Zibby Mag

By Rebecca Lynne Loftin

At an overlook in Long Beach, I begged my boyfriend to stop taking pictures of me. Whenever we were out, he would tell me I looked beautiful and by the time I looked up, he was already snapping photos. I liked the attention, but he never stopped, even when I couldn’t bear to see myself, let alone be seen through the unforgiving microscope of a camera.

He was switching between the last roll of film on his Canon and his iPhone. Snap. I looked to the ocean, turning my face away. Snap. I looked terrible. Snap. I started yelling. Snap. He told me to smile. For me, please. Snap. I was crying. He continued as if this were a memory he’d like to keep.

I couldn’t bring myself to love him as much as he loved me, so these small degradations evened the playing field. Or maybe I really did look pretty when I was coming undone. I’m still not sure. When he turned the camera to me, I was in his power. Snap.

On a sunny day last December, I said I love you on my way out to a meeting. The words left my mouth as I was grabbing my keys, and we both stopped. I always told my friends I loved them in lieu of a goodbye, an innocuous habit.

Love you, see you soon.

It felt no different now. But he looked at me with a mixed expression of surprise and hope, definitely hope. Before I knew it I was saying, “I didn’t mean that.” The first honest thing I said that morning. Before he could respond, I rushed outside into the sunlight.

Growing up, my mother and I devoured romantic comedies as some men do with science fiction — as an alternate reality, an escape. We put them on when my father was away, which was most nights. My mother liked them because they were guaranteed not to be depressing. But, for me, they served as a kind of wish fulfillment.

I thought I would eventually fall in love across the street like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle. He would say hello, and I would say hello, and it would be over for me. A single moment of “m-magic,” as Sam Baldwin says over the phone to the Radio Doctor. Locking eyes across a busy intersection, I would see his body as a lost memory from another life. I thought it would overtake me.

But there’s been no Radio Doctor, no intersections, nothing particularly dramatic at all. I fell in love with friends and enemies alike. I’ve been left and done the leaving. But it hasn’t enveloped me like I thought it would.

I spent New Year’s Eve of my senior year of high school at a house party drinking Southern Comfort with my boyfriend. A few months prior, in my childhood bedroom, I said, I think I love you through my fingers, my hand over my mouth as if to stop the words from spilling out. That time I did mean it, or at least the seventeen-year-old equivalent. Still, I knew it wouldn’t last when he talked about moving close to my college, and I cringed at the prospect.

We fought that night, but after a few drinks we forgot to be mad, and I was fine until one of his friends grabbed my ass, and another got drunk and tried to kiss me. My boyfriend went over and pulled him off. I thought he might punch him, and I blithely thought, “No one has ever fought for me,” but then his friend stumbled away and vomited by the mailbox, and my boyfriend went inside to get water.

They lit fireworks off underneath a leftover Christmas tree, burning in bright flashes of color like a disco. Ten. Couples started to pair off. Eight. Red sparks flew at bodies, jumping back in their wake like popcorn kernels in a frying pan. Seven. I neared closer to the fire. Five. My boyfriend pulled me back, I felt his chest against my shoulder blades. Three. He kissed me. One. I felt as young as I looked — a miracle.

When they finally took away the blackened tree and people went inside, the street looked bare, ordinary suburbia again. Leftover firework canisters littered the scorched pavement, remnants of the moment. The magic was over.

I thought I would eventually fall in love across the street like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle. He would say hello, and I would say hello, and it would be over for me.

I fell in love for real in a small bedroom in Oklahoma on a Tuesday night. I told him to put on a movie; we watched When Harry Met Sally inches apart in a full-size bed. He had been helping me on my college thesis, and we became close those late nights at his computer. Initially, I wasn’t attracted to him; he was my age and too sweet-looking for my taste. But when we crammed in his roommate’s backseat on a beer run, his thigh pressing into mine, I realized I wanted him. For weeks after, I pulled away; it seemed too much, too soon.

But on that Tuesday, whatever pretense we had maintained about “just being friends” was in imminent danger. I was in his bed, what on earth had I been thinking? What had been silently happening for months between us now cast itself into stark, terrifying relief, his arm brushing mine, both of us flinching from the closeness, me wanting more. I talked through the movie, trying to behave casually, maintaining some semblance of emotional distance. If silence stretched out for too long, I thought the romance of the situation would infiltrate the air like a contagion.

Then, the kiss between Harry and Sally, the turning point flashing before us on the screen, and I feel us turning, too. I shut up for the first time in an hour. Harry sits with her in bed, breathing into her hair as she cries into his t-shirt. They brush lips in what I can only describe as a peck, familiar and small: the beginning. Then they fall back, mouths crashing together as if by some gravitational force, their friendship deteriorating for want, desire. Harry showers the morning after, planning how to break the news.

I lean further into the pillow and pull on his sweatshirt. They’re at Carrie Fisher’s wedding now.

“Why does it have to mean everything?” Harry says.

“Because it does.”

I’m drifting off. I know I should leave, but my legs stay put. Sally’s hand whips Harry’s cheek before storming out through the swinging doors. He turns to me, and I fix my expression in a perfect imitation of neutrality. I can hardly breathe. At last, he turns back to the screen. Sally lugs a Christmas tree up to her apartment alone, welcomed by Harry singing Petula Clark into the answering machine, and then I’m out.

I wake up just long enough to catch Harry running through Manhattan to Sally. It’s New Year’s Eve. “I hate you, Harry. I really hate you.”

That night, he crashed on the couch to let me sleep and, as I found out later, wrote a song for me, using a voicemail I had left him as the intro. A month later, we were together. I hadn’t even decided if I really wanted us to happen. I was graduating soon and still unsure if the whole thing would be worth it, while he was already falling in love. I was anxious, flighty, but he knew we were a sure thing.

Eventually, I started to think that I would marry him. I hadn’t turned twenty-one yet, and already I was looking forward to a lifetime of domestic contentment. Our relationship became a life raft, pulling me to shore after years of displacement. Over time, my family had been reduced to my mother and our two dogs; when he introduced me to his parents and great-grandparents and sister, they welcomed me with open arms, a kind of long-lost homecoming I didn’t realize was possible. He brought me breakfast in bed on days when I couldn’t leave my room and left me long, thoughtful voicemails when we were apart.

In the summer of 2019, I moved to Los Angeles while he stayed in Oklahoma to finish school. But I was confident that our relationship would be one of the precious few that made the long-distance thing work. My life had been chaotic until him, and here was the very picture of safety, compassion, and patience.

I was happy. Our dreams built upon one another like a snowball, collecting details of our imagined future together; a fenced-in yard in Highland Park, a spring wedding at twenty-five. Dogs, babies. By now, the hope for our future was the size of a boulder, building up speed so quickly we didn’t see the trough below.

I was in his bed, what on earth had I been thinking? What had been silently happening for months between us now cast itself into stark, terrifying relief, his arm brushing mine, both of us flinching from the closeness, me wanting more.

I love Sleepless in Seattle because they never get to the messy bits of being together. Seattle or Chicago? Oh, my kid? Yeah, how do you feel about being a mom? Do you mind living on a houseboat? It all looms on the horizon. And yet, we are suspended in that blissful moment forever.

He flew out to LA that fall, and I could immediately see that he hated the city. Born and raised in Oklahoma, the sprawling, chaotic nature of California raised his hackles. He told me he would learn to love it, but I couldn’t believe the lie. For him, the sacrifice was worth it, but I knew he’d hate me in five years. The resentment would fester, and where would that leave us? I thought promising forever would mean forever, but we didn’t even make it past a year.

I called him one night in November to tell him it was over. At first, he didn’t believe me. He was sure it was just one of my fits, that I would come to my senses and stay. He said, “You told me you’d do this. You’d try to leave, and you’d end up regretting it for the rest of your life.”

Even today, I can’t fully explain why I couldn’t go through with it, except my selfish desire to be young. I wasn’t sick of myself yet. In loving him, I stopped needing him, and I was sorry for it. He saved my life, and still, I left.

It’s been nearly two years since the breakup. I haven’t loved anyone since, even though I uttered that phrase to my most recent boyfriend absent-mindedly. We didn’t last more than five months. And it wasn’t just the photographs.

When I told him it was over, he knelt on the carpet, and I stared at the curve of his back as he asked me to stay. I was crying, mainly because I felt obligated, but I knew I’d be leaving without a trace of regret. He dropped off flowers and a note at my door the next day. I threw them out, but from what I remember of the letter, he apologized for being insecure, how he’d do anything to change my mind. My father used to do the same after big fights. Peace offerings and false promises; tomorrow I’ll be better, but he never was. I saw how little he loved or even knew me. It became easy to hate them both.

I mostly keep to myself these days. I built up the dam and turned away. But the bulwark is splintering. Not much of my life has consisted of heartbreak or even grieving; I suppress the bad feelings and hang around clones of men I’ve already loved. I know better, but I can’t move on.

Sometimes I look forward to middle age. By then, my responsibilities will be embedded in a family rather than myself — building a life for half rather than all of me. The dammed river fading from view in place of pristine waters: oceans of care for somebody else. Maybe it’s biologically ingrained in me, or maybe I just saw too many Nora Ephron films.

Still, I can’t help but want to run to the Empire State Building and take a brown-haired man’s hand into the elevator and know I am finally coming home — eternal happiness clicking into place from a single touch. The sweetest lie America ever told itself, and I can’t help but believe it a little.

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Rebecca Lynne Loftin is a writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. Her newsletter, Kid Girl, features new personal essays on a weekly basis. Like everyone else in LA, she’s a screenwriter and director by trade. Her series, Evie Gets A Boyfriend, is now on YouTube.