Top 5 BOPs

My name is Andrea, and I suffer from nostalgia.  At key times throughout the year, I am reflective—the real holidays (each of the Federal government-approved ones), the fake holidays (ones recognized by really good jobs with good benefits), and all the holidays in between (my birthday, others' birthdays, solstices, death anniversaries, my cat's birthdays): you name it, and I reflect.  This year, however, the nostalgic impact presented itself earlier in the year when I discovered a big box of unnamed and uncategorized pictures from my past.  There seemed to be no time-period organization in this box: one day Andrea of moving-past dumped a bunch of pictures into a plastic tote, as if to leave them for present-day Andrea to find as a fucked-up time capsule of her life circa 1988-2007.  Let me do the math for you: there are roughly 19 years of memories in a box; memories I only vaguely remember making, but definitely memories I do not remember freezing in time.  I can't recall ever carrying a camera, and present-me has mixed-emotions about past-Andrea's intent.

I don't know what it feels like for most scorned lovers when they find their boyfriends-of-past (BOPs) hiding in a box in their garage, but for me, it was fun and sad and unnerving and uncomfortable.  Discomfort surfaced mainly after I posted some of the old pictures containing BOPs on Instagram and a more recent BOP made excessive comments on my previous pics of other BOPs, and it started a BOPs-fest that I couldn't contain.  When I joked that I had opened Pandora's box, I thought a joke was all it was.  Opening the BOPs box (if you will) has lead to an interesting mid-life BOPs reflection I feel I have been forced into by the universe.

In High Fidelity (the book, then the movie, both of which I have read and seen), the main character, Rob (John Cusack), makes a Top 5 list of past girlfriends.  In the movie, Rob tells his past story and present story with dramatic scenes of girlfriends-of-past (GOPs) in alternating narrative time-sequences.  If you have no idea what I am talking about, here's a brief scene where we see Rob pondering his GOPs.

What's interesting is I literally opened the BOPs box (which, for the record, contained other pictures, too), then a BOP resurfaced, and then for over a week after the BOP commented on the pictures, the BOP kept contacting me.  Let's give this BOP a fake name: Adam. Adam wasn't just texting to say, "Hey!" Instead, Adam sent serious long missives via text about inane topics, seemingly in an attempt to reestablish regular contact.  In keeping with the High Fidelity metaphor, I'd compare the resurrection of Adam to when Rob contacts GOP, Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Charlie then accuses Rob of having a "What does it all mean?" moment.  She says she's had a rash of past boyfriends going through the same thing.  And in the movie, Rob's purpose in contacting the Top 5 GOPs is to indeed come to grips with "What does it all mean?"

After a visit to my therapist on New Year's Eve, she said I had to cut Adam off—or "take out the trash," as she called it.  It's not to say I hadn't already avoided contact with Adam, but he moved away for many years, came back to Idaho, and tried to contact me, but more often than not, we just didn't talk: I thought it would stay that way.  My nostalgia, however, became his nostalgia.  I got to the therapist's parking lot and drafted a text to Adam "texts can't continue...contact can't continue...not trying to be mean...I've got issues to work out...this isn't helping...blocking your number if you don't comply..."  He tried to engage, but Adam isn't even the point of this story, as it turns out.

The moral of this story is the universe might hand you nostalgia in a box: she'll give you a big fucking stack of BOPs and feelings you haven't explored, and you could just leave those BOPs sealed tightly in their fucked-up time capsule, or you could let them seep out one night—give their little BOP ghost-bodies an airing out—all while you drink a bottle of red wine, stay up until the wee hours of the night, thinking the reminiscing you're doing is innocent: then you discover, you can't stop the nostalgia ghost-train you've started.

It took approximately 3 days from Adam to most-recent BOP to contact me.  In the interest of protecting the most-recent BOP's anonymity, I am going to give him a super-generic name: Millard Fillmore—Fill for short.

Fill and I have a long and sordid past.  I met Fill when he was 31, and I was 19.  I worked at a record store; he was a customer at the record store.   Fill was the man of my 15 year-old dreams.  He was burly and rugged and rock and fucking roll.  I was enamored; it took years for me to talk to him in an unencumbered way—normally I stammered, was awkward, and flush.  I sweated and crushed and avoided eye-contact and was breathless when Fill came around—I was young.  Fill was married, and he was a laborer I lusted after.  A lot of ladies lusted after Fill, then, I think.  It wasn't until many years later, when Fill was divorced, I no longer worked at the record store, and Fill was 43 and I was 31 that I got Fill.  I wasn't even planning on having Fill, but sometimes you get what you want when you don't actually need it, but 15 year-old nostalgic you just can't resist some things, even with the red flags falling all around you like snow on a cold-winter day.

For over a year, Fill and I played some strange game resembling a relationship.  I was introduced to Fill's friends, we hung out with Fill's friends, Fill hung out with my friends, but more importantly, Fill and I spent a lot of time together.  We spent hours on the phone, in contact, making dinner, hanging with his son, watching movies, seeing concerts, drinking, doing activities, and I got to even hang out with Fill's mom at his son's extracurricular activities.  During this year, Fill was short on cash for Christmas: I knew he wouldn't accept help, so I arranged a scheme in which a friend delivered an envelope filled with cash to his door.  I didn't want Fill's son to have a bad Christmas.  I didn't want Fill to have a bad Christmas.  I was attached to Fill, but only after I decided that 15 year-old nostalgic Andrea could have actually snagged this person.  With red flags a fluttering, I decided I was going to give it a go anyway, and just like that, the go was halted.  It turns out Fill didn't "believe in relationships." This seemed funny, considering relationships, romantic or otherwise, are something we can agree exist: right now, in you reading this, you are having a relationship of some kind.  For someone to profess that they just don't believe in the existential nature of relationships make no sense.  When Fill said, "I just don't want to be one of my friends.  You know—45, married for the 3^rd time.  I don't want to be that guy," what he really should have said is "I just don't want a relationship with you.  I see no future.  I'm really glad you've made me dinner, been a part of my life, and had sex with me, but after this year, I just don't think it's going to work out."

A misconception I think a lot of men often have about women is that we are fragile: we can't handle the truth when we discover we are not wanted.  What's harder, however, is not hearing the truth.  It's harder for us to bounce back and move on.  It's harder to not know the truth because instead of finding out we aren't wanted, and that, yes, it is in fact, US that are the problem, we spend needless time trying to figure out how to fix ourselves into being a solution.  If we knew we were the problem from the start, we could move on to being someone else's solution instead of trying to factor our way into a convoluted algorithm we will never be a part of no matter how hard we try.

I don't singularly see my role in this world as a solution for men: in fact, I see myself as something completely different.  But in opening the nostalgia box, I realize that in my twenties, BOPs came and went and my nature and interactions with BOPs was attention-driven: I wanted recognition.  I wanted to be loved and lusted after.  Love was a romantic ideal, and I wanted confirmation that I was wanted.  In my thirties, I want to be wanted, but moreso it seems that I have spent the first part of my thirties seeking out someone to take care of.  I haven't figured out, yet, if this is the biological imperative: we want to care for someone (some women have children—I have cats), and we want someone to care for us.  I want all things that come with partnership, and I have a notion that this start to the idea of finding someone to care for will bring me someone to care for me as we age, get cancer, get sick, get ugly, continue to sag, start to resemble the opposite gender the older we get, and begin to die.

A friend recently asked me, "But don't you think your friends would take care of you?"  And my answer is, yes, undoubtedly, my friends would take care of me no matter how saggy and disgusting and bitchy I get, but there is something in a love pact, though deceiving as we all know the truth to be, that makes someone "required" to be there.  I know that even in the face of requirement, people have ditched each other, but there is some place in my heart where I feel a sense of peace in thinking that one day I will have a partner who is required to take care of me even when my boobs are dragging on the ground behind me.

So, three days post-Adam, Fill sent me a text-message.  It's not the first Fill message I have gotten; Fill has been text-messaging me for months, even after I told him I didn't want to speak to him after our non-relationship ended when I found out that Fill had "a girl come into his life."  A girl who is in her twenties, and blonde, and thin, and attractive, and seemingly everything that I am not.  I'm not bitter, but I was extremely hurt at first—who wouldn't be after finding out not only they aren't wanted, but they are also being exchanged for a newer model?

Fill's text said, "I am having a baby."

My first thought was, "Seriously?!  Seriously?  Seriously?  Why are you texting me?"

My first action was to call my sister.  And then I opened a cheap bottle of red wine.  And then I called another friend, then another, then another.  In 36 minutes, I had consumed a bottle of red wine and called 6 friends because when a BOP shows up, it's one thing.  However, when a nonrelationship-believing BOP shows up to tell you he's about to embark on an adventure of new FATHERHOOD, a pretty HUGE RELATIONSHIP, and that the womb of the child is that of a twenty-something, there really isn't much to do other than open a bottle of wine—and then open a second bottle.  And drink the second bottle in just under an hour, and pass out at 9:30 on a Friday night.

In uncorking the BOPs box of nostalgia pictures, I had no idea what I was inviting from the universe.  And when I tried to take the trash out, the universe decided it would take out all of my trash in one motion.

I don't care what Fill's motives were for texting.  I didn't respond.  Because how does one respond to that message?  And why is it even important?  It's not to say that I haven't thought of making a Top 5 BOP list: I have.  I'm not going to post it on the web.  And it's not even to say that I haven't wondered about one person in particular and maybe two that I would have the "What does it all mean?" conversation with—I want to have that conversation still, and I hope the urge is fleeting and disappears before I am 40, but I just never imagined people would be wanting to have the "What does it all mean?" conversation with me.  But it turns out, nostalgia doesn't have a "block" feature.