The "Yes" Column

As promised here is the story of my boyfriend and I. This was written in April 2014 for a creative non-fiction class and covers our general relationship up from my freshman year of college (2011-2012) until that time.

The “Yes” Column

Every year when I go in for my annual physical, there are forms in the doctor’s office asking about depression. They’re ironically on a sunny yellow sheet of paper, in an attempt to mask the gloomy questions with the brightness of the paper. They’re something my mother and I would make light of, make into a joke. The forms have two columns: check yes if you experience these symptoms or no if you don’t. I’ve always checked no. But going into my sophomore year of college, I actually read through the list because it was the first time I thought maybe I did have some of the “yes” symptoms. I scanned down the list, conscious of those around me, embarrassed I needed to think about if I was actually depressed, the bright yellow paper on my lap like a beacon. Symptoms such as problems sleeping, extreme restlessness or hyperactivity, decreased feelings of self-worth and changes in diet practically throttled me. But I lied. I went down the columns checking “no” before handing the clipboard to the nurse with an extra cheery smile, trying to fool both of us into believing I really belonged in the “no” column.

My development of “yes” symptoms began after the spring semester of freshman year. It was the best and worst time of my life. I had been slowly falling head over heels for a teammate, Adam, all year, but I had always viewed him as inaccessible because he was a senior and I was a shy freshman who couldn’t form sentences when he would talk to me. I couldn’t get past his deep brown eyes that seemed to read right through me, or his perfectly proportioned skier body of narrow hips, wide shoulders. But, miraculously, at our end of the year team formal, we got together, my shyness overcome with the help of a little liquid courage.  We stayed together throughout the spring, with our time together rapidly dwindling as graduation approached.

I never had any real belief that we would stay together beyond that spring. I could barely believe we were together at the time, let alone imagine it to last. But as the spring progressed, he was hired as an assistant coach and decided to get graduate school out of the way at St. Lawrence too. At the time, I considered myself lucky. The fact that he would still be here after graduation, elevated our potential in my mind.

One night, we spent the evening in a lean-to located a little ways off campus. After burying my face in my sleeping bag, I told him I didn’t want things to end. He pulled me closer to him and stroked the length of my arm as he explained that things between us would have to end with the semester. He would be my coach and having a relationship with one of his athletes simply wouldn’t be appropriate. Being with me was not an option.

I stayed at school as late as I could, willing time to stall and my remaining days with him to lengthen. On my last day, I brought cupcakes over to his townhouse and we hugged goodbye. I was still too intimidated to go for a kiss myself. As I walked away into the rain, Ray Charles’s “Every time We Say Goodbye” played on repeat in my mind. I willed him to come outside after me and say he had changed his mind. I prayed this wasn’t the end and that he would snap out of responsibility and into a relationship. But my luck had run out and as I climbed into my suburban, I choked back tears as my father unknowingly drove me home and away from the guy I’d fallen harder for than I ever planned.

The first week of being home was the hardest. I missed the weight of his body on the mattress next to me, the warmth of his hands on my waist, the fluttering, heart-wrenching feeling I got every time I opened my eyes and saw his beautiful face just inches from mine. I could still feel the thickness of his hair beneath my fingers, taste his lips and smell his combination of Old Spice and Suave for Men shampoo. I couldn’t sleep, I was never hungry and long bouts of endurance activity became my saving grace. I came to understand despair at that point in my life. Whenever Adam would email about how training was going I would comb through his words hoping for some indication he had changed his mind about us. Whenever he would call to discuss skiing and the workouts I was doing, the conversation would begin with a normal, impersonal “How are you?” and I would revert to my automatic answer of “fine” because that’s what I needed to tell myself too. I needed to deny I was anything but fine in order to bear it. 

In my denial, I felt that I could overcome any of my emotions. If I suppressed them long enough, hard enough, they would eventually dissolve and dissipate somewhere inside of me. I firmly believed that I could conquer any pain, physical or emotional. But in order to better understand my emotional pain I often transferred it into physical pain. I literally ran and skied myself into the ground. I developed hip problems over the summer that made it painful to climb stairs but a few ibuprofen pills every few hours enabled me to go on runs and skis that lasted for hours. I went to physical therapy for my hip, only to hit the trails right after promising my therapist I would take a day off. Physical pain was more tangible, I could understand it. But even more than understand it, I was its creator, I was in control. I could say how badly I would hurt by how hard I pushed my body. I was also the one who could make the pain stop. Physically at least.

By the time I returned to college, I was obsessed with exercise because it was the only thing that made me feel good and it was the only thing I had control over. When I went on a run I would run at race speeds just because it made me feel powerful, my deteriorating body be damned. I had told my coaches I went to physical therapy over the summer and they encouraged me to keep up with it at school but I never wanted to show weakness in front of Adam so I never went except on threat of not being able to attend practice.

Interactions between Adam and I were awkward because I reverted back to being unable to speak in front of him. He acted like nothing had happened between us so I followed his lead and never mentioned it. Instead we just let an awkward tension grow that was only dissipated when he would scold me for not taking care of my body. As my physical injuries became more problematic, additional issues such as my insomnia came to light, giving him one more thing to be angry at me for. When I would be in meetings with the coaches about these issues, the unavoidable inquiry of “why do you think this is happening?” would always arise and I would lie. How could I say that Adam was the real problem, that I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about him or that I couldn’t stop exercising because it was the only way I could deal with the pain of not being with him? How could I say that the real problem was that I loved him but he didn’t love me back?

By the time skiing was over, my feelings for Adam had only grown. My attempts to get over him were discouragingly unsuccessful and my body was so broken (I had developed a stress fracture) at this point that exercise was no longer a viable outlet. I turned instead to alcohol. I would only drink on the weekends, blending in with the other college students, but would fantasize about being intoxicated all week. It made me numb. It took away all pain. It became my new and improved saving grace for the spring semester of my sophomore year.

I wouldn’t qualify myself as an alcoholic during this time but it made me understand alcoholics. I sympathized with the fact that alcohol could, not take away my problems and pain, but make them not hurt so much, even if just for a little while. I got it. Every hour I was drunk was one less hour I hurt over Adam. But it wasn’t who I was and I slowly began to resent myself for relying on it. Over the summer I gained substantial weight from it and would train only a fraction of the amount I had the previous summer because I no longer cared. I didn’t care about my body or skiing or myself. Nothing really mattered.

At this point I obviously knew that Adam and I were a thing of the past, smoke in the wind. I wasn’t ignorant, I knew that for him at least time had sealed off those feelings and he was past it. Although I couldn’t say the same for myself I knew I had to try harder as I faced another ski season with him as a coach. Whatever it would take to move past him this school year I would do.

Yet when I returned to school for my junior year, I wasn’t who I thought I would be. I drank and partied heavily, I hardly cared about athletics, my body was a wasteland, and I was rapidly losing more and more respect for myself after every random guy I kissed.  I thought that maybe if I put enough people between Adam and myself I’d forget how he’d begin his kisses slowly, concentrating on my bottom lip and gradually build into the toe-curling whoppers that we all dream of. If I kissed enough boys my age who barely needed to shave, I’d forget how it felt to cup Adam’s occasionally scruffy jawline in my hand.  But instead, as I was kissing too-much-tongue guy or holy-shit your-mouth-is-not-a-Hoover guy, I just wanted to kiss Adam more.

So I came up with a new please- get-over-Adam- now plan. I’d try something with a little more substance, something more than a make out. I started seeing one guy regularly and we became a “thing,” then together, before finally starting to date in December. He was funny and young, carefree and enjoyed partying. I liked him, I really did, but my best friend still heard more about the funny things Adam did at practice rather than anything about my boyfriend. 

Spending hours in a ski van driving to races and practice with Adam likely didn’t help the please-get-over-him-now plan. I had long gotten over my inability to hold a conversation with him, and the more we talked the more I liked him. We talked about writing and books, roommates and professors, class and family. There was never a shortage of things to discuss as long as it wasn’t us. Over the two seasons we spent as coach and athlete, we never discussed what happened his senior year. The closest time we came to it was when a teammate was describing how I had been talking in my sleep and snoring the previous night. Adam commented that he doesn’t snore but people have told him he breathes heavily and looked over to me as if for confirmation. I acknowledged it but quickly changed the subject before anyone could wonder why I would know anything about Adam’s sleeping habits. 

In addition to loving talking to him, it wasn’t helpful that I could openly look at him as we talked. Constantly looking at him from the side gave me an appreciation for the straightness of his nose, something my own is lacking due to a street hockey puck to the face when I was seven. I noticed that the two lines on the corners of his mouth had become more prominent than I remembered and they made him look older, more thoughtful. And whenever I’d ask a question that required his opinion, his jaw would clench and relax twice before responding. But his hands captivated me. They have a light dusting of brown hair, his nails are always neatly trimmed, and his fingers are long and beautifully straight. He doesn’t like having rough calloused hands but even regular application of lotion doesn’t stop his skin from becoming firm and established. I loved watching them slide smoothly around the steering wheel or tap out the rhythm to whatever classic rock song we were listening to on his leg.

After our the last weekend of racing he prompted the team to signed up for the Stowe Derby, a twenty kilometer ski race that combined alpine and cross country, with him on the Sunday after our last collegiate race. During the week leading up to the Derby, teammates who had expressed interest slowly decided that it wasn’t something they wanted to do or it was too expensive, so at the end of the week I was the only one that signed up. We left the carnival together, talking as we always do as we drove to Stowe, not once mentioning the elephant we had crammed in the car with us for the hour long car ride. We then picked up our race packets, and checked into our single hotel room for the night. We showered and watched the Olympics, talking casually, with me sitting on my queen bed and him sitting on his queen bed, yet neither of us dared to address the throttlingly obvious fact that we were alone in a hotel room together. Alone. In a hotel room. With Adam. Basically, my every fantasy come true. Except that he was still the coach and still didn’t want me.

For dinner, we drove around on a mini-adventure before going to “Jimmz” a scruffy little pizza shop. Deciding to split a large pie, I surprised him by wanting bacon and agreeing to his addition of pepperoni because “girls typically always just go for cheese.” I was tempted to get a beer, thinking that a slight buzz would make this situation less awkward and maybe give me the courage to address the insanity of our situation. Instead I ordered a water.

On the way out of the restaurant, he strode a bit ahead of me so he could open the van door for me. It had become a joke earlier in the day when I laughed at him for holding the door, telling him his mom would be proud. For the rest of the weekend I never touched a door handle.

Back in the hotel room, we watched Borat, a movie we had picked up earlier for a few bucks from the gas station before we went to bed. Not that I really thought I would need them but I wore nice underwear and a lacy pink bra to bed, just in case. As we lay in our separate beds, all I could think about was a scene from What Happens in Vegas when Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher were sharing a hotel room. The camera flashes back and forth between them as they lay awake staring at the ceiling waiting for the other person to make a move. Since he hadn’t started breathing heavily, I guessed he was still awake too. I desperately wanted to bridge the gap between our beds and snuggle into him. I wanted to speak up and address the awkwardness, to tell him things aren’t over for me, that if he would just say yes I’d be all his. Instead I just laid there, shuffling my feet and playing with my fingers, staring at the ceiling.  

We both woke up around six, well before the alarm, because the room next to us was playing loud country music. He told me I had been talking in my sleep, and I instantly panicked. I remembered having a dream that I was talking on the phone to one of my roommates telling her everything I wanted to say to Adam. Thankfully he said he could only make out a few words that it was mostly just mumbling. Breathing a sigh of relief, I sank back onto my pillows. After a moment though, he said, “Ok I’m just going to say it, I’m just going to say it, this is awkward.”

In an instant, his words released the tension that the room had been suffocating with, the rigidity with which I had held back my feelings for the past two years, every obstinate refusal to address our past whenever we had been alone together over the past twenty- four months, every suppressed nervous giggle, every tongue-bitten comment, every bottled-up, stuffed aside, thought, feeling and action I had regarding Adam, was finally let out into the open. And what was more; he was addressing it, not me.

He began by saying we have never talked about what happened, that he has thought about it constantly since his senior year, wondering what would have happened if he hadn't said no to me. He said he thinks we’re compatible and talking to me in the vans is easy and fun. Adam said that he likes that I recognize the real reasons he says certain things, like introducing the idea that there might be another person as assistant coach for the coming season just he gets validation from the team that they’d like him to stay another year. He said he knows that relationships between assistant coaches and students happen all the time because we’re all basically the same age and went to school together and he wasn't as worried about having a relationship as he once was. He kept saying all of these perfect, beautiful things to me as I laid there in my bed, still fiddling my hands and jiggling my legs, wanting to record it so later I could prove it wasn’t a dream.

Yet even as he said all of these perfect, beautiful things, I was skeptical, one hundred percent on the defensive. If I admitted the depth of my feelings what would become of it? Could I handle another insomniatic summer? What if he was only saying these things because we were currently in this safety bubble of a hotel room and we were so removed from the reality we’re typically in? What happens when we get back to campus? Do I return to being an athlete and we hover around the awkwardness and pretend nothing happened when he inevitably decides he can’t be with me after all? Could I handle returning to all of those “yes” symptoms if this doesn’t work out again?

Instead of just lying there, this time I took some initiative. This was my golden opportunity to tell him, almost two years after the fact; he was still everything I wanted. I took a deep breath and told him I liked him, choosing to keep my feelings lighter than they actually were to guard against potential heartbreak. Then I got off the bed, and started to brush my teeth, knowing that I needed something to physically prevent me from blurting out more emotions than I was ready to share. Plus, if we were to kiss, I didn’t want to have morning breath.

My movement seemed to remind him that we needed to get to the race and signaled a pause in the conservation. There was still heaviness in the room, as both of us crashed from the high of boldness we, both passive people, seldom took advantage of. We hovered around one another, quickly packing up our bags and checking out of the room. As our hotel door closed, all I could think about was how we were leaving our little safety bubble and moving closer towards our reality.

The car ride was short and nearly silent, only occasionally interrupted by Adam offering me bits of advice on the race. We took a shuttle bus up to the mountain where we rode the chairlift together and got in a short warm up before lining up for the start of our wave. He quickly took off as I approached the alpine slope more cautiously on my Nordic skis, taking my time on the tricky corners and attempting to keep my mind focused on my pole plants and foot movements and not on the fact that the guy I have wanted to be with for the past two years finally wanted to be with me. I tried not to think about the conversation that had taken place only hours before, tried to put it out of my mind so I could concentrate on racing but instead I recreated every word he had said to me and constructed the likely conversation we would have on the long van ride back to campus and crafted the perfect answers, preparing what I wanted to say so that when the time came I would be ready.

Two months later, I could see the collar of his undershirt: a light grey t-shirt from a summer ski camp at Stratton Mountain School, recognizable by the slightly frayed collar, a glimpse of his rugged personality. But it was hidden under a white collared shirt that had a light blue checkered pattern and my favorite heather-grey, high collared quarter zip up sweater. He had on a pair of olive green khakis and his dressier tan shoes that he got from Goodwill, a reflection of his frugal nature.

Adam had said we needed a classy night because we hadn’t gone out yet that week. We went to a nice restaurant in the neighboring town, ironically called “First Crush.” For dinner we both ordered the chicken special and walked across the street for some after dinner fro-yo. Adam mocked the way I said fro-yo, drawing out the ‘oh.’ We split a neon green cup of frozen yogurt, before heading back to his house. When we got settling in bed we watched an episode of The Office, me lying on his chest while he leaned up against the wall with his arm around me. When the episode ended he declared it time for bed, snapping his computer shut as he put out the light.

In the darkness, he reached out a hand and slid it up until it lay on my cheek, using my face to orient himself in the dusky darkness. He found my lips and pressed his against them, while he placed one hand on my waist as the other held my hand. I boldly slid my fingers under his shirt, nervous as I inched my hand over the hills of his abs, to the plane of his chest and back down to his waistline. I felt him unbuttoning my sheer black top. I shrugged out of it and pulled off my camisole. I could make out his movements in the invading streetlight as he grabbed the back of his t-shirt and pulled it over his head. Stripped of our tops, we both scooched closer to one another. He slid one arm around me; the other unclipped my bra as I undid his belt, his button, his zipper. He slipped the straps off me and I used one-hand to slide his pants off his hips. While he got his pants the rest of the way off, I freed myself of my bra, dropping it over the side of the bed. Then he wrapped one arm around me, leaning on the other as he hovered over me, kissing me slightly differently now, harder, and used his other hand to undo my belt, button, zipper as I self-consciously thought considered the imperfections of my naked body.

In the morning, we lay curled together in bed, both shirtless but wearing bottoms. My right leg was intertwined with his, his left arm under my neck, his hand cupped around my shoulder, holding my body against his. We were listening to the Allman Brothers but the song playing in my head was John Legend’s “All of Me,” on repeat in my head from the night before. We had been laughing a few minutes before as Adam tried to sing along, purposely distorting his voice, alternating between soprano and the deepest bass. Then we were quiet for a moment before he said, “I love you Kate.” I felt my heart stop, as in the rarest of moments it fell out of sync. Heat flooded my body, like I was sitting in a sauna, going from comfortable to squirming in the sudden unescapable heat.  I felt my face turn scarlet and my eyes flickered quickly to his face, my attention diverted from the pattern I had been drawing on his chest, as I tried to assess the seriousness of his words. His mouth still held the smile of our laughter, his deep chocolate eyes brighter than usual, but his face solemn enough to let me know he meant it. He said it easily, matter-of-factly. Not hurried, not passionately, not a whisper, just a straightforward up front statement of fact.

I awkwardly laughed and nuzzled my face in between his shoulder and neck, unable to quell my laughter. It wasn’t a product of sarcasm or any sort of distrust but in bliss and overall nervousness. Realizing I had to do something I smiled hugely and kissed him, again and again and again. He smiled, his cheeks curving in deep lines along his dimples, as he said, “you’re so happy,” like he was surprised. Like he didn’t know I had been waiting to hear those words for the past two years.

***

I'm planning on writing more about what has been going on with us since then (can't believe that was a year ago!) because so much has happened, both good and bad. We have definitely gone through a lot but sometimes that shows you something about yourself and the person you choose to be with despite everything that tries to get in the way.

(Adam and I on Mount Philo in Vermont, March 2015)