Severed ends can’t make a beginning
Ryan was my first young love, and I loved him so much. I felt crazy for caring so deeply about another person that wasn’t my parents or siblings. This kind of love surpassed friendships and crushes. I used to daydream about the day we would move out of the Rio Grande Valley together and into a place that seemed more awake, maybe a place where it snowed.
But Ryan was a really shitty boyfriend.
In January 2009, I was about to turn 16 and have my heart broken for the first time. I say Ryan was a shitty boyfriend because he was. Even at 15 he was a shitty boyfriend. He lied about things that I didn’t think anyone needed to lie about. He lied about his birthday — and not because he wanted to seem older or something.
I don’t know why he lied about his birthday or why he lied to me about anything. Maybe he had some sort of insecurity that I would never know about.
He was also flaky. I don’t think he had social anxiety — but maybe he did. I don’t know. I just don’t think he ever meant anything he said. He stood me up more times than I’d like to remember.
I dated Ryan three times. First in the 8th grade, but that was baby stuff. When we broke up the summer before high school, I got over it quickly and didn’t cry at all. The way we both mutually stopped texting and talking on the phone made sense, and it ended on alright terms.
The 2009 break-up, our second, was different. The story goes like this:
In December, Ryan gave me the password and email login to his Myspace account and told me that I could log in anytime — he had nothing to hide. He would text me to hang out almost everyday and I thought we had a fine relationship. We were close. But by January, things were starting to get distant between us, and that was something that I wasn’t used to. Suddenly, we weren’t talking as much and I started to think he lost interest in me.
Instead of asking him about what was going on between us, I logged onto his profile and found that he was, in real time, chatting and flirting with a girl named Amanda. It upset me so much that I called him to ask if he was trying to hurt me.
He responded by saying he didn’t know what I was talking about, he was hanging out with a friend who was messaging Amanda from his profile. He claimed it wasn’t him.
I really wanted to believe him. I really, really did.
There’s this song by Etta James called “I’d Rather Go Blind” and in it she sings this lyric that goes something deep down in my soul said “cry girl.” I felt like that.
I wanted him to order me a heart-shaped pizza with “SORRY” spelled out in M&Ms a la Princess Diaries. I didn’t know how real life worked.
Hot tears fell down my cheeks as I began to mourn the end of our relationship. I thought to myself that maybe it was wrong to have logged on even if he said that I could. But it’s also wrong to cheat on someone emotionally or physically, especially if that isn’t the agreement two people made together in their relationship.
I wanted to believe him and go on like this was something to not worry about. But I couldn’t, because even at 15 years old, I could tell where this was going.
Just as he had lied about so many things before, I could tell he was lying about this, too.
We didn’t speak for a week after I confronted him. I didn’t want to talk to him, but at the same time, I wanted him to come apologize to me and tell me that he couldn’t be without me. I wanted him to order me a heart-shaped pizza with “SORRY” spelled out in M&Ms a la The Princess Diaries. I didn’t know how real life worked. I thought things in movies were cooler and that a grand gesture would make my real feelings of sadness go away.
I went over to my friend Leah’s house and told her what was going on. She sat next to me at the computer for moral support while I logged onto my Myspace and confronted Ryan again.
I had wanted to do everything with Ryan. I had wanted all his hopes and dreams to come true. I had been sure that we would help each other and that I would watch him grow into someone that he had told me he always wanted to be — someone who was responsible, who could afford his own car and who wanted to make a living making art.
I thought about all of those feelings as I told him that I thought he was lying to me, and that it wasn’t his friend flirting with Amanda.
He changed the story, told me the whole thing was a big test. He said he somehow knew that I was logged onto his profile while all of those flirtatious messages were being sent. To him, I had failed that test.
But I think that he was just shitty and was trying to cheat on me. In those messages Ryan asked Amanda to hang out with him and I caught him in the middle of it. I guess he needed to turn it around and make it my fault. In my experience with dating Ryan it was always “bad timing.” It was never his fault.
The horribly sad part about all of this is that I took the blame and believed that I failed the relationship. I used to think that — if I could go back in time — I never would have logged onto his Myspace. But that’s fucking stupid, because then I’d just be blissfully ignorant. And if there’s something I’ve learned since I was 15, it’s that being blissfully ignorant is not. worth. it.
Now I think — if I could go back in time — I’d give my teen self a pep talk, and say that it doesn’t matter because he’s a shitty boy with shitty friends. If he’s not mature enough to be loyal, he doesn’t deserve the love and time I have to give someone.
I would empower myself.
In the passages I’ve selected from my teen diary, I am wrestling with what it means to be a young girl with a broken heart, and how to overcome that heartbreak. From January 4 to January 10 (before finding the messages he sent to Amanda and throughout the breakup) I attempted to funnel my anxiety, young teen existentialism, and sadness into these entries.
I put the wrong year. It says 2008 but it’s supposed to say 2009. Either I was still getting used to it being 2009, or this is proof that my head was not in the right place. I was experiencing so much anxiety and was not equipped to understand what this loss of a relationship meant. I remark in the first sentence that a spider feels so much more at home than I do at my dad’s house in McAllen. I felt lonely and lost without Ryan.
I didn’t grow up with my mom living in the same place as me, and I didn’t know how to talk to my step-mom or my dad about relationships, much less a breakup. I didn’t go to my friends because I was too embarrassed. They thought that Ryan and I had a really great relationship and I felt too insecure to tell them the truth. I completely relied on myself.
I longed for advice on how to cope with my depression and sadness from this relationship that was ending. On January 4 I wrote:
“I don’t know if this makes any sense but I wish the trees, mostly palm trees, and rocks and all living things having to do with nature, would give me advice. Like real genuine advice. Because they’ve been here longer than I have. I want God to give me advice. I want the greatest advice ever given to be given to me.”
I left my Catholic church to join Ryan’s a month before we broke up, thinking it would bring us closer. My time spent there helped me to realize that Catholicism really wasn’t for me and that I was actually just scared of going to hell. I think I really wanted to believe in something, that I wanted to believe in God or a god. Now it’s not that important to me to have a god. I say this because it’s my own personal belief to count on oneself.
Growing up, a huge fear of mine was that some boy would be talking about me in the locker room the way that I would hear boys talk about their girlfriends when they didn’t think another girl was around, or just didn’t care if one was around. They would say things like, “yeah man her nipples were like pepperonis” or “she sucked my dick, she’s such a slut.” It made me not want to become close to boys in an intimate way. I was so afraid to be perceived in that way by men.
The same shitty boys who sit next to each other laughing and messaging hot girls online, and who talk about you in the locker room, are the same shitty boys who grow up and run our country and become our bosses.
Sometimes I felt that way about Ryan, but he always assured me that our business was our own and was private. This was a huge part of why I felt sad. I felt that now, since we were broken up, he would go around telling other guys what I was like, or that I was slutty. It was a horrible feeling and it gave me so much stress. I wanted to disappear just thinking about their faces and their reactions, or how they would laugh at me with each other.
And now I can totally see that this kind of shitty stuff that happens to young girls and their shitty boyfriends on a micro scale is the same kind of shitty stuff that happens on a macro scale in politics, on the street, and online. The same shitty boys who sit next to each other laughing and messaging hot girls online, and who talk about you in the locker room, are the same shitty boys who grow up and run our country and become our bosses — who have families and pay taxes.
They are boys who believe they have the power to talk about women in this way, and thus believe they also have the right to tell them what to do with their bodies or what makes them sluts. I also realize that all these boys are a product of the society we have built, then and now. They said these things because it was (is) so normalized to talk this way about women.
I kind of wish that, in the moment when I saw his conversation, I would have responded for him, saying “Sorry I have a girlfriend” or better, I wish that I would have changed his entire profile background to something really dumb, and then called to break up with him. If only.
I would feel this kind of heartbreak again three years later in 2012, after Ryan and I tried to make it work a third time. Except this time it wouldn’t hurt as much. I made art out of a cork board he tagged with a graffiti stencil he made. I took the cork board and wrote:
“Don’t date your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. You broke up for a reason. Out of severed ends you can’t make a beginning. August 27th, 2012. I wanted so badly to be in love again, I forgot it all”
and propped it up against a light pole in West Campus, Austin and set flowers and leaves around it with three new friends — like a grave. I’d walk back the next day and find that it would be completely destroyed with little to no remnants, probably by drunk, rowdy frat dudes or destructive girls like me who see things in public and kick them over.
I know that I thought “third time’s the charm” when I decided to date him again in 2012, but it wasn’t. I learned a big lesson about dating an ex. A poet friend I had, Amaris, told me this really great thing, “Out of severed ends you can’t make a beginning.” I included it on the cork board and think about it often. It really helped me the third time we broke up, and to reflect on our entire relationship.
In terms of my relationship with Ryan, I think that I needed to learn what it was like to go through this kind of loss. Sometimes people are not the people that they intend to be. While we’re all growing up, we’re also changing and growing apart. After that last break up, I started writing songs and playing them live at coffee shops and venues, and after a couple of weeks I started to make art.
The severed ends of our relationship couldn’t create a stable beginning for us, but it did create a kind of beginning for me.
Illyana Bocanegra is a filmmaker and co-founder of TEMPER. She lives in Austin, Texas, where, sometimes (if the conditions are just right) it snows.
This is the second installment of the My Teen Diary series.
