Sweet & Sour

Gary Stewart always smelled vaguely of cinnamon. It didn't matter if he was working into the late hours at his part time job as a grocery stocker or glistening with sweat after a competitive pick up basketball game, the sickly sweet smell always lingered on his skin.

It's hard to trust a person who always smells perfectly pleasant. If it made sense for anyone, however, that person would certainly be Gary Stewart. I don't think I'd ever met someone in my life as impossibly sweet and caring.

Perhaps a different person would learn to love such a thing. But here's the problem: I hate cinnamon. The spiced sweetness makes me want to choke, a fact I was reminded of anytime he kissed me. I knew the moment I met him that he and I could never last. If you asked anybody else in the world, they'd probably tell you he's too good for me. They'd probably be right. That's the type of boy you could marry, they would say.

But he smelled like cinnamon and his smothering nurturing nature made me feel like I was suffocating. Always sweet, just like his scent. He didn't even hold it against me when I ditched him at senior prom to get high in the back of Alex Blackmore's beat up Camaro.

I really had to spell it out for him that we were over. It was brutal, and he cried, and I felt like a terrible person. Though strangely, even though I was the one who broke his heart, I felt a sense of mourning when we were truly over. I felt the need to fill the hole that relationship left in my life. So I scarfed down a cinnamon roll from the Cinnabon at the mall, and then immediately threw it back up.

Despite my stomach's refusal to except the unnatural combination of spice and sweetness that is cinnamon, my heart felt lighter in that moment. I felt like I had somehow purged the bad feelings out of my system.

And so began my ritual. It's a perfect system I created: Every time I feel something sour, I consume something sweet. The cinnamon roll disaster perfectly embodied everything about being with Gary Stewart. And once I ate that awful treat, I was able to move on.

Alex Blackmore was a great kisser who looked good in a well-worn leather jacket, but my apathy for him bordered on hate. As it turns out, a relationship can't last on sex appeal alone. It took nothing more than a half pack of vending machine M&Ms to relieve myself of that heartbreak.

Jamie Malone was the first boy I ever truly loved. I met him in my Freshman year of college. He was irresistible to me, wrapped in a stylish scarf in the brisk Autumn weather. I had convinced myself that I had concocted him from a dream. But Jamie Malone was real. He was three years my senior, so I convinced myself that he was a man and I was a silly girl. He loved coffeehouses and rainstorms and correcting the way I say the word sherbet.

I was so lost in the idea of what a grown up relationship was that I didn't realize that I had begun to chip away parts of myself to fit the mold of who I thought he wanted me to be. Despite my ever shrinking identity, I convinced myself that this was true love. I wanted to be with him forever.

As it turns out, forever was until the older, more sophisticated TA he had his eye on finally gave him the time of day. He didn't even have the decency to break up with me to my face. He left an obnoxious letter ever so scribbled in calligraphy. He waxed poetic in his telling of how we weren't right for each other. It sounds ridiculous now, but I was devastated--at first.

And so, the self I had become so he would love me, convinced herself to eat banana loaf bread with black coffee. After all, that was his favorite thing to order at the pretentious off-brand café he drove twenty minutes out of the way to enjoy each morning, even though he lived right across from a Starbucks.

But then, slowly, I managed to dig into my deepest soul and find the old parts of me again. And those last bastions of myself instead ate banana sherbet, pronounced with the invisible hard "r" that isn't there but I say it anyway. Because, fuck pretention. And fuck Jamie Malone.

The first time I kissed a girl, she tasted of watermelon Chapstick. Her name was Krissy Lester, and she was an outspoken activist and an avid fan of the thrasher punk music that played at a local dive bar in town. I allowed myself for one moment to believe I had been looking at the wrong pieces my whole life. But that feeling was fleeting. Aside from our chromosomes, Krissy and I had nothing in common. It fizzled before it even began. I know what you're thinking, but you'd be wrong. I didn't enjoy a watermelon treat after the demise of this particular relationship. Sure, as time goes on, I find that's the one detail I seem to recall with vivid clarity, but Krissy Lester was not watermelon. No, Krissy Lester was a lemon tart. The first bite was sweet, but the more I consumed, the more sour and bitter things became.

She returned a box of my stuff to my front porch. And then she lit it on fire. It was pretty easy to move on after that.

Kyle Archer was the real deal. He was shy and soft spoken, sweet but not in a sickly way. I realized when I met him that all the other versions of love I thought I had encountered had been a joke. We had that kind of love where we were comfortable breathing each other's air, where we lived peacefully within shared silence.

Nothing is harder than losing the only person who was in on your inside jokes. It feels like an irretrievable part of you is ripped away. The hardest part was seeing the future so clearly. I saw myself as a wife, as a mother. I allowed myself to dream of a life that could be.

I remember with vivid clarity the moment that future was ripped from me.

It's almost cruel in how ordinary it all was. He left our shared apartment to go to his Wednesday night class. He'd done it a dozen times before, but this time he happened to collide with a drunk idiot cruising down the interstate. The last words he said to me were "Catch you on the flipside."

I found the ring he planned to give me buried in his sock drawer when I was boxing up his things.

I didn't have an answer for this one. There isn't a dessert that can cover this kind of heartbreak. No perfect sweet that could sum up everything that Kyle Archer meant to me.

For the first two weeks after it happened, I didn't eat anything at all. I couldn't even look at food. I locked myself away in my bedroom and allowed myself to wither. I thought of everything I lost and how much nothing else mattered anymore, losing myself in the beautiful past.

And then I thought about Kyle. I thought about his light laughter and how he would always turn the lights off for me, because he knew I was scared to move in the dark. And I thought about how much he'd want me to be okay.

So I eat. I eat a slice of Black Forest chocolate cake, because it's bitter and too rich and almost impossible to finish. Every bite I'm sure there's no way I could take another.

But I do.

And eventually, the slice is gone, the only proof of it's existence crumbs of black against a white paper plate. My stomach hurts, and I hate myself for finishing it.

But I carry on.

And eventually I feel better. The pain in my stomach lifts, and the fullness dissipates, and I feel like I could eat something once again. And in that moment I know that this--the worst heartbreak I could ever endure--even this will heal someday.

And I wait and wonder what sweet delight life might still have in store for me.