Sternal Fractured Love
A tale of a young, strange, and mature girl’s relationship with a guilted and good man.
Article by Frog Choi, art by Tessa Derose
Content Warning: Sexual violence, self harm, discussions of suicide
“What are you looking for on here?” I ask.
Three days later, he replies,
“Oh sorry, missed this notification.
Well, I don’t know if this changes things, but I’m not here
for anything serious or long term. I guess fun and chemistry.”
“Does that mean strictly online or does it
normally entail some in person aspects?”
I’m flirting now.
“Yeah I mean the desire to come on here had to do with
wanting something physical and someone I find attractive
(like you) and see how physically compatible we were
if that makes sense. But then in practice I think the whole
thing is complicated with meeting up, so I don’t know.
It’s always nice to flirt with a cute girl.”
He told me then what I ignored and later found out painfully for myself: I was not someone serious, only a girl, a flirtation. Right away he needed me to know the capacity he held for seeing me as such. It was a caution ahead sign wrapped in a compliment, enclosed plainly in a blue bubble on my screen. I looked past it all because I never worried about being interested, on any real level, in someone from Tinder. My history on the app consisted of physical relationships, mostly one-offs. Not because I was emotionally detached—far from it—but because Tinder was a refuge for my unlovability. I went on the app to meet guys much older than me in order to saturate myself in unconditional desire. I was never there to find love, I never would’ve been vulnerable enough for that. But I believed lust could last at least a night, maybe even a few weeks. Any longer, I began to fear the inevitable moment when they’d figure out there was nothing there to love.
He was 35 when we met. 17 miles away. His bio read (and still reads): “I’m probably taller than you, you’re probably prettier than me.” We matched when I moved to the Bay Area at the beginning of the Pandemic. In theory, that’s what he meant when he mentioned the “complications” of meeting up. But what he was trying to say was, he was a man who was constantly feeling guilt—“as a Jew and an Irish-Catholic,” so he put it. In a week, he was visiting his ex in West Virginia, to see if there was still anything there. As the cool 19-year-old girl I’d decided to be, I told myself I was unbothered. And at the time, that was true. I really didn’t think I could ever be in a healthy relationship with someone in their mid-thirties. But as we kept talking, it became difficult to ignore how compatible we were and how much I actually liked him.
Throughout our text foreplay and prologue to our relationship, he was always worried about being “good.” One time, it had been a day since I replied to a graphic message from him because I was busy with Zoom school and 60-hour workweeks. He texted me again:
“Are you still into this? I am and have been thinking about you, but if I put you off the whole idea, I’m sorry, just let me know.”
Another time, I was telling him about a date gone bad with a man who harassed me after I told didn’t want to see him again. This was the conversation that followed:
“For all the kink talk of using you or whatever maybe
it’s rich for me to say, but the gamification of dating
seems to encourage a weird entitlement. But like that’s
also just a fucked up masculinity thing I guess.”
“Yeah I think it was very much a masculinity
thing, if not also taking the age thing a bit too
seriously. He seemed to have a lot of regrets in
his past and I feel like I was a sort of cathartic
experience if that’s not weird to say.”
“No, that seems really perceptive actually. Saying
this as an older man full of regrets. But different
ones I assume.”
He was often cryptic and forlorn like that, putting on the whole, “Trust me, at my age you’ve been through some shit” act.
At times like these, I felt like I was living in a Sally Rooney novel. I was the precocious girl, who thought her intelligence made her different and better than other girls. She loved pain, and garnered intimacy through sexual submission. He was the male love interest, obsessed with being a “nice guy,” cloaked in a guise of self-consciousness and anxiety. He was plagued with guilt and regrets, too.
He asked me what meeting up would look like, if I drove, and if my dad would ask questions. “I know you’re not a kid and all but…” he had said. Eventually we set a date. I listened to Angel Olsen’s “All Mirrors” as I drove over the hill into Santa Cruz. When I got to his house, he greeted me in a vintage shirt from the Monterey aquarium and leaned down to kiss me right there on the doormat. Upstairs, I undressed and lay down on the bed, and he looked at me and said I was “like a vision.” Afterwards, he told me I surprised him because of how comfortable he felt with me. I went over every night that week, right up to the night he flew to his ex’s. I figured that was the last time I’d ever see him, because it seemed like they were likely to get back together. But he texted me the night he got back, using words that made it clear he wanted to see me again. So, on every day off I had until I left California, I drove the 22 miles to him, voluntarily tethering myself tighter and tighter to him each time.
I remember when I asked him to look over one of my essays for class. He was sitting in an Eames chair and I was at his feet while he read, my back resting against his shins. I think he started to stroke my hair or something, but one thing led to another, and then he was standing and I was still kneeling. Facing him now, slacks gathered at his ankles, the cool metal of his Western belt buckle kissed my knee.
“Mm. I’m gonna write you such a good letter of recommendation,” he joked.
Which was a sordid thing to say, seeing as he taught at the nearby university. But truthfully, he said it for my benefit. I was the one who was thrilled by the difference in our age, much more than he was. I wanted to know that if he met me in the real world—like at a bar, or in one of his classes—he’d pick me and cross that line. In reality, he was shy and I pursued him shamelessly. I struck up our initial conversation, I sent him pictures while he was with his friends, I obliged in all his fantasies, I even let him film me. I did everything that further personified myself as the banal “yes” girl, whose only basis was to recover the blunted older man from whatever or whoever he had felt had last left him disenchanted.
There was one day when I wanted to go home because I was so depressed. We were lying in his freezing living room on his couch with that red, honeycombed blanket and I had to keep checking the mirror to make sure I still had a face. Every minute that passed was marked by a clicking from the flip clock that resounded through the floorboards.
“I think I’m gonna go. I’m not feeling that well,” I said. I started to head towards the door, not able to meet his eye for fear of dismissal, for fear that he might just let me leave.
“Woah, slow down. Come here,” he said, with knit eyebrows and tender concern in his eyes.“Do you want to lay down for a bit? ” he asked. I obeyed. It was the first time I can remember him nurturing me outside of the realm of sex. Like he had finally noticed that he could be close to me not just in the bedroom, and I was powerless to how he tried to take care of me.
Soon, we moved to the bed upstairs, my back facing him. I started to tell him, softly, about my depression and we were barely touching but suddenly, he was hard. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I’m not even here, I thought.
“But do you want to?” he fumbled through the silence.
“Uhh. Do you want to?”
“I mean…yeah. But I don’t want you to think I got you to stay and come upstairs, just so we could have sex.”
“Tell me you want to.”
“I want to fuck you.”
So I let him. Pathetically, I loved that he still wanted to be inside me, even when I felt so vacant and couldn’t believe that my hollowed body could give someone else pleasure.
Near the end of my stay in California (and thus, the end of our relationship), we were lying in the room that used to be his sister’s. It was painted the same color as my childhood bedroom—a bright marigold, illuminating the dust that glittered through oak blinds in the late-afternoon sun. The sex we had then was probably the best I’ve ever had. I could sense his dedication to my pleasure and my feelings, tuned in thoughtfully to my reaction each time he struck my face. The harder he hit me, the more pleasurable it was for us both, and I could feel him growing rigid inside me the more aggressive he became. Then, he tarnished the moment by likening me to a porn he’d watched, one that showed only the faces of Japanese girls as they reached orgasm. And then, somehow we started talking about his ex. He had a tendency to really blithely bring up past partners.
“Did you love her?” I asked.
“Oh, well, I mean, I’m kind of still in love with her.”
“Oh.” I fell silent. The pain was indescribable and I turned away from him, worried he could see my flush. “Do you still talk?” I asked.
“Yeah, we text sometimes. She told me she’s seeing someone though, so I actually ended up telling her about you too.” I guess that was supposed to impress me, or something. “But I don’t know, I might try and break them up,” he says.
“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
He performed this conversation with premeditated relaxation, as if he had prepared this speech and knew its weight, but assumed his words couldn’t penetrate me. I knew we weren’t together together, but I hadn’t expected the chill with which he told me he loved someone else.
“I’m not, really. I think if I tried, I could. I’m not above it.”
“Why do you still love her?” I asked.
“It’s hard to explain. After I left Ireland, I just felt like I abandoned her at a time when she really needed someone. She was really lonely.” I didn’t know if that was a reason to still love someone, but I let his words hang there without rebuttal.
I was sandwiched between two exes; a toy to amuse himself with while he exhausted his most recent relationship of possibility and fantasized about his future with the one that got away. But sandwiched would imply that standing alone, I was still something of substance. I felt more like a filmy spread of butter.
The next time I went over, I told him how much it hurt to hear him say that. He was genuinely alarmed by this—it seems, in retrospect, I was constantly surprising him. He said he only told me because he took me seriously and thought it was something I should know, though admittedly he was getting guilt off his chest as well. When I left for school a few weeks later, this was the memory of our relationship that weighed on me. Because of the coldness (or maybe it was loneliness), with which he said he wanted to break them up. I finally grasped that he never had and never would think of me as a person he loved.
Despite what you tell me, I know I wasn’t anything real or serious to you. Still, in those first few months away from you, I missed you so much. The innocence of my first love, or at least my gleaming and virginal idea of it, was really gone. You made me feel smart and precious, and you were the first one to call me pretty. When I was with you, I started to belong to someone, if that’s even something to aspire to.
As the months pass, I want to call you, so I can ask if you ever considered loving me. The question is an axiom as the blade enters my body in order to feel something, because Ocean Vuong reminds me that the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.
I want you to see my name flash across your phone and for you to be scared, at least for a moment, about the possibility of our nonexistent child. Because why else would I be calling?
I want to tell you that I stayed at a psychiatric hospital after I tried to die, that my dad has cancer, and about the other world-crumbling realities that make up my life. Because now I’m like them, right? Like the exes that needed you, who you could be there for and save?
In five years, I want to call you to see if you’re married, and if you have kids. Was she it for you? Your ex? Or maybe you found someone else, someone adequately older and age-appropriate.
I did end up calling you, 6 months later. You had recently turned 36. I was still 20, like I was when I left California, and you. I had just watched “Casablanca” and posted a lackluster review on Letterboxd, and you replied with a long-winded comment explaining why Rick and Ilse's love was remarkable because it was for a greater cause. A bit later I got a text from you, “Am I gonna get canceled for mansplaining ‘Casablanca’ to you?” You must’ve been so bored. Capitalizing on your apathetic state, I called you. We ended up talking for nearly three hours, which was to me a testament to the veritable existence of our relationship. But I couldn't ask you the question. I wasn’t able to ask why you couldn’t love me. When I ended the call, you told me that if I was ever in the area, I’d have a place to stay. Then, hesitantly, as I was hanging up, you said it would be really nice to see me.
As “luck” had it, I was going to be in the Bay a month later for my dad’s radiation therapy. And even though you told me then how much you wanted to see me, you didn't reach out the day I told you I was arriving, so I came to the conclusion that you’d somehow since gotten back together with your ex from Ireland. 18 hours and one sex dream/nightmare about the two of you later, I braced myself by pinching the skin on my inner thigh, hard, with my left hand, as I texted you with my right, asking to stay with you since I couldn’t be around my dad while he was radioactive. (Turns out you were only flying back from Philly.) You moved plans around, which I took as a good sign, and all of a sudden, it’s Thursday night and now I’m at your door.
The very first time we met, you kissed me right there in the entryway. I recall you asking me later that day if it was okay that you did that. I said yes, but then told you my favorite part was the suspense before the first kiss. I wonder if you kept that in mind this time around, because we only hug hello. You launch into the updated tour of your house. It’s still as cold as ever, but you got rid of that toaster that sat in the middle of the dining table, and there’s a new folk-art sculpture on the mantle. Then we sit down in your office, you on the couch and me in the armchair. We talk for a long time. About your newly adopted theory of John Lennon being gay for Paul, and my recent visit to the DeYoung and my enamor with its museum lighting and the walls filled with works of Charles Sheeler. I remember noticing how different I was this time, grown up, smarter. At dinner, I don’t fight you to split the bill. I let you pay for everything.
When we get back to the house, you keep saying how tired you are. Is this it, your move? One touch from you and I could disintegrate, so fragile from anticipation. I say, “Okay then, let’s go upstairs.” I bend over to take off my shoes and I feel your eyes lingering. We head up the stairs, then down the hall to your bedroom. But as we approach the doorway, you stop short and say, “So. You can stay in here with me if you want, but obviously you’re not obligated to. Any of the other rooms are open, of course. I wasn’t presuming anything, so whatever you want to do.”
I look up at you, propped against the doorframe with trying bedroom eyes and hands behind my back. I say, “Okay.” I’m feigning shyness, trying to make you sweat, just a little. Then wordlessly, I head to your bed and you follow me. I take my sweater off and turn away from you and I hear the rustling of you undressing as well. When I turn back to face you, you’re naked. I laugh and comment, “Oh yeah, like that’s not presumptuous of you.”
The sex is so good, you have to stop yourself from coming a minute in. As we’re lying there afterwards, you ask if I still have my IUD. What a dumb question. As if I’d developed some master plan to get pregnant with your child and ripped the device out of my uterus with my fingers and sheer force. “Yeah, duh,” I answer, “and I got tested before coming here.”
You say, “Okay, good. And the last time I had sex was the last time you were here, so that’s as good as any test.” This pleases me idiotically, even though it means nothing.
In the shower the next morning, you hold my face with two hands, cupping my chin. Pulling me closer to you until I’m on my tip toes, you look at me and sigh in contentment and then plant a light kiss on my lips. At that moment, I feel whole.
I drive back to the hotel my family is staying at with a bruise and swollen lips. The bruise is from your body on top of mine, bracing your weight on my chest. Even though it was so painful, I found myself unable to say anything because I liked that at any moment my sternum could collapse and your hand would sink into its cavity and touch my beating heart. I coveted you being that close to me. My lips are swollen because you hit me hard while face-fucking me, and my teeth gnashed against the inside of my mouth, leaving tracks and drawing blood. But I cherished the already-memories being marked by something so corporeal.
I come back later that night. We talk Bowie’s, “Oh! You Pretty Things” and I ask you if it’s cringe to like The Dubliners in Ireland (no, they’re quite cool). Later, I lay in bed next to you, exhausted, and you turn on “The Manchurian Candidate.” You start jerking off and I watch you. Then, when I go to wrap my mouth around you without asking permission first, you strike my face. Not with great force, but with a sudden accuracy that takes me so much by surprise that I’m flinching now. It’s hard to pin down what made this time different from all the other blows that I wanted, but I remember feeling myself beginning to fade. I tried to display the pain I was feeling as pleasure and because of that, I think you thought I was close. A while later, I lie on my stomach with you collapsed on top of me.
“You’re really hot,” I hear you whisper, through muffled hair and sheets, my face down in the pillow. You’re saying more but I can’t hear you, or at least, I don’t place the words to any meaning. Then you ask, “Are you okay? It feels like you’re shaking.” And embarrassingly enough, I realize I’m crying.
You’re so panicked as you brush my hair aside and ask, “What’s wrong? Did I do something? Did I go too far, did I hurt you?” I’m weeping as I tell you that it’s nothing, and no, no, it’s not you. It could never be you. You counter, “Well, like, you’re crying and shaking really bad and look at how we’re laying here—I might still be inside you, so I feel like it probably has something to do with me.”
“No, really, it’s not about you. Things are a lot right now, and I haven’t been doing very well this past year. I just don’t know how to cope.” I’m chewing my words carefully and slowly, but then you kiss the crook of my shoulder and it’s so nice everything starts spilling out. Maybe it’s your fleshly weight on my back, forcing my words out. Or maybe I just want you to pity me, so you’ll finally decide to love me right then and there.
I tell you about my burden of feeling unlovable, and the crippling prospect of carrying that with me for life. You say you actually feel exactly the same way, that you tend to self-sabotage when it comes to love, and then, something about being able to forgive yourself for it being a sin that you bear, which I thought was a funny thing for you to say. I gather up all my courage from every time I couldn’t ask you. Your hand is on my heart and I hope you can feel how fast it’s beating.
“Can I ask you something sort of insane? And, I want you to answer in the most, uh, unbiased way possible. Because it’s not just about you. I mean it is, but it’s also happened to me before, with that guy from my freshman year, if you remember him. I just want to know how you see things. And I’m not saying that I felt one way or another about you, but… well, so, I feel like during our relationship last year, there was never any sense that we could be real.” I wait.
“Wait, sorry, I don’t think I know what you’re asking. Was that the question?” you ask, earnestly, but it also feels like you’re a little exasperated already.
“Yeah sorry, that wasn’t very clear. Long story short, I guess I’m asking…” I swallow. “Why wasn’t I someone you thought about loving? Like, why couldn’t I ever be serious to you?”
“Oh. Well, first off, I don’t think that’s true. Obviously, I’m not trying to tell you how you felt about the relationship, but there definitely were times where I could see things going that way. Which surprised me. I grew to care about you and like you so much. I honestly wasn’t expecting that, but we had so much chemistry right away. If anything, I think you never had that door open. It didn’t seem like you were looking for a serious relationship. I mean, don’t you think that’s part of why you initiate relationships with older guys? To close off any possibility of real love?”
I’d never considered my circumstances in reverse, that I liked older men because there was no chance of authentic love. I always thought I enjoyed it because I could rely on the simple, steadfast desire. I’m conflicted taking in your words, I partially think you’re full of it.
“So, then, what stopped you from initiating anything real?” I ask.
You pause for a while and hold your breath, like you always do when you’re thinking carefully. “I don’t want this to hurt you, or to sound patronizing. But it might, because I want to be honest… you’re so young.” The way you said it felt like you believed you were revealing something to me I was unaware of, and you needed to convince me of it. “I know that sounds dumb, but it’s true. You have so much changing to do, and growing.”
After some pause, “You’re a tremendous person. You know that, right? And you don’t realize it, but you’re not fully formed yet. I’m saying all this as someone who’s a lot older, who’s had a lot of relationship experience.” I’m whimpering without restraint or ego now. Because I can’t control my age. The only thing I can do is cling to your arm as hard as I can, even though there’s no way you could feel farther away. Because right then, I understand it’s really the end of us.
“Then why be with me at all, if age matters so much to you?”
“This is going to sound really clichéd, but things were different with you. You really are mature for your age, like a lot more than my students, who are 21 or 22, even 35. Which is why I actually could imagine things going somewhere. Like most of the time, you really don’t seem like you’re 20, but then suddenly, it’ll be really apparent.”
“So do you ever regret—” I start to ask.
You cut me off by saying, “No, never.” A certain, if not minimal, relief washes over me.
I continue, “Well, not regret then, but like, cringe, looking back at our relationship? Like, are you ever gonna be able to talk about me with your friends?”
“Yeah, when I said earlier, that I ‘think’ I’ve mentioned you to my friends, I don’t know why I said that. It was a yes. I do say you’re in your twenties—because technically that’s true—but I also talk about how great you were, and how it was really nice what we had. I’m just a private person in general.” A beat. “I don’t know why I’m saying that like everything is in the past. I hope I know you for a long time.”
“Isn’t it though?”
“Fuck, well—” you start, but never finish. I still don’t know what you meant by that. I didn’t understand in what capacity you expected to know me.
A bit later I ask, “Do you ever find me cold?” It was something I’d been thinking about recently, compounded then by you saying you never felt that I was invested in our relationship.
“No. Absolutely not. I do find you strange sometimes. Like, really strange. But maybe that’s just your Gen Z-ness.” I laugh-cry at that. “You’re not different now either,” you add as an afterthought. “Like, you don’t seem like an emptier person, I just want you to know that.” I don’t think you understood how much that meant to me.
I ask you if you’re still in love with her, your ex from Ireland, because I need to know. You immediately reply, “Yes. But it’s complicated. I won’t go into it any further because I remember what happened last time we talked about her.”
Our conversation eventually ends after almost four hours. When I wake up, you’re holding me, which didn’t happen often, because you always said my body was too warm for you under the covers. You’re cautious as we have sex in the morning, kissing the top of my head gently, even as you’re being rough with my body. I’m so relieved that you still want to enter my broken body, that I can cry again. And as I watch your face in those last moments, it’s exactly like the last time I left you. And even though I was supposed to stay with you another night, I think we both knew I wasn’t going to come back. It was the last time I was ever that close to you.
As I write this article and look at us on paper, I can see how ordinarily nothing we were. Writing about us doesn’t make what happened between us special. Writing about us won’t make you come back and love me, 17 miles away again instead of 944. I go back and forth on how to mark you in my life. Because in your real life, I didn’t exist. Your friends didn’t know the truth, you didn’t show me affection in public. You had me all to yourself, while I shared you with your exes—though admittedly, they possessed a much larger part of you than I did.
I started writing this before that last time we saw each other, when I missed you being near me so bad, and when I was agonizing over why you didn’t love me. Seeing you seven months later, and now learning that age is the reason for all my suffering, I’m unsure of how to process it all. Is it crazy that I respect you for it? As stupid as that sounds, I mentally dole out a certain amount of good-boy awards to you, for not deluding yourself with the idea that a twenty-year-old would ever be able to love someone nearing forty. Even though I could have. On the other hand, I don’t accept that as your answer. It’s not fair. My age never stopped you from telling me how much you liked me and how special I was. It didn’t stop you from taking me on a birthday trip to Crater Lake. It didn’t deter you enough that you refrained from using ageplay in bed. But love and a real relationship, that’s the ceiling of what our age gap permits?
Maybe I’ll be your last relationship before marriage. You’re resigned to be my first and always. I know I won’t ever recover from you, not completely. You can try and convince yourself you were a good guy who took me seriously, but ultimately, you were never honest with yourself. About how you cared too much about the appearances of us, together in the real world, to admit how much you actually liked me. Or about how you might just love your ex, and my age as a reason for being unable to love me is an excuse. A pretext for leading me on so I could be ‘her’ for you, at least for a little while.
But if the current exquisite pain ever does fade away entirely and I can no longer physically call to mind how you felt and made me feel, I’ll be sad to no longer know anything of you. It’s another way you’ll always have me, in my entrenched hope that you won’t totally slip away. I’ve worked on this piece every day since I left you, my daily indulgence of affliction. I miss you, because I’m terrified of not feeling your impression on me. Though you told me it’s stupid to miss things that aren’t gone yet. I guess that was a way of relating to you, performing as an age where I had gathered real regrets. But you’re gone now, for good. I’ll probably show up in your dreams from time to time, because I hear that means a person is thinking about you. Will you show up in mine?