Excuse me, Sir. I’m Going to Go Build my Empire Now.

I sit on the quiet hill on the Tufts campus on Winthrop Street, watching cars pass by the sparse, reddening trees on this cool October night. Seeing traffic and nature together relaxes me. It’s one of my many quirks.

I sigh in contemplation. My love life looks nothing like I thought it would one year ago. One year ago I was on the fast track to what I thought was my dreams in construction and cosmetics (a weird combination for sure), and I had confirmed with my boyfriend of two and a half years that he was coming with me for my move from the East Coast to the Midwest. We were in it for the long haul while he finished his graduate degree in electrical engineering here in Massachusetts while I worked days as a construction project engineer and nights as a beauty consultant. I was grooving along and making it happen.

Or so I thought.

After our first trip to Detroit together that November, I got this sinking feeling while we walked through a foot of snow in silence across the MichU campus that something wasn’t right. I had this panicked feeling of wanting to escape.

I didn’t want this. But… what was “this”?

And he must have noticed too because at the end of that weekend before he opened the door to his apartment to let me in so we could cuddle under blankets together as we normally did on weekends together, he first asked me, “Sam, you’ve been unusually quiet. Is something wrong?”

He was right. I normally would have been bouncing off the walls from the excitement I could barely contain, but my stomach was in knots over the words that had formed in my head and I was hearing spill out of my mouth now:

“I think there’s something wrong with our relationship and I don’t know what it is but I want to fix it.”

And there it was, the elephant in the room addressed out loud.

Granted, I had felt that way for a few months before, but it wasn’t until this moment that I realized what that feeling meant to me. It wasn’t excitement when he said that he wanted to marry me someday. It was worry that he expected me to be the driving force in the relationship. It wasn’t pride in his work ethics I felt when he let me rest while he stayed up to finish his grad school homework. It was worry that we wouldn’t go to bed more often going forward and I’d come into bed lonely. It wasn’t sincerity that I felt radiating from him when he told me to not work right after I got into a car accident. It was disconnect that he didn’t understand that I would do whatever it took to do what I set out to do.

Don’t get me wrong. This man was a wonderful, caring, loving man. It just wasn’t the wonderful, caring, lovingness that I needed. And so we broke up two months later after trying to fix what we weren’t sure was broken.

I thought I had encountered the kind of caring I needed from another man, at least temporarily, just a few months after my first trip to Detroit. That was not the case. He wore sheep’s clothing that looked like playful love over his dark, devilish skin. The trying, emotionally-draining situations he put me through would have broken most women over the five months I dated him. But remember, I’m no ordinary woman; his constant playful, nitpicking banter ironically strengthened me and, funny enough, gave me the strength to fight him when the final hour came and I had to make a choice to accept his unacceptable actions or to cut him loose and to never return to his side.

I chose the ladder, which was a painful yet personally satisfying end.

And it was then that I realized: up until that point in early June, I had been incapable of having a relationship with anyone without it being the intent for going for the long haul. I just always operated that way, and having something casual was not something I did very easily.

I’m glad I realized that during that time because my tendency would have been to latch onto the man I had met and unintentionally got interested in when I visited Portland two months later. Instead, I took the situation with a sense of curiosity.

We were just outside the karaoke bar we had energized ourselves in, singing to our hearts’ content with other conference goers. I wanted to know more about him, make him more than just this surface-level partier I saw him as (although that part of him is what drew me to him since he wasn’t a super-bro about it; instead, he had a sweet excited-about-life nature to him). And I was reminded of my tendency to go deep into a person’s personal life when I want them for my own when he paused and said in a thick German accent:

“I don’t want to be obligated to your feelings.”

I didn’t fully understand what this quirky, on-my-wavelength man was trying to say right away, and it’s possible that there was a bit of mistranslation in there, but I took it to mean that he would feel bad if I developed feelings for him during our time here and we went back to our respective homes and couldn’t do anything about these feelings we developed for each other since we live so far away from each other.

Luckily I had broken my own heart many times before then, so I was prepared for whatever happened next at that point, even if it was nothing at all.

“You’re not responsible for my feelings,” I said to him, looking him dead in the eyes even though we were under the cover of darkness and could barely see each other now. “I’m a grown woman and can take care of myself.”

I’ll admit… this sentiment, this kind out that he gave me, only further solidified my need to connect with him: I needed to know more about this person that I would have said a similar thing to if I was put in this situation. He very well could be my doppelganger. He hugged me and I asked him how he was feeling. He said that he liked hugging me, that I made his chest feel warm. I smiled as we pressed together under the streetlight, feeling each other’s warmth.

The short time I had with him was wonderful, full of warm hugs with drum-like heartbeats, cups of coffee, exchanged mailing addresses and emails, and conversation surrounded by points of view and opinions, and advice we doled out to each other which I felt resonated with me and hopefully he felt the same with what I told him. It was a beautiful teenage romance novel-like weekend up until the point that he chased the train goodbye as I set off to the airport.

I will see him again, I thought. I really, really want to. But in the meantime, I will be the best person I can be. And by achieving my dream of location independence, maybe, just maybe, I can find a way to be geographically close to him.

When the person that you connect with for a short period of time and want to be around more is gone and you may not see him for another year minimum, it makes you very aware of your surroundings. I didn’t plan to pursue any romances until next year as it was, but this popped out of nowhere and I instinctively went for it. This is the kind of whimsical, whirlwind weekend I can tell my future children about someday.

As I get up from this hill, reminiscing on the memories that refuse to fade from my mind from over two months ago, I wonder if he thinks the same strong feelings about me and, like me, is afraid to admit it because he doesn’t think that he can do anything about it since he lives in Germany and I live in the U.S.

Well, I never planned to change my life for a man anyways. I only change my life for me. And here I am, four months straight single for the first time since I was twelve years old, and I refuse to latch on to another man the way I have in the past.

No, I tell myself as I walk down the rainbow steps towards Boston Ave. Life goes on, and so will he if he hasn’t already. If our lives cross again and we have that same spark and fire to our second meeting like we did for our first one, then we’ll talk and consider what is possible. But for now, I’ll reserve those sparks for forming my own story. My life is not summed up by a man, but by my decisions to do things that build my empire whether I have someone to rule it with me or not. He damn better have his own empire though because I don’t like people that rely on my successes.

Because my happiness relies on no man or person. It relies on me.