Dream Deferred

Christmas and New Year's is a lonely time to be single. It is even lonelier if you just recently broke up with somebody. Or didn’t break up with him, per se, but just let the relationship fade away into oblivion. Saving him the trouble of breaking up with you.

I met my perfect man a few days after my birthday. Just when I least expected it. I was a few weeks into my surgery rotation, when I looked my least attractive due to lack of sleep and the required uniform of ill-fitting scrubs. Yet despite my puffy eyes and blue jumpsuit, I met the man of my dreams. He was tall and very handsome, with dark hair and brown eyes lined by glossy black eyelashes. He had a great sense of humor, and could do funny impressions of people (a talent I really enjoy because I happen to be quite the mimic myself ahem). And an added bonus was that he was Cuban. Sexy, latin, and a revolutionary. (I felt slightly let down when I found out that he had become a US citizen, but let’s face it, I was still high.)

Carlos was one of the other medical students who joined our surgery rotation. I pretty much just looked at him as a classmate the first few days. I always feel pretty asexual in the hospital, and I usually don’t think much of people hitting on me, but for some reason, Carlos caught my eye after a while. He would flirt with me and give me winks and whatnot, but the tipping point was when he stood up for this pathetic, nerdy student in my class, when he was being yelled at by one of the surgeons. I love a valiant man! I was hooked.

Carlos and I were soon talking every day, and texting like love-crazed high schoolers every night. We would sneak away for off-campus lunches, and make out in the stairwells of County General. He was smart, funny, and kind. He showered me with compliments. There was one little fly in the ointment, however. Ok, maybe not a fly. More like an elephant. Carlos had a girlfriend. A girlfriend of four years, actually. I shooed her away in my mind. She’s far away, in Indiana! And Carlos lives in NY now, only leaving to visit his family in Miami! He’s mine. Besides, she can’t possibly be as cute as me. (I am slightly embarrassed to have thought this, but if you can’t tell the truth in a blog, when can you tell it?)

On our first date, after making out in the middle of the street in SoHo, I asked Carlos if he still had his girlfriend. “No, no, I took care of it.” Took care of it? I winced at the idea of some poor girl getting a phone call from her perfect man, breaking it off… But I quickly shook my head of the thought. We went to a bar for some drinks, and it was literally within minutes when the second bomb dropped.

For some reason, religion came up. “Are you Catholic?” Carlos asked me.

“Yes,” I replied in my most angelic way, only then to give a wink and say, “but I’m a very bad Catholic girl.” Rather than a normal response, which I suppose would be to smirk back at me, and imagine a very naughty rendezvous involving spanking and the like, Carlos instead said this: “I used to be Catholic, but now I’m a Christian.” My stomach turned to lead, knowing what was coming.

“What do you mean, Christian?”

“I’m a Born-again Christian, I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My heart screamed out. My brain told me to run, run far away. Shush! I silenced myself. How could you run from the perfect man?!

What does this Christian thing mean anyway, I wondered to myself. My uncle was born-again, and years ago, he sent the entire family what is now known as “the hell letter”—a letter informing us that if we did not accept Jesus as our savior, then we would burn in a fiery hell for eternity. My mom told her brother if he ever tried a stunt like that again, she would never speak to him again. Later, a roommate in college, who turned out to be a dear friend, educated us. Although she believed we would not be saved on Judgment Day, she still had close friends outside her religion. Comforting. The only other experience I have with this particular sect is the memory of waking up early one day as a child and stumbling upon some weird cult church show while flipping channels on the television. The priest was yelling in tongues and striking people down—even children! I was terrified. (Carlos informed me recently that this is entirely different—Evangelical Christian—but terrifying just the same.)

“Maybe since his religion was repressed in Cuba, this is his way of expressing his beliefs,” my mom offered some words of comfort. Romantic, but unlikely. I took his Christianity and shoved it far in the back of my mind, hoping that if I ignored the issue, it would go away.

Days later, and essentially no dinner dates later, we slept together. It was way too early, but I let him pressure me into it. I was VERY pleased to find out that he was not at ALL very Christian in bed! Just a blur of Spanish and acrobatics. As we lay in bliss, Carlos actually said, “I was just thinking of how attractive our children would be.” HIGHHH!!!!

We continued like this, sneaking off in the hospital for a make-out shesh, making crazy Latin love at night, texting and calling each other all the time. Despite my visions of beautiful half Cuban, half Nordic children, I did not feel intimate with Carlos. It was forced. I didn’t feel like he was my boyfriend at all. But I so wanted to feel that way. Intimacy takes time, I knew this. But did Carlos?

Meanwhile, the church questions were becoming more and more frequent.

“Did you go to church today?” He asked me every Sunday.

“No! You know I never go, its sooo boring!” I would giggle every time. He would laugh too. I decided it would not be the best time to tell him the funny story about how Brian Wilder and I accidentally got wasted off the consecrated wine during the Christmas Eve mass in high school…

Sooner than later, despite my best effort to be charming and adorable, things started to change. Texts got less flirty. Phone calls slowed, and then stopped. I asked Carlos, carefully, what was going on.

“Cosita, you’re perfect. I think we have something really good going on here, and I just want to take things slow. You have to understand, I just got out of a four year relationship.”

Wait. A. Second. Mister! My heart screamed out, but my face stayed calm. He was the one who pursued me! He was the one who pressured me into sleeping together, into calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend, and who showed pictures of me to his family!! “I totally understand,” I smiled.

That was the truth. I understood all too well. Years ago, I had a long term boyfriend. We dated for years, and I was in love with him. I built dreams around him. Living in a house by the sea, babies in white hats playing on the beach…

But I broke my own heart when I realized we would never work out together, and I broke up with him. I rebounded into a whirlwind affair with someone completely different—loud, dark, outspoken and passionate. I was high off Johnny. But after a few weeks, the ghost of my old love haunted me. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. And he became untouchable; no man could ever compare to him.

Was I becoming to Carlos what Johnny had become to me? A fun, fiery affair, but just a careless rebound?

The last time I saw Carlos was the night of his birthday. We went out with his friends in the city, and had a fantastic time. We both had too much to drink, but what’s too much if you’re having fun, right?! But that night, in bed, came the third bomb.

After the usual imitation-porn-movie series of moves, came the question. Actually, more like a statement. “I want to put my ___ in your____.”

Let’s just let that hang in midair, because that’s basically how I felt. I did my best to express that I wasn’t into that (especially after only dating for like a month and a half, are you crazy??!!)

“Well, we don’t have to…tonight,” was his Christian response. I’ll leave out the gorey details, but let me say for documenting purposes that he tried this a few more times, and when he dropped me off the next morning, I was left feeling very uncomfortable about the whole situation.

Carlos headed down to Miami that day. We spoke a few times afterwards, only because I initiated. A few days before Christmas, I stopped calling. It’s his turn, I figured. I still wanted him to be enamored with me, like he was in the beginning. I was dying for him to miss me, to surprise me and come up for New Years Eve. But day by aching day, I never heard from him. My dreams I had just begin to build around him faded away. Dried up, like a raisin in the sun. And just like that, I was on my own again.

It is not Carlos who I miss, but the idea of him. I miss the man I created, who was basically a skeleton of Carlos, once you stripped away the religious zealot, the cheating boyfriend, and the wannabe porn star. So, not Carlos at all really. After a few days of grieving, drinking and eating cookies, (the latter two which I would do anyway during the holidays) I will be my laughing, cheerful self once again. Besides, I already met another tall, handsome guy who just might be the one.

Un clavo saca a otro clavo.