The first time I saw her, her legs were dangling off the edge of a windowsill seven stories up in the middle of winter, smoking, and singing along to Wiz Khalifa. She’d just had her braces removed and was suddenly aware that she’d never have to pay for a drink ever again. This was three years before we started dating. I was seventeen.
We met in boarding school in Sweden, and shortly after graduating I spent a few whirlwind years travelling about, teaching English abroad, working construction jobs in Brazil, eventually moving back to my native California, waiting tables and delivering coffee on film sets.
It was Instagram that informed me she was moving to L.A., having been accepted into a school. I was quick to reach out, offering a friendly face in a sometimes unfriendly town. Bi-weekly hangouts soon became daily, then hourly, with a constant stream of texts between. Soon enough we were dating. I was only twenty, and she nineteen. I worked at The Weinstein Company (yes, that Weinstein Company), and she attended her classes. I moved into her apartment, and suddenly we were playing house, bonded by our mutual love of film, music and nightlife. We would get into dive bars with fake IDs up and down Hollywood Boulevard, watch midnight screenings of old black and white films at the Arclight, and peruse the aisles at Amoeba music. We even almost got married. Sure, it was technically just for her to get citizenship, and perhaps we never said it out loud to one another, but at the time, I would’ve done it for real.
And then life got in the way.
I got accepted into a university across the Atlantic Ocean in the UK. She assumed the
position of reasonable adult, consoling me as I cried endlessly over the inevitable end to our relationship. I dramatically shaved days off the calendar like a man awaiting the date of his own execution. But I had to leave. Just like she had done eighteen months prior in pursuing her own dreams, I had to pursue mine. Severance of all contact was the only option to make it as painless as possible, but, predictably, I didn’t get that luxury. But that’s what we did. No Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat updates for three years. A random encounter at a night club in Sweden was the first interaction since our breakup, and then we re-added each other on Instagram. Suddenly, we were welcomed back into each other’s lives. I’d seen where she had lived. What she had done. Meanwhile, I’d left the UK and my unquenchable thirst for travel had seen me move to China and later to the UAE. It was like peering into a different timeline.
We agreed to meet up in Stockholm—only the second time in over four years. Although Sweden is notorious for its cruel and unforgiving winter, its nightless summers are magical. Tipsy and laughing, we zigzagged through the city, reminiscing over old memories, and then I walked her to the apartment of the man she would later marry. She met him years after me, so I was spared any feelings of betrayal or disloyalty, and was simply happy for her, if not a little curious. I said goodbye, and flew home a few days later. After China I moved to Malta, then to London which became my home for the next three years. While scrolling through my feed one morning, I saw it: the customary Instagram post announcing her engagement. And several months later I received an email invitation to their wedding in Greece. She quickly messaged me asking if it was weird, but that she wanted me to come because, after all, I was one of her oldest friends.
The attendance list arrived, and I scrolled through the faces of people whose existence I had completely forgotten. Faces I recognised from boarding school, faces I hadn’t seen since graduating, and then the new ones she’d met since our lives disconnected, people who presumably knew nothing about me, or…us.
I flew to Athens and took a cab straight from the airport to the pre-wedding party, and as I stepped out of the elevator, I came face to face with her soon-to-be husband. We’d never met, and though I hadn’t asked what he thought about my attendance, I assumed he was fine with it. Still, you never know. But his eyes lit up and he hugged me deeply, telling me everything he knew about me, how happy he was that I came, and how highly she’d spoken of me. And she was standing right behind him, with a familiar yet foreign smile, waiting to hug me. I hadn’t seen her in four years.
The wedding took place on a hill in the countryside. Cheers and clapping eclipsed the sound of blistering wind as they kissed and ran into the monumental castle where the party would take place.
There was a brief moment I caught her outside and told her that I cried when her husband played the piano for her. Smiling, she asked, “Remember when we almost got married?”
The ensuing night and the following day were some of the most memorable I’ve had in years. I danced with old friends to old songs we knew, providing a brief window into days with people I no longer knew much about. But unlike phony comments of, “let’s keep in touch!” no false promises were given. We all had fun, but we were all honest.
At the final dinner somewhere along the coast of Athens, before I left for my flight, I hugged her again, took a selfie to send to my mom, and I expressed in a few words what I could only hope encapsulated the time we once shared together. I applauded her for finding love in what turned out to be a great guy. We hugged again, and then I left. The wedding, the weekend, the nostalgia—it was all over.
On the plane back, I thought about the different directions our lives had taken after we broke up. I was a week away from turning 30, and it was the first time I ever felt old. What would have happened had I not moved to the UK? What would have happened had she never moved to LA? And what if I hadn’t run into her at the club years back, subsequently re-adding each other on Instagram? Would she still have invited me, or would that have been it?
Even after the wedding, realistically, our paths won’t cross many times again. We don’t live in the same country, we don’t share the same friends. But some time ago, when we were kids thinking we were way older than we were, we were best friends, and we were in love.
Henry Miller once wrote: “The really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love.” Our love has passed, but that doesn’t mean it never happened.
The responses I received upon telling people I was going to my ex’s wedding were all nearly identical: shock, confusion and pseudo outrage. But I don’t understand why. An old friend invited me to the most significant day of her life. And I was proud to be there to see it. If only everyone was so lucky.
