Once upon a time, there was a fairly normal girl who went away to college. And in the fall of her sophomore year, she met a boy at the campus radio station and fell in love for the first time. The boy and the girl had an enchanted love affair. They talked for hours and hours, they laughed, they adored each other, everyone they met (including themselves) seemed to believe they found their soul mate. Since she rented a room from an elderly lady off-campus, and he lived at home with his mother and siblings, they spent a lot of time walking through parks in the middle of the night, planning their future and listening to the 4am train rumble through their small town. As the crisp October days gave way to cold and snow, they relied on his Delta 88, and kept themselves warm with an old quilt and their plans to marry after college and take WCCO by storm: her in television, and him in radio. Alas, it was not to be, however. The boy, bewildered and beset with demands from his mother and (unbeknownst to the girl) by demands from a former girlfriend, ended their relationship. The girl fell down the rabbit hole, and her descent only sped up when she learned, three months later, that the boy was to marry his former flame.. She emerged a year later when the boy called her from his army post at Fort Dix. He begged her to write to him; said he'd made a mistake and he wanted her back. She wrote … but the promised letter in return never came. Finally, she confronted him and he confessed that he could not return to her – his fiancée "wouldn't let him." So the girl left, and began looking for surcease from the pain. Within two months, she had lost her virginity. Within five months, she had gotten pregnant in a one night stand with a nameless stranger. Two months after that, she found herself at a clinic, staring at a poster of a fur seal pup someone had taped to a ceiling in the procedure room. She tried alcohol, sex with strangers, Lutheranism, even what passed for counseling at the time – anything to outrun the pain, but nothing worked. Eventually, she all but stopped drinking and having sex with strangers, became a Unitarian Universalist, and even married – twice. Despite the divorces, a rebound engagement that had ended most unpleasantly, and finding herself a single parent, she never really felt she had gotten over the boy until she met him (at his insistence in a park where no one could see them) twenty five years later. Despite his balding pate and middle aged spread, his quick grin and his wit and humor recalled to her instantly why she had loved him so. And yet, a continuing sense of bewilderment and inability or unwillingness to take a stand was not as easy to overlook in a man as it had been in a boy, and when they said goodbye, she somehow had the sense that after all this time, some kind of chapter had been closed. Then, 26 years after she met the boy at the campus radio station, she met a man online. It was hard to meet single men in their 40s, especially since most men either had no children and wanted them, or had already raised their children and wanted their freedom. The man she met had four children – the youngest two close in age to her daughter – and one dog; and the girl, who had graduated to womanhood over the years, had one child and four dogs. The man had a major in philosophy; the woman had a minor in it. They met; he told her he loved her and soon she was able to say the same to him, and they (including the children) began making little adjustments and plans for the life they hoped to lead with one another someday. It wasn't easy; the man was out of work and needed to find employment that would enable him to continue to have his children with him half time. The woman lived an hour away and had a house and job there she couldn't leave. And she began to wonder, in the back of her mind, if the man was too enmeshed in his own pain over his divorce and his children to look clearly at either her or the future, but she brushed aside those errant thoughts and told herself that with patience and time, they would work through this bad patch and realize the future of their dreams. Until the day, that is, when one of the man's daughters instant-messaged the woman that her father had had someone else over to the house to watch movies the night before. The woman called the man and he assured her that everything was fine between them. This person was just an old friend, he said, and promised to talk to her more about it that night. But when she called, he didn't answer the phone. On and off, all night long, she tried his number, but he never picked up. The next day, three days before Valentine's Day, he told her he was leaving her to be with this other woman. And once again, she fell down the rabbit hole. This time, however, she was aided by her therapist, her psychiatrist, and an outpatient mental health program. Thanks to Lorazepam, lithium and adjusted doses of her regular antidepressant, plus weekly meetings with her therapist, six weeks of outpatient mental health treatment four days a week, and almost five months medical leave from her job, she stayed alive. The man had dumped her right at the start of a membership drive at the public radio station where she worked, so taking time off was not an option. She pasted a smile on her face and swallowed the lump in her throat with gallons of coffee and medication, and after the drive was over, even managed to work her morning shift on the air before heading down to the hospital. She learned that she could put her head down and cry during the songs, sit up, blow her nose, take another swallow of coffee, paste on the smile and key the mic. She could back-announce the music and talk about the weather, then start the next song, turn off her mic, and put her head down on the board again and weep. And no one listening ever knew. Once again, people told her she would get through this. But this time, they weren't so quick to reassure her she'd find love again. And they didn't say anything about all the wonderful life she had yet to live; they just said she had to be around for the people who needed her. And even though her beloved therapist, who had helped her so tremendously in the years since her second divorce, assured her "we'll get you through this," she started to feel that she had been lied to, manipulated, tricked into staying alive simply to make other people's lives easier and not because there was anything left for her in this life at all. In her family, a lot of sad things happened in February. She had an older sister who died of a heart defect after four days in 1958, and the anniversary of her birth and death always made the woman's parents sad. There had been some other sad anniversaries in February, too, including the Valentine's Day 2002 diagnosis of her beloved dog with cancer. She had decided, in that first year after the man left her, that if things did not in fact improve, she was going to end her life in February, on the anniversary of the day he abandoned her. She didn't. And now, two years after that fateful day, she thinks she made a mistake. With the exception of a couple of med changes and the ability to get through a whole month, sometimes, without crying at work, nothing has really changed. And once again, the woman is finding herself choking on rage against – she's not sure what or whom – but rage that she was tricked, tricked into staying alive thirty years ago and tricked into staying alive one year ago – two years ago … and wondering when she will finally, finally let go. Let go of hope, let go of fairy stories, let go of belief … and find the end to pain she's looked for for so long.
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