February Week 2: Old Lovers

I want to write about five Johns I loved and lost. I have written about all of them separately but here they are wrapped up together.

1. My longest-lasting-never-coming-to-fruition high school crush was a John. He always had a girlfriend but I was in all his classes junior year. I thought I was over him but then we drove together across Texas at the beginning of senior year. I was still just crazy enough to take the seat in the middle between him and his new girlfriend. They broke up by the end of the weekend retreat but John never so much as asked me to go out dancing. I finally asked him, and that was the last time I ever asked anyone out anywhere. He was polite but declined. 

2. My last high school boyfriend was a Johnny, not a John. Typical ADHD gifted nightmare. Our socioeconomic differences were hard to overcome and his childhood trauma even harder. I was too young to handle someone so fun, so broken, so much not fully realized. We broke it off when I came home after freshman year. He was still a busboy, not in college. I couldn't wait for him to figure it out (he did).

3. This John was 11 and hurting and I was his teacher and I wanted to put him in my car and be his superhero. I lost touch with him for three years and he called out of the blue. More radio silence for a solid decade and I find him on Facebook. Two months later he's living in my house and everyone in my life is like WTF BRIDGETT. It was complicated and I doubt even my closest friends understood any of it. We had two good hard summers together, then fleeting contact here and there. I hugged him goodbye outside the emergency room and I knew it was our last goodbye, I knew it with my whole self. He wrote me from jail one time in pencil. I still have the letter. And then he died. 

4. John, Fr. John this time, I fell in love with this man completely and irresponsibly. He had eyes the color of my son's, was as gay as a priest could get away with, sung show tunes from the pulpit, and one Holy Thursday after a long Lent, I went up to have my feet washed and he did so, kneeling in front of me, and then kissed the top of my foot like it was the two of us alone in that church with no one around. But I wasn't shocked by the gesture, I reveled in it. I needed that kind of intimacy and we were great friends, outlasting his move to another parish and almost surviving my divorce, until the week my daughter was in the PICU and he didn't come through for me in any fashion. He broke my heart like no lover ever has. I don't even have his phone number anymore.

5. And John. As in, the john. As in, the bathroom at my old house. Most specifically, not the john, not the toilet, but the bathtub. Six foot soaking tub with nickel plated claw feet and pristine porcelain. Oh I miss it. I now live in a house built in a more sensible era with a sensible modern tub. But love isn't sensible. And I miss that tub.