Ren 

DECEMBER 2009

I swallow against the raw emotion welling up in my throat and wipe away the tears that are seeping out of the corners of my eyes. I just picked a scab on my heart that I thought was semi-healed over, and my body now aches again with the fresh blood of lost love.

I slowly stack everything neatly back in the box and sit there a few more minutes, just letting myself be in this bittersweet reminiscence.

The sound of Aunt Gina preparing to leave breaks me out of my meditation, and I make that motorboat sound of resignation as I stand up out of family duty to go wish her good night. I stop off in the hall bathroom to wipe away any smudged mascara that has undoubtedly accumulated under my eyes.

God, why did I have to cry? Now I look all emo, like the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. If I tip off Aunt Gina that something's up, her favorite game of twenty questions will commence. Come on, Ren, happy thoughts.  But Gina is luckily in a rush now to get home before she has to drive in the dark, so she hardly even looks at me before giving me a brief hug and wet kiss on the cheek and taking off. 

After Gina leaves, my dad helps carry the art to my car, and I grab my box from his bedroom and meet him out in the driveway. The sun has gone over the horizon, and a sherbet glow lights up the sky. He puts the art in the back seat, then takes the box from my hands, placing it in as well and adjusting it to hold the art from toppling forward.

"Hey, Dad..." I begin, realizing I never got an answer to my earlier question.

"Yeah, honey?" he says, still bent over in the back seat.

"How did you know that Gio's mom had died?"

He rises slowly out of the car, shuts the back door, and leans against it. "Oh, yeah. Um, it was..."

He pauses and looks guilty.

"What?"

He squints at me. "Are you still seeing Gio?" 

"No... I mean, I don't know. Why?"

Why is he acting so weird?

"Well, did you talk to him... about everything that... happened while you were away?" he asks me back, searching my eyes for some sort of clue.

 "I don't know. We didn't talk a lot about it. What do you know?"

He sighs heavily and crosses his arms. "Well, Honey, um, I've actually spoken to him a few times over the years."

My jaw falls open. "What!" 

"Yeah, well, he's, uh... stopped by a few times." 

"What!" I say again in the exact same tone.

"Maybe we should go back inside and talk about it."

I can't seem to wipe the shock off my face as I follow him inside. He pats the sofa seat next to him, and I hesitantly sit down, looking at him with a furrowed brow.

"Okay," he begins. "So... I bumped into him downtown once after school in the first couple of months after you left, and... Ren, it looked like he was really struggling... emotionally, you know."

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. "So... I felt bad for him and invited him over to watch the game with me. You know, Honey... we used to be kinda close, too," he said softly with an apologetic face.

"What!" Apparently, this is the only word in my vocabulary at the moment.

I shake my head and pinch my eyes closed in an attempt to make the dizzying sensation stop, and then the next sentence just spills out of me. "Dad! Why didn't you tell me?"

"He told me not to, and I didn't want to disrupt what you had going on in New York," he says sincerely. 

Somehow, that stings.

"How many times?" 

"I don't know..." he shrugs. "Maybe a dozen times over the years."

"A dozen? Oh my god!" I'm absolutely reeling from finding out my dad and Gio had a secret relationship.

"Don't be mad, honey. Life's been really tough for him sometimes, and he's missing someone, a father figure he can talk to," he explains with a pained look. "But tell me, how was he? Is he doing all right?"

"He seemed fine... well, sort of," I say the last part nearly under my breath, then begin to feel angry. "What do you know about him, Dad?"

"I don't know if it's my place to tell you."

"Dad, enough. Tell me."

He scratched his head nervously. "Well, like I said, just after you left, he went through a really... hard time. He was very depressed and was skipping school again—abusing drugs and alcohol. We got him through that, though."

"We?" 

"His mom and I," he discloses, his face calm and serious.

"What?!" My brain is exploding.

"Anyway, then years later, his mom died, as you know, and he was even worse than before. His sister called me one day on the phone for help. She said he trusted me. Your wedding was in a few weeks. I didn't want to say anything, and you had so much going on. Anyway, your mom and I got him into counseling."

"MY MOM!"

I am beyond. 

What reality am I in right now? How could they both have kept this from me all these years?

"Honey, she's the psychologist. She knows about those things, not me. She has connections and knows stuff I don't. Believe me. It was not an easy decision to involve her."

"Wait, you got him into counseling? Like his job or..."

"No. To see a... psychologist. He wasn't leaving his house, honey. He... went on medication and regular therapy and seemed to be doing much better, but that was a few years ago. I haven't talked to him since."

I don't know what to say. I drop my head into my hands in absolute overwhelm. I start to go a bit numb.

"I'm sorry to tell you all this. Um, are you sure you won't see him again?"

"No," I manage to mumble, thinking of Gio's last words to me.

"Okay... um, but if you do ever talk to him again. Please be mindful that he might not have wanted me to share all that with you."

"Okay," I respond, my head still firmly planted in my hands.

This is all suddenly making more sense.

In high school, Gio shared with me that he had experienced a major form of depression for a few months before we got together, and he went on medication for it. But for the year-and-a-half we were together, he wasn't on any medication, and he was fine.

But it had been my worst fear, actually, that Gio would fall into depression again. Let his plans for college and his potential slip by him. I remind myself that he does have a good office job now and a fancy car. He can't be doing too badly, but this new information puts what he said over the phone in a new light.

"Damn it, Dad, I've always sorta worried about him, and that, and now I feel..." I didn't really want to finish that sentence once I knew where I was going with it.

"You feel what, honey?"

"Guilty."

As I drive home later that evening, I just can't get my stomach to unknot itself.

 In the first few months of university, I tried calling Gio a few times and writing him some emails, but he never returned them. He just completely cut me off, and it broke me up inside even more—as if he hadn't just a few short weeks ago been the one person who knew me the best in the entire world and who I still loved with all my soul.

He never liked pictures taken of him, so I only had two to remind me what he actually looked like—I already felt like details in my brain were beginning to fade away. When I was alone on the weekend (which was often), I would get them out and stare at them—like I needed proof that he even existed and how good it felt when he looked at me.

My heart just kept crumpling in on itself, becoming tighter, heavier, and more painful with each reminder that he was out of my life for good.

Every guy I'd ever been seriously together with ended the relationship before I was ready to—my first boyfriend, Ryder, then Gio, then my boyfriend in college, Justin, and most recently—Alex. How naive I was to think marriage finally protected me from that.

It seemed that guys had some magic boy "love switch" they could just flick off and be over me. I believed that maybe girls just love harder than guys. That we are wired differently. Gio had flicked his off, and I was the one still hurting.

Had Gio really been a wreck over me? What's happened in his life over the last eleven years? Is he okay? 

My gut tells me I need to talk to him again, but how can I get him to see me?

Maybe I'm thinking about all this way more than I should. 

Damn, I miss him, though.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

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