I am jarred awake by a terrible, unmistakable sound, and notice I’m alone in bed. In the softly lit bathroom I make out my boyfriend-who’s-not-my-boyfriend naked and kneeling in front of the toilet, vomiting violently. This continues for the next several hours and into daylight.
-----
The driver arrives and takes our luggage. After 45 minutes of unforgettably scenic island driving, we are dropped off at the airport where we take a puddle jumper to Trinidad. My boyfriend-who-won’t-call-me-his-girlfriend is fading from green to gray with each lean and lurch. He manages not to vomit during the flight.
-----
I am sitting on my suitcase on the floor of the Miami International Airport at ten o’clock at night, weeping. My boyfriend-who-checks-out-his-own-body-during-sex is waiting in a line at least 40 people deep to find out what to do since there are no more flights home tonight.
-----
I once had a boyfriend who refused to say we were a couple. This went on for over a year despite incongruous trips to meet his family and friends. I later learned that this opposition to naming the relationship wasn’t for fear of commitment -- he married the very next woman -- it was because he refused to include me in his decisions or inner life, the majority of which he kept hidden and only ever revealed when all deceptions had run their course.
He was rude to me when I first introduced myself to him, meeting one spring Saturday night through mutual friends. He was seven years older than me and an inch shorter, and handsome in an accessible way. He was the kind of man I grew up around so I was used to and even prepared for his type: argumentative, excitable, belittling, emotionally unreachable. I struggle to place what even drew me to him initially.
After eight or nine months of dating, I financed the majority of an expensive tropical vacation for us to Tobago, the little sister island of Trinidad. I knew nothing about the country but it was the place he wanted to go more than any other. A lifelong lover of sun and sea, I packed bikinis and a book and off we went to escape the winter.
Picture mosquito netting over the bed, geckos darting through the bougainvillea, the waves of Castara Bay crashing below the perch of our retreat. We saw bananas growing wild and goats on tin roofs. While hiking one day, luck had us turn and look just in time to see an entire pandemonium of green parrots take flight from the canopy. We ate curry on the beach and danced to calypso in the street. We bought tuna caught that day and butchered right on the beach, our center-cut filets costing only $3TT.
Our idyllic vacation only seems blissful when you leave out how painfully one-sided the trip and relationship were. Halfway through the week in Tobago, I cried in anger and sadness, reduced to begging for his time and attention. We were two people who traveled to the same place but were not on this trip together. When at the beach, he set up several feet away from me, needing space to unwind. When back at the retreat, he stayed on the deck smoking cigars, writing in some journal, and needing privacy. Bringing up my frustration only gave him a new occasion to deem my needs childish and overwrought.
It wasn’t only like this in Tobago, it was just more noticeable without the familiar trappings of everyday life. He was dismissive and demeaning back home, too. He was obsessed with himself and his vision for his life, a vision that never really included me, no matter which direction I approached or the angle I took. He was impenetrable. I don’t know when it got bad, or if it was ever even truly good.
-----
In stark and painful contrast to the overwhelming beauty of Tobago, the airline puts us up for the night in a three-star hotel in Coral Gables, to which we catch the last shuttle. I sit on the floor, the seventeenth passenger in a sixteen-passenger van. The hotel isn’t prepared for the midnight influx of guests and it takes half an hour to get our room. I eat a soggy airport sandwich in a bad bed while my boyfriend-who-never-cared-how-I-felt stays up and watches an action movie on TV. I see my life’s first cockroach run up the wall opposite the bed and sleep with the polyester bedspread pulled over my head.
-----
A few months after Tobago, he disappeared overnight without any explanation other than needing to help a friend. It would be months before I learned what it was about. It hardly seemed worth it at the time to complain. Getting repeatedly berated for thinking I had a right to know what was going on in the life of this man who wouldn’t love me back put me off asking altogether.
When the man you are dating sneaks away to a hotel off the interstate to provide his semen as a favor to his ex-girlfriend and her new wife, he is not planning to build a life with you. And when he makes you out to be a monster for feeling betrayed and confused about where this leaves you, he does not respect you. When he gives you a drawer to put a change of clothes in but won’t make room for you in his life, he doesn’t value you. When he ends the relationship because he finds your discomfort unacceptable, he does not even see you.
-----
Our last night in Tobago, we endeavor to eat all our leftover food, since anything beyond granola bars isn’t going to travel well. I cannot stress enough that you should never eat the unfinished tuna two days after buying it on the beach. Put that directly in the bin.
***
The above is a personal essay submitted in the third and final round of the Yeah Write Super Challenge contest in March 2017, garnering a Second Place prize. Click here to learn more about Yeah Write.
