07.18.24

A psychoanalysis he didn’t ask for:

His mom loves him but she is very reserved. She was a high-achiever, the impressive one in her family. She was the only woman in her class to pass her medical exams the first try (at least that’s what you think you remember her saying, something like that). She moved to America and married a lawyer. She had three kids. She’s far away from her entire family. She got divorced. It was maybe a little ugly, but she wouldn’t tell you that so it’s tough to say. She became very successful in her career and had seemingly no interest in remarrying.

She finds him impressive and sweet and he is her firstborn — she loves him, she does, she worries about him, she does. She likes that he is talented but reserved. He followed his passion and she admires it. She knows he’s sad, but she doesn’t know what to do with that. Hopefully he’ll figure it out, she thinks. He’s smart. He’ll be okay. He’s strong. He’s capable.

She also sees that he’s sensitive, but she tries not to think about it. Boys are supposed to be easy (her younger son is pretty easy, certainly easier than her eldest). Ultimately, he wants her to hug him. She hardly ever does. They never say, “I love you.” He first described her to you as “cold,” and you felt taken aback by that being the leadoff descriptor for his mother. Cold. What a choice of word. You would never describe your mom as cold. Not because it’s offensive — because she isn’t. At all. “Cold” is not a word often associated with motherhood. It is jarring to hear it be his first association with his mom. They text and talk on the phone often. You would have guessed that they were close.

But when you meet her, you see it. She is distant. She asks him lots of questions, they talk a lot, they speak French to each other, but there is an evident chasm between them. It makes your heart ache a little bit — he really is so sensitive. He has a very thin and delicate but still very hard exterior, but inside he is completely viscous — practically oozing with a vast innate desire to be held and nurtured. He wants affection, love, warmth. He doesn’t like owning up to wanting it, he’s hesitant to be vocal about his desire for tenderness. He worries it makes him vulnerable. He’s nervous about accepting it. He’s not used to it.

You stand at the doorway on your way out of her house — the first and last time you had dinner there. You had meant to bring cookies with you but you left them at his apartment by mistake. They are finishing up a conversation and you are standing between them, completing the triangle. You’re waiting for them to love-you-bye, and hug, and they don’t. He just turns on his heel, says, “See ya,” over his shoulder, and walks out of the house. Stunned, you turn to her after a moment and say, “It was great to see you, thank you so much for dinner.” Did you give her a quick hug? Maybe. And if you did it was stiff.

His mother doesn’t know how to love him properly, so he always wanted it. Then at a particularly formative time in his life, when he’s just starting to come into his own and feel some assurance about who he is, he meets a girl who uses his sensitivity, and his desire for love, and his vulnerability in expressing it, against him. It is weaponized. He describes it in a way that leads you to believe they were at least teetering on the edge of emotional abuse. It makes you worry about him. It makes you feel special that you’re getting the privilege of getting to know him this way.

But by the time you come along, he’s become so afraid of repeating history, of falling back into a trap where he is taken advantage of in his most vulnerable moments. He won’t let you get close to him, even though you only approach him slowly. In that slow approach, when you are being guarded yourself, he seems to be waiting at the end of the hallway with open arms, widely waiting for your embrace. But when you get closer you find that he actually has his back to you, daring you to leap onto his shoulders and cling on for dear fucking life. And you do! Because you accidentally fell in love with him along the way. But he will never carry you like a princess being saved from a life in a tower. He won’t even hold your hand when he takes you out to a restaurant in Queens. You will be subjected to a life of gripping his worn t-shirt from some local event he attended twelve years ago, hoping desperately that he occasionally remembers to reach back and kiss you on the cheek.

Ha! I think to myself, I did it. I got him. I cracked the case, his case, our case. That’s why he wouldn’t love me. That’s why he didn’t. That’s why he won’t. I speculate myself into fits of insomnia and wonder why it is so hard to get up in the morning.

I got him, or I think I got him, but there’s nothing to show for it — no way to even prove it. He’s never going to know that I got him, or if I was onto something, or if I was completely off-base. He might not remember what my laugh sounds like even though I remember what his fingertips felt like brushing my waist as he moved past me in the kitchen of my first New York apartment. He has a whole life I have no idea about, it’s been so long since I’ve seen him, since I’ve known him. I worry about the fact that he “lives near me,” I get anxiety at the pharmacy and on the train platform and at the grocery store, the places where our worlds intersect like a geographical Venn diagram, yet I don’t even know if he lives there anymore.