a triumph

As per my prompter last week... I have decided to write about a triumph that I over came when I was a teenager.

At 14 the world is such a small place. What more do you know than the friends you have at high school and a small extension of the friends they might have from summer camps or elementary school? What more is there than the day-to-day drama of the life you are living? How serious could any relationship really  be?

For me, the answer is "pretty damn serious".

The boy I fell in love with in high school was not the most popular guy in school. He wasn't a big athlete (though he dabbled in high school basketball based solely on his height). He was smart and funny in a cocky kind of way. But basically, he was just an average guy.

We had known each other since infancy. He was adopted in May or June of the year we were born. My mom had me in February and waited with bated breath for his arrival right along side his parents. We spent much of our toddlerhood together. Went to the same day-care and took baths together along with another boy I was friends with in the womb.

Time passed and (as children do), we drifted apart - our parents staying in touch every few months here and there. And when the first day of Grade 9 french rolled around, I was stunned to see him sitting there. He had zero recollection of who the hell I was, but I remembered him. I did not, however, remember him being so damn cute!

Weeks later, we were chatting on the phone (!) every night. We had moved from ICQ to the telephone with ease and found our conversations deep and soulful. We would talk until two or three in the morning about how he felt about his adoptive parents and the way I felt about a father I had abandoned a year or so before. We talked about our futures and the dreams we had for ourselves. And soon, we talked about our dreams for one another together.

We held hands in the halls and passed notes in the classes we shared. Teachers quickly broke us up for disrupting their classes and we were constantly pulling each other out of class to steal a kiss or share a joke or a story that just couldn't wait for the bell to ring. We wrote letters and put them in each others lockers (to which we both knew the combination). We were, in every sense, high school sweethearts.

But, as these things tend to do, our relationship went sour. We were so young and so unknowing. Who could plan their lives out at 15? There is no realism to that. And as we started to change into the budding of the adults we would one day become, our relationship took a shift. We would break up (because we wanted to explore the rest of the world and see what else was out there), and get back together (because we were mad about one another). And with each time we would get back together, the resentment would grow.

Pretty soon he was bringing other girls around to his friends (and I was getting reports back), and I was fooling around with half the men I knew - having never done more than kiss him - in order to try to get his attention. We would still some times chat late at night, but the conversations were often arguments. His parents, who had known me my whole life, started to hate the idea of me being in his life at all.

Our yo-yo relationship continued all through grade nine and by grade ten, things had gotten way out of hand. Now we were pulling each other from class to have an argument that had carried over from the night before. Letters were unceremoniously dumped in each others slits of our lockers scrawled with sadness and hurt. Trust was gone. Only bitterness remained.

Faster than we knew what was happening we became THAT COUPLE.

We would stand in the halls arguing. He with arms crossed in front of the hundreds of friends and strangers that passed by us, me screaming and yelling just to be heard over the pain of him tuning me out. I would push him against the lockers with all my might and he would act like he didn't care what I did to him. I was nothing to him any more. We had long erased our late night chats about the future and in its place stood a frustrated man and a lonely girl. I would yell and shove and pound his chest with my fists and all the while, nothing.

Another year gone by. Grade 11 now. Past the half-way point of high school. And all we had now was the fighting. I screamed, and I pushed, and I punched and he never flinched. Until one day. The day he shoved me back. He shoved me hard. Straight into the lockers. He shoved me with every ounce of strength combined of each shove I had bestowed upon him over the course of a year plus. He shoved me as if he meant to shove me from his life forever.

I bruised (of course), but I was addicted to him. The drama was like a drug. It fueled my ED (which was just starting to get into gear right around then). It fueled my unexplainable anger toward everything in my life. It fueled my grades to keep plummeting. And so, I kept shoving, and so did he.

In December of grade 11 I was a mess. 80-something-pounds at 5"0. Straight Ds across the board. Furious with everything in my life. Desperate for what he and I had to come back to us. I decided to take action to put things right between he and I once and for all. I called him on a Friday and told him that today was his lucky day - he was going to come pick me up and we were going to finally fool around.

He drove me in his mom's van. I remember the place we parked. I remember feeling cheap and disgusting. I remembering thinking "you are sinking this low to get this guy's attention?!". And in the parking lot, I went down on him.

We held hands all the way home and he stalled his 25 minute drive back so we could hold hands a little longer. I remember thinking "Finally".

By Monday, a new rumor had spread to my ears; on Saturday night he had hooked up with some girl at a party and everyone could hear them all night long.

Devastated, I went to his class and summoned him out. Suave and clueless that I already knew his dirty secret, he came out of class ready for a kiss. I smacked him. Clear across the face. Not my first time by a long shot, but this time was different. He hit me back. Hard.

Already broken hearted and feeling empty I fell into a ball on the floor, hysterical. I stayed there for a while (even after he turned on his heel and went back to class) crying and holding my face in shock and horror. I'm not sure what made me get up, but eventually I did. I went back to class, grabbed my schoolbag and hopped on the next bus home.

And that's when I drafted my letter of triumph. I wrote him an email telling him to forget me. To stay out of my life forever and ever. I told him that I had a father who no longer got the privilege of being in my life, and that he was no bigger or no more important than the man who helped give me life. I told him to go to Florida the next week, and come back as if he had never kissed me a day in his life - as if he had never loved me for a moment.

I never went back to him after that. He tried a number of times over the years, but I never budged.

I turned my back on a pain that I knowingly inflicted on myself and walked away with my head held high and a confidence I had never felt before.



It is that story that reminds me that I know I can triumph over my eating disorder. Because I do not take kindly to being smacked in the face! Ass hole