I was in Edinburgh, moseying among the bar lights and old cobblestone streets: a terrible place for a hopeless romantic. I was spending two nights at a hostel there before the start of my semester in Stirling, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend it thinking about home. I walked along the Royal Mile, awestruck by the picturesque castle on a hill in the distance, the quaint shops selling kilts and cans of haggis, and the street performers juggling bowling pins and playing with fire. I thought: What a wonderful place to fall in love.
Then I remembered how badly I wanted to have a few beers. I turned into the first bar along the street, ordered a pint of ale, and man sitting next to me recognized my accent and struck up small talk with me. He was an American too. He said he's a business student in Washington, and after a nasty break up, he felt he had to get away. He kept talking, and I just listened and drank. He bought me a whiskey. We kept talking about love, and he brought up his ex-girlfriend again and again, saying he was certain they would get back together when he returned to America.
"What about you, man?" he asked, nudging me. "Do you have anyone back home?"
I'd be lying to say it wasn't love that sent me across the Atlantic. It was a girl named Erica, my first college girlfriend, who I met in an Ethics class at Emmanuel. Her hair was long and black and when she smiled, she had little dimples. She was an all-around quiet person; her voice was soft and she hid her emotions in pretty phrases she penned in a notebook. She was humble and intelligent, and from the moment I laid eyes on her, I wanted to kiss those dimples.
Eventually, I asked her out for coffee. We walked to Panera Bread along the streets of Boston, fiery autumn leaves blowing along the sidewalks. After the first nervous sips, we seemed to have a lot in common. She said she likes pop-punk music and Pixar movies. She said she likes reading classic works of literature. After our coffees were finished, we left the café to watch a movie in her dorm room. We sat, not touching, watching Monsters Inc., and when the credits rolled, I wanted her the way everyone longs for a person: to feel the warmth of their closeness, to feel at home in their arms.
There were more dates: more cups of coffee, more movies. There was dinner and hand-holding and kissing goodnight. Then there was the night just before Thanksgiving break that I put on a clean oxford shirt and a sweater and walked up to her room to ask her to be my girlfriend. My hands were sweaty; I fidgeted like a person on pills.
I was tongue-tied, un-smooth, un-suave. Maybe pills would've helped. "Of course," she said. "I would love to be your girlfriend."
I felt drunk and happy. It was a tiresome flight from Boston to Heathrow, one which put me in a don't-fuck-with-me kind of mood. I spent a few days traipsing around London, but mostly I was trying to get myself adjusted to Britain (crossing streets was, for months, the most difficult part). But things changed in Edinburgh. I was no longer traveling alone, with no one to discuss love and heartbreak. I finally had someone who felt the way I felt.
This guy from Washington and I kept drinking and talking about love. The memories of that night are hazy, but I specifically remember laughing so hard I spit my beer back into my glass, and slapped the bar.
"This bartender's cute," he said. "What do you think of her?"
Erica and I did things any couple would do. We danced and laughed and swapped mix CDs. She made me the best mix tape I've ever received. She gave me soft, alternative tracks by Copeland and Death Cab for Cutie, interspersed with '90s pop-rock hits by bands like Something Corporate and Third Eye Blind. She was the pop-punk girl I dreamed of when I was thirteen, dancing in my room and singing Sum-41 songs to my Lara Croft poster.
With Erica, we were eager to be as close to each other as possible. We got to know each other by physically and emotionally peeling off layers. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen naked, in movies or in real life. I remember our first time having sex, shaking with anxiety, trying to act calm and assured, and hearing the words of Death Cab's "Transatlanticism" burst to life in her tiny dorm room.
But as time moseyed on, there seemed to be, even in our most intimate moments, a distance. In the winter, as soft flakes of snow stuck then melted to our windows, we revealed ourselves wholly. We peeled off each other's clothes slowly, and lay for hours, sharing our fears and passions. But as the winter melted into spring, we kept our anxieties hidden to journals and blog posts. We became champions at letting our emotions stay inside, to whiter the way flowers do if you keep them in a broom closet.
Then summer came and we really began to hit a rough patch. She was away in Rhode Island, and I was home in southern Maine, playing in an adult soccer league, longboarding, and stealing my dad's beer. I missed her so much that it hurt. But at the point, I didn't know certain vital things about love. I didn't know that, as un-romantic as it sounds, love at some point requires purely hard work and good judgement. I was young, dumb, and horny; and I bought into the brassy notion that true love comes easily.
We broke up over the phone.
My pint was almost empty. I wasn't drinking at this point, I was inhaling. The guy from Washington kept talking. My mind floated between subjects like a bird that can't decide which tree it prefers.
One night, drunk off cheap red wine, I gave in and spoke to her. I told her I missed her, and she said the same. Days later, she came over to watch a movie in my dorm room before heading out to a party. I did all my laundry and cleaned the living room of my suite just for her.
But she seemed different when she arrived. She exuded a discernible hesitancy. She lingered in the doorway. I tried to make her feel at home by offering her tea and snacks, but she brushed past my offer, leaving her coat and boots on as she moved onto the couch. I put in a movie to watch, but we only got through about half of it before she kissed me and suggested we move to the bedroom. I was complicit and desperate: I had my shirt off by the time the door slammed shut.
We made love in nervous, choppy undulations. The two ingredients of our sex were always these: stage fright and an uneven rhythm. But during the part in which we'd normally collapse into each other's arms and talk and stare at the ceiling, she jumped right out of my bed. She began pulling her wool socks on.
"You're leaving?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, her voice cold and sharp as an icicle. Nay: a thousand icicles. A thousand tiny icicles driven cleanly through my heart. She only wanted the physical part of sex, that much was clear to me. Perhaps the sex had nothing to do with me, really. Maybe the sex was just to prove something to herself.
I put on boxers and sat on my bed, watching her pull on her boots. I tried to kiss her as she was leaving, but she turned her cheek. It was precisely in that moment of unexpected loss, watching my bedroom door click shut, that I learned that in love you feel at home, and in heartbreak you feel rootless and distant. You become a tourist to you own life. You think you know where you belong, but then she leaves before you can ask, "Was it good for you?"
I stumbled through the streets of Edinburgh, back uphill toward the hostel. The lights were still burning among the dreary Scottish night. That castle lingered like a rain cloud.
I should have gone to bed, but I stayed up thinking about the guy from Seattle and his girlfriend and the bartender. I grabbed my laptop out of my suitcase and moved to the hostel common room. I looked at all the hostel residents, strangers from different continents. I met a South African guy who asked if I was Canadian and an old Brazilian man with a bald head. I met a red-haired girl from California who was also studying abroad. But I wondered why they were at the hostel on an more personal level. Were they searching for love? Were they fleeing from heartbreak? Or were any of them like me, juggling both at the same time?
The room was spinning. I felt like I understood how the sun felt up there in the cosmos, distantly burning and watching all the little planets dance around its axis. I was sick with booze and heartbreak. I opened my laptop and went on Facebook. I opened Erica's profile, and in a private message, split my heart open in a rambling message completely devoid of poetry. It was the social networking equivalent of tossing a stone at her window and throwing my arms up in pleading.
I sent it, and shut my laptop.
I didn't wait for a response because I knew by the time difference, she was probably in the middle of a sleep cycle. I should have been sleeping too, but instead I sat by a window, looking out into the night and thought about sleeping beside Erica, running a hand up her naked leg, up the gently curved hill of her hip to land softly on her dimpled cheek. I wanted to hear her laugh again. I wanted to pull her into me, in the middle of the old Scottish streets lined with grey stones and those burning bar lights and storybook castles, and tell her I love her again, hoping she might love me too. There is nothing more to say about that night. I went to bed with nothing but my dreams, my fears and passions waiting in her inbox, and the pale moon looking down at me.