will), but if there was a poster child for band/drama/role-playing/socially awkward nerd that seldom had a date or a girlfriend although badly wanted both, I was that poster child.  Add to that a healthy dose of Chivalric Romance picked up in books and I was a poetry writing, flower giving, swooning fool looking for a person to shower my attention upon.

The relationship survived that program and a visit to her parents in Germany and the trip back and the start of school year - she in Chicago, I in Old Home.  I would call late at night, the phone cord wrapped around the edge of the door to the garage to give some privacy, paying out excessive amounts of long distance phone time (if you understand this reference, you are officially old). I wrote letters and cards and poems.  Live was nothing but the softly lit pictures of landscapes with only the promise of the future.  I was in love.  I had a dream.  I was making plans to move to Chicago and go to school.  

But something was not right in my romantic world.  The calls were going unanswered, the letters not responded to.  Like a good Hopeless Romantic, my response was to double down on my efforts:  more calls, more letters, even flowers.  Still nothing.  My mother, in a wisdom that was quite right had I chosen to listen,  commented that it was a summer romance that was simply ending.  My father said nothing, probably picturing the spectacle of me trying to drive in the snow in Chicago in January and shaking his head.

And then magically, all was well again.  She wanted - no, needed - me to come out attend a function wit here.  She would take care of the ticket and the hotel room.  I need only come.  Oh, the rapturous depths of delight I felt!  This was the apogee of every hopeless romantic, was it not?  To be wanted and needed.  Romance, I crowed to myself, had won the day.  Take that, doubting parents whose experience of the world had tampered with the triumph of true love.

Except, of course, it had not.

My arrival was not as romance should have gone.  She met me, dropped me at the hotel, then had class. I was left to wander the day by the Lakeside, waiting to check into my hotel.  I wandered the streets of a better suburb of Chicago all day, the winds off the lake cutting through my jacket as if it were lace.  For a brief moment I got a vision of what it was like to be homeless with nowhere to go and nothing to do.  If this was romance, it tasted a lot more like being put on a shelf and forgotten.

But the night - the night of the event was coming.  That would make it right.

But it did not.  What was clear, once we dressed up and arrived, was that I was truly just a place holder to avoid the indignity of going alone to a social event.  I wandered a bit, but these were not my people and this was not my romantic night out.  I talked with a few of her friends, but we were from very different worlds and I - a hopeless Romantic but also in a lot a simple person with not a lot of socialization practice - ended up sitting in a chair off to the corner, a potted plant keeping me company, hoping the evening would end quickly.

The weekend after that was rather droll but not unwelcome, as things slowly seemed to warm up from the nadir of that night.  I left feeling as if I was again on the right, romantic track.  I need only redouble my commitment and the prize - true romance - would be mine.  In my mind, I was already buying snow tires.

And so I redoubled my efforts. I sent more cards.  I wrote more letters.  I made calls and left them on the machine, and then more calls and left them on the machine.  That is what hopeless romantics do, I told myself - demonstrate their commitment. 

But nothing.  Not a letter, not a call, , not a 3 x 5 post card, nothing.  Until that day in November when I called and, when the phone message came on, there was a message specifically directed at me:  She had received my calls.  She was busy.  She would call me when she had the time.

Every person that had called her and left a message - every person that would call her and leave a message - would hear that.  And wonder who that message was directed towards, and what fool and a moron that person must be.

At that moment - and I remember it quite clearly  - Happy Hopeless Romantic Me collapsed like a skater breaking through thin ice into the freezing water.  A skater that never made it out.

It died.  The whole thing died.  Romance was gone.  The books, the songs, the poems - I do not know that I could bring myself to say that they lied, but I could bring myself to say that they had misinformed me.  What I went through was not so much a depression as it was a cold hard drop onto the rocks of reality, one that in some ways I never really recovered from.

The postscript for this entire scenario - as if one was really needed - was a card addressed to me from Chicago that Christmas, one that said "Have a Merry Christmas - At Home."  Uisdean Ruadh, in one of the kindest, bravest and most heroic acts of our long friendship, made me take that card and everything else I had from the relationship and burn it on the grill.  He left me nothing to be maudlin over except for my journals, which I could not bring neither bring myself to review not destroy.

By the time - some years later - that I met The Ravishing Mrs. TB, there were only faint grindings of that Hopeless Romantic present, faint grindings that spiraled up into the wind and blew away as soon as the first sign of potential failure showed up (which may, coincidentally, have saved the relationship).  There were cards and flowers and poems, but they never had the wild abandon of those earlier years.  It was a more calculated, less engaged Romantic that risked putting things his heart into things or dreaming. 

Enough time and space has passed that I can look back on the incident and see that if I wanted to actually have a relationship, I pretty much did everything completely in the wrong.  Perhaps that was a function of lack of experience, perhaps that was a function of too much theoretical thinking about love and relationships and not enough practice.  Either way, I have in all the years since never had such a complete and total collapse of a personality trait.  There is not even rubble.  There is only cold ash over a ruined wasteland.

I do wonder, of course, what would have happened - or what would happen - if I could find a small piece of that hopeless Romantic Fellow again.  Or perhaps, to be fair, he never left me: he only found other ways to manifest himself in much more secret and mundane ways in what he cares about -  animals, plants, acts of kindness, things that themselves never react badly to attention -  and perhaps perhaps even practicing such romanticism in small ways and mannerisms of behavior and writing that never risk being called out and thus never risk being smashed.

And, perhaps, in secret dreams held so tightly that not a person suspects such things even exist.

Yet even as I write of it now, I can still feel the shock and horror of my name being effectively thrown out to the world as not a Great Romantic but as a fool and idiot.  I can see exactly where I was in the kitchen when I heard it, feel the twist of the phone cord in my fingers, sense without knowing the flair of blush in my checks and the edge of tears peeking out of the corner of my eyes.  

And in the back of my mind, I can still hear all that was in that Hopeless Romantic heart crashing to the ground and breaking into a million pieces, only to blow away in the cruel November wind.