No, I didn't like her. She was irritating, and everything she said and did with me reminded me of my parents, especially my mother. I remember that she made me clean the handle of the toilet because I thought I was supposed to use my foot. It was humiliating to have to undo a mistake you hadn't known was one. I guess there was a better way of asking me to undo my mistake, but her way was dry and humiliating, lack of compassion, again, like the way my mother would always do. I guess neither one of these women knew a better way.
But I guess she was different from her in that she smiled, even laughed. She admired me for my academic excellence, my intelligence when it came to math. But then, strangely, that seemed to much like her Dad, who was a mathematician. According to her, her dad wouldn't let her use the calculator until she knew how to add and subtract numbers of any size and complexity. Rules she had inherited from him. Her mother was like a nebulous being; you know she's around but not quite put your finger on it.
I didn't like her. She was my first girlfriend and the physical interaction was exciting for a teenage boy. But I didn't know that that wasn't enough to justify being with someone I didn't respect or like. For most of the relationship I just wanted to end it, but then there was always that spark of physical touch that kept me in a leash. Even though when we were physical she was even more authoritarian. I think she didn't like that part either, but she was quite confused by it. She told me stories of her previous relationships where things were just really strange. Why does a woman go down on a guy just because that is what she thinks a man wants? For her there was an element of self-pity, and another of obligation, and these elements added to her despising the man, ultimately.
Being teenagers just means a lot of confusion. Being teenagers with unsympathetic and out-of-touch parents adds to the confusion and frustration. And in my case, being a teenager who had had to take care of himself and of others for so long also meant a deep sense of loneliness. And never being thanked for his role in the family, but rather more likely being reprimanded for not having done enough, this also became a weight in self-esteem. And so here we have a teenage boy with his first girlfriend whom he did not like at all, did not find any connection, but wanted to be with for reasons only apparent decades later. Here a teenage boy finally feeling accepted even if accepted by a mean-spirited woman who has her own baggage as a single, female child in a Chinese family that rushed her through the best high school in the city so she would be the youngest to graduate. And so the dynamites are set and the dam is waiting to be blown up.
When the explosion happened, I simply couldn't take it. However much I might have wanted to get rid of her, in the end I couldn't because she was the only one who accepted me, even if it was on a superficial level of the skin. She was the only one who wanted to do things with me, the only one who wanted to call me first, the only one who wore the dress of "girlfriend" beside me among our friends to make me feel like a man, the only one who trusted me, again on a superficial level, enough to let me touch her. So however unhealthy the relationship was, however mean and harmful she actually was to my life, and most important of all, however little I cared about her, she was a trophy that I couldn't just let go. But she was headstrong and in the spirit of her world of unbreakable rules she would apply one simple one: once broken never again mended. So despite my pathetic ways of imploring her for a second chance, she had to adhere to her rule. It had nothing to do with how wise or unwise continuing the relationship was, or that my behavior to her, one characterized by so little love, was much less than what she deserved from a relationship, none of this was the reason. She just had to hang on to the rule that once broken, never again mended.
I suffered, probably not as long as I thought I would, but I did suffer. Then I hated her. Then I didn't talk to her. She came to visit me a few times during college when her ballroom team came to compete with ours. She was still the same mean-spirited woman who believed that she was really smarter than everyone else because her rules would always take her one step ahead of everyone else. After that we never talked again. Now she found me on Facebook and wanted to connect with me, in this new and even more superficial manner. I hardly remember her smiles, the only feature that would save her from an absolute judgment as an unhappy bag of rules. Other than that, she represents to me a world I cannot stand, a world of rules and no human sympathy.
I see from her Facebook picture that she has a son and these two, along with the father, presumably, were photographed on the Great Wall of China. It's amazing that the bitterness I still harbor against her keeps me from having any more sympathy for her now that she's a mother than I had for her when she broke up with me. We are all just a little messed up, I guess.
