My mom asked me that once. I couldn’t even begin to articulate an answer. Because I’ve done it over and over again. Always, the on and off again loves, and even some difficulty maintaining friendships. I am slow to trust and easily wounded and quick to run once I feel trust has been betrayed… except when I’m in love.

Then, it’s like the refrain to The Doors’ “Love Her Madly.” I leave only to come back. Or else, I love the ones prone to a revolving door policy.

I’ve been tempestuous with my partners, and hot and cold; we’ve mirrored this behavior with each other. Meeting up again and again past state lines in one case, over decades in another.

There’s one in particular I’m reminded of tonight. Someone on Threads posed the question: What’s the longest relationship you’ve had, apart from family? They worded it slightly differently, but that was the essence.

Twenty-seven years, by my math.

We met when I was 19, and he was 24.

Before I met my daughter’s bio dad, before I became a single mom, before I bonded with my current best friend over shared woes and creativity.

This past October-ish, maybe September-ish(?), he ghosted with an air of frightening finality.

I’m still not sure what if anything I did wrong.

I’ve wondered if maybe he didn’t see the humor in my choice of Halloween costume this year, if it offended him because it in some way mocked one of his creative ambitions, trolling musicians seeking fame and fortune, because I’d been burned by one (who WASN’T him) and wanted a bit of creative payback.

I had even conceived a story to write about that other musician, “the perils of pursuing guitar girls,” a duet alongside “the perils of romancing a writer.” Really for alliteration sake, I suppose it should be “the woes of romancing a writer.” Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll still write them. That just felt a little too vengeful, as time went on.

Anyway, the last time I saw him in person, he’d been vaguely in my area, picking up something he’d bought on Facebook Marketplace, and invited me out to dinner. I had a fierce headache, maybe a migraine, but he seemed worth it. So I went anyway.

I’ve wondered if it was too much of me not to offer to cover my half of the bill? But I had let him know I was broke until payday when he asked me.

I don’t know.

For a bit after that night, everything seemed okay. He was more prompt with responses than usual. It felt like maybe we were finally just friends and nothing more complicated than that. But I suppose nothing is ever that simple.

A therapist once cautioned me against continuing to pursue him romantically because of his wild nature. I don’t know that he’s ever been “faithful” to anyone. But not in the open and honest polyamorous kind of way. More backdoor sneaking around and misdirection and replacing former loves with new ones before ending relationships.

But he just had a way about him. Being around him, especially when I was younger (more naive, more easily impressed, more in love), was intoxicating. I like to think that spell was cast both ways, at least at times.

We once both unknowingly drank from the same glass of water for over an hour or so because we were so caught up telling each other stories, neither of us noticed the difference; sitting on opposite sides of a greasy-spoon restaurant booth, his boots propped up on the seat beside me, the shock that went through us both when I accidentally grazed his bare leg with my hand, then once again on purpose.

He would later forget the glass of water moment, which is wild because at the time, he was all about it. I didn’t make much of it at the time, but he was bewildered and delighted.

You could boil it all down to his being very, very attractive, and more than slightly vampiric in appearance. And a musician. And so many other things that tick off neat little boxes in my dreams. But we thought alike, as well.

Using our charm to get our way. I try to reign in my manipulative tendencies at this point, but I’m sure, old habits and all. It’s a survival mechanism, maybe. I sometimes rolled it out for funsies in my youth, to keep myself entertained, which was calculated and cruel. We shared more than that within our natures, though, I suppose.

I could blame him for everything, say that he kissed me before telling me he had a girlfriend. That revelation came the day after, over the phone, by which point I was already smitten.

But I could’ve made other choices, too.

And he had his moments of surprising tenderness and sincere concern. Like when I was approaching some decade or other, maybe 30’s? And I said I felt so old. He sighed like an elder, perhaps aged beyond his years by his own life’s misadventures, and said, “You’ll get over that.”

Or the way he treated me the time I came to see him after breaking up with my live-in girlfriend, in preparation to have my daughter come back home to me. He let me pick a song from his collection, as he was DJing that night, and he kissed me and bought all my drinks. Something he was in the habit of doing. And not in a skeevy trying to get something out of me sort of way.

I told him we were celebrating, because of the break-up and because I was just told I could stop taking my antidepressant. “Wow, the last time I went through a breakup, I started antidepressants,” he’d replied, or words to that effect. But he watched me closely, trying to suss out if I was hiding anything behind my bravado. Because he knew me that well.

At times, when we were in the more amorous phase of our relationship, he seemed to have a sixth sense about when I had just broken it off with whomever I’d been seeing up until that point. Sure enough, like clockwork, that’s when he’d come back.

I’ve had some very profound dreams about him over the years, as well, that I’m rather superstitious about. Talking and making out under a boardwalk somewhere, telling him all my love life problems and finding solutions together.

That’s not so far off the mark. Back when he had a landline and I had the number, I would call him late at night because he and I both kept odd hours, and he’d talk me down. A coworker commented upon hearing about this that it reminded her of Hinder’s “Lips of an Angel.”

I even sent him love letters to his band’s business address, though we never discussed them. I wrote some I never sent, because I was just overwhelmed with so much emotion, I had to put it somewhere. Bipolar disorder of some flavor or other, and passion. A heady combination.

The general consensus vote is that he wasn’t worth the energy long-term because he disappeared so much and always left me wanting more than he was willing to give. But I miss him tonight. What would I even do with him if I had him in my life in some capacity? I have no idea. But twenty-seven years is a long time.

Am I not as pretty as I once was? I’m at my heaviest. And I’m older. And blond now, versus the slightly-goth-flavored, black-haired variety of me he first met. Maybe I just didn’t have enough new adventures with which to seduce his imagination, as I once did, when I lived my life more in the wind.

But there was a time, when I was in the hospital coming down from severe mania, when seeing him again was the promise I made myself to stay sane. Something selfish just for me, not resuming parental responsibilities, or going back to classes, or seeing my family again. No. Just him.

And I found him once more, after years of no contact. I’d left the public-facing job I’d had where he and I had met, where he’d continued to leave flyers for the haunted house where he ran a scene, and such, even after I was gone. Eventually, I think I lost touch with most of the people I’d known at that job, or else he stopped dropping flyers. Or both. And more than once, I had the feeling that I was done, moving on, doing other things with my life.

But when I told him seeing him had been all I could think about while inpatient, his eyes softened, and he said, “Really?” with a look of astonishment and wonder. And we went around the carousel again.

Anyway, I’m missing him wistfully, but I’m also grateful the question was posed and that I had this opportunity to trip solo down memory lane. It’s been a very, very rough night, and it helped to remember that I have, in fact, felt all the things, at times. That there’s more to life than how it looks like right now.

I did in the midst of all my pain and crying tonight have a very, very clear thought, that almost seemed to come from a different part of myself. “You don’t like what you see? Then change the view.”

And when I desperate texted my daughter that the world deserves better than me, she responded, no, you deserve better than the world. At that, I sobbed, which helped release some of the pent-up, stored emotions.

I was feeling like I couldn’t last one more night, one more day. Then, I saw the question online, and I had an activity I knew would make a perfect distraction. This post.

He’ll never see this, I know. But that’s maybe as it should be. Some questions don’t get answered.