Happy Anniversary, Arnold

Fifteen years ago today Arnold called me at work and ended it.

In my head, he was going to be my husband. Fifteen years later I'm still writing about it. I don't know what that means. I don't care.

Using that name brings me back to two distinct places. The first is a 90s childhood nostalgia I'm too tired to actually enjoy. The second is him.

Writing this is a chore because I never wanted to recount what happened after he vanished. He judged me for being devastated by his exit, as if my reaction to him destroying my life was somehow beneath him. Not the first time someone's used my reaction as evidence against me instead of evidence against them. He just gets to be the origin story on that one too.

It would be nice if he acknowledged I actually exist. I won't hold my breath.

We met because he'd just gotten a Saint Bernard puppy. That was it. His profile said "I laugh a lot." We started talking on Grindr like everyone does, and somewhere in those first messages we both decided the puppy made a better origin story than an app. So that's the one we told people. Funny how we were editing the narrative before we'd even had a first date.

On the fourth of July, same as we marked every month because we'd met on October fourth, he handed me twelve roses. Eleven real, one fake. He told me he'd love me till the last one died.

I believed him completely.

Three days later he broke my heart. I still wonder if he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me.

There's a video from that first Valentine's Day of him singing to me. I still have it. I've never deleted it and I've never made it through the whole thing either.

Nothing about his behavior was kind. He met my parents in Seattle. He moved in. Three days after those roses, he called me at my part-time job to say he was out.

He killed whatever hope I had left.

I was supposed to be the one in that wedding video, not some placeholder who paved the way for the next guy. Apparently I was just the guy God did not want him with, or the one he couldn't be bothered to tell his mother about.

Why wasn't I enough?

I'll stop at two questions because I'm sure he's already framed this story to make himself the saint.

His mother's church helped him get there. Years of her convincing him that being who he is put him one bad decision from burning alive or getting swallowed by an earthquake. He didn't argue the theology. He just packed a truck and let the fear of hell do the talking he didn't have the guts to do himself.

It sucks. I've given him way too much grace for someone who broke my soul.

He got married while I sat with the memory of loading his mattress into a truck. He confirmed every anxiety I ever had in a single afternoon: the calm phone call, the move-out notice, the breakup, the rush to get it over with. It was efficient, I'll give him that.

I fell apart on the sidewalk that afternoon and told him I wanted to die. He didn't hold me.

He's a dick for telling me God did not accept this, not right now, not in this moment, like grace was something you could put on layaway, and then acting like the victim while he dismantled my world. Then, because he couldn't be bothered to handle the fallout of his own actions, he called the police to remove me.

Who does that?

He acted disgusted that he even had to speak to me afterward.

They put me in the back of a car and drove me off to a psych hold. He didn't ride along. He didn't call after. As far as I know he went home and slept fine.

What came after didn't stay contained to that year. I started using to fill the hole he left. For three and a half years I thought about him every day. I eventually wrote a song about it, called it "It Started With a Dog and Ended With God."

Less than a year after he left me on that sidewalk, he got married. To a man.

Turns out God's objection was never to men loving men in general. It was specifically to me.

He viewed my TikTok profile on January 10, 2024. I don't know what brought him there, and I've spent more time than I'd like to admit wondering. Five months later, on June 8th, I finally wrote back. I told him I'd seen his name on my feed and that it took me back to his chapter in my life, back to that profile with the simple line, "I laugh a lot."

I said despite how things turned out, I couldn't help but remember the laughter and the lessons learned. I even used the word "journey," God help me. I told him I hoped life had been kind to him, that I hoped he was thriving.

I signed it "Always, Henk."

That message was gracious. Too gracious. What I actually meant was: you destroyed me.

I did not write that. I wrote "always" instead, like he'd earned an always.

He couldn't even manage twenty words back.

He read it. I guess he was too busy being married to acknowledge the "crazy" ex he created. Typical.

This is why it sounds bitter. Because I've done this my whole life, handed grace to people who never asked for it and sure as hell never earned it. He got it. Other people since him got it too. I'm not proud of that pattern. I'm just done pretending it isn't one.

I've moved on, technically. Dated around. Slept around. Tried not to measure everyone against him.

"Tried" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

I'm not writing this because I want him back. I'm writing it because for a long time his silence made me wonder if I'd invented the whole relationship in my head.

I did not.

I have the roses. I have the video I can't watch. I have the read receipt with nothing underneath it. I have a decade of a nervous system that still flinches at a certain kind of calm voice on the phone.

He gets his husband, his God who made an exception for everyone in the room except me.

I get the roses, the receipt, and the fact that I never once needed his permission to survive him.

Love that for him.

Love & Art, 1991