That’s My Type!
On the light up floor of my love life, there was a period of time when I had a tendency to, over and over, pick the same dance partners. A type, if you will.
Fluffy hair, tan skin, adrenaline junkies with angelic smiles—all cheeky ne’er-do-wells who were both the life of the party and the cause of my inevitable heartbreak six months down the line. I had an uncanny affinity for picking out people who would show me spectacular new things for the short while we were in each other’s company—only to run off to catch the next train just as I started to teeter on the mantel of an ill-advised L-word.
I was very fond of them. So fond, in fact, that I spent the better part of my first two semesters at college running exclusively with them. His sort and my sort, we’ve simply always gotten along. We share the same sense of humor, the same attraction to things we can’t have, and the same needling fear that if we don’t live hard fast wild enough, we didn’t live at all.
Tartt describes it as a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. Wilde affirms that I will always be fond of him, because he represents to me all the sins I never had the courage to commit.
There’s truth to all of that. At eighteen, I, wide-eyed and freshly liberated from my suburban hometown, wanted nothing more than to dance in the arms of exciting and magnetic people; to, at last, shelve the SAT prep books and cast off the “good girl” label I’d worn all my life.
So I went hunting for trouble, and tracked my way through the airtight throngs of people in every house party to find him. Frat boy and his Comme des Garçons hoodie, his vapes on the dash, his camera, his afterparties and emerald pools…
The highs were undeniable. These were the boys whose dorm floors I littered with half my wardrobe and I broke into football stadiums with at three in the morning, boys I first brandished like a trophy then later kept an anxious secret, boys who knew exactly who to talk to and where to go for a night to remember. Indeed, when I think back to those times, I can only really recall them in hues of neon and moon-grays.
I’d never experienced anything like it. In high school, I was a sheltered, awkward kid with a 10 p.m. curfew and a perfect academic record. After being bubble-wrapped for years by protective parents, I found myself alone, perched on the precipice of a city full of strangers and peering into its shadowed face. Strangely enticed by the cruel eyes. Drawn to the glint of sharp teeth.
When I was convulsing in the throes of love, I felt so far from the quiet, fearful girl I used to be. When we jumped into the pool hand-in-hand, it felt like a baptism. When he slammed the car door in my face and I screamed through the tinted windows, it was like I was hearing my own voice for the first time.
The lows, too, were undeniable. For something so superficial between us, my grief was real every time they left, or I did, or we slowly backed away from one another, afraid and disgusted by the mess we’d made and each one refusing to take responsibility. I was going about everything wrong, but how dearly I wanted things to turn out right.
His sort and my sort were not the same after all. After all was said and done, they recovered just fine, impervious to the damage and ready for a new adventure. I went home.
At some point, the novelty wore off. After you become acquainted with the worst of yourself, you lose interest in indulging in all those sparkling, extravagant vices that got you there in the first place. Dating the same type of (wrong) people takes you down the same (wrong) road, over and over again.
Speaking retrospectively, these sorts of people—charismatic, fickle, an uproar to love and a torture to hate—were not actually my type. More like, they were who showed up when I was out in the night, searching for myself at the bottom of a plastic cup and finding his hand on my thigh instead. In the moment, when I’m sitting in his car and the music is good and we’re laughing like little kids, I can’t tell the difference between a soulmate and a siren.
Like all things, learning how to love and be loved takes practice. It’s a prerequisite to knowing yourself better. Ironically, knowing yourself is also a prerequisite for loving someone else; properly, healthily, and in a way that doesn’t leave you completely stranded.
When enough seasons had been put between the me who felt like she was constantly missing out and the me now, the urgency to catch up faded away. I think now that I was somebody who, after eighteen years of not having it, craved power—to sit in the center of someone’s universe, to sparkle like glass, to wade deep into the night, where I’d never been allowed to venture before.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that there are much better ways to feel powerful.
Art by Rebecca Orr