Forever Winter (Rome’s Version)

“You know you’re not hard to love, right?”

She said this to me with my face between her palms as a crisp summer breeze brushed against my neck. The day was warm, yet I could not ignore the chill that loomed from deep inside me.

I didn’t expect to become the anti-hero of my own life. I swear I had good intentions, but instead, I ended up destroying the very things I never intended to harm. 

Situationships are the wolves in sheepskin, the thorns on a rose, the mirages in the desert. How did this happen? Somehow, I messed up my cherished friendship, only to impose my own feelings.

Sometime in March of last year, I had reconnected with an old friend I had fallen out with during my undergrad. On rare occasions, I would see her around, hear her name being said in conversations, only because my best friend (at the time) was dating her. They were dating for almost ten years. 

Around the same time, my girlfriend of almost four years broke up with me. It was an amicable break-up. She wanted to grow, experience her journey as a fresh graduate for herself, live her own life. This was more than a reasonable reason - not that she really needed a reason at all - to want to leave. We spent every waking moment together. We were in the same program, shared the same friends, had the same classes. In the nicest way possible, I’d say that we were suffocating ourselves with each other. 

On the day she texted me, telling me she had been thinking about things… about us, I realized something:

Love, even in its best form, cannot endure forever. 

I tried my best to reflect the love I wish I saw growing up, when I was with her. I did the things I had seen in movies, had read about in books, and saw online. I was not perfect in any way, shape or form. But still. Even in my flaws, I believed that if I played my role right, I would see the happy life I always dreamt of. 

I guess not. 

The next few months afterward, I tried to focus on myself.

I thought I was doing everything I possibly could at that time. I was starting my self-love journey by reading books like ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by M.D. Bessel Van Der Kolk, reciting positive affirmations to myself in the mirror, reconnecting with old friends, and pursuing old hobbies with a ‘renewed sense of self’ (I knew absolutely nothing about myself). And for a moment, I believed that everything seemed perfectly aligned. 

But I wasn’t actually growing or healing like how I wanted to believe. Somehow, I had sabotaged myself into an emotionally unhealthy situationship - I had developed strong feelings for my best friend’s girlfriend. 

Somewhere in the rekindling of our friendship, the sparks flew and caught onto feelings that could only be described as ‘flammable.’

I had always liked Jo (not her real name). She was kind, smart, and ambitious. I liked the way she dressed and how funny my jokes always seemed when I told them to her. 

“Maybe this is it,” I thought, stupidly. “Maybe this is finally the one.”

Soon, the list of the things I liked about her grew longer. I liked how different she was from me. She was organized, tidy, and regimented. She executed everything she said she would do, was “successful” in the traditional sense, and somehow she always made time for everyone else. 

However, I was seeing things in her that, looking back, were probably never there. Jo was sensational because she was everything I was not. 

Our relationship (if you could even call it that) was a house fire. Inconspicuous, invisible until it no longer was.

For a year of my ‘healing’ journey, I was inflicting more emotional scars onto myself than I ever thought I could. 

In Forever Winter, Taylor Swift writes that her partner says to her, “Why fall in love just so you can watch it go away?” And for a year I wondered the same exact thing. Why did I say I was going to love myself, only to watch myself disintegrate?

If you’ve ever been involved in an affair and stayed because you wanted them to choose you in the end, you might know the pain that comes with fighting against your better judgment. 

I knew I was worth more than being a secret. Yet, I had been a secret in all my relationships. Being a queer, trans-man like myself, not many people are willing to love you out loud. And up until this point, I was convinced that’s all I was ever going to be - a  secret - and not one worth sharing.

Just as Taylor says, we are “too young to know it gets better” and it will be a “Forever Winter” if the love we think we deserve, goes. Despite the heat of her embrace stinging me like frost, I endured Jo as long as I could.

From the ages of 22 to 23, society will tell you that you are an adult. That you know everything there is to know about this world filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. That you have made every perfect decision there is to make, resulting in this wealth of “proper” and “perfect” knowledge to live by for the rest of your life.

Of course, as we all know, that is beyond false.

Now that I’ve turned 24, I’ve learned that there is some truth in the idea that age is a reflection of wisdom. Age, devoid of wisdom, welcomes a renewing set of experiences. Even if they are similar, I always hope that I am wise enough to not do the same thing twice.

Thankfully, after three failed attempts of leaving this toxic relationship, I told Jo:

“I’m done.” Winter was here, and it was cold, but the feeling of returning to myself was the warmest thing I had ever felt in a long time. 

We had stopped seeing each other in February - Valentines Day, actually. 

Reattempting my healing journey for the second time in a row, I discovered that love, alone, cannot save you from yourself. 

“He seems fine / most of the time / forcing smiles and neverminds”

When it comes to love and relationships, the problem with me is that they are a complete distraction against the deeper turmoils that already exist within me. 

I would stay up at night thinking about our affair with my chest being pulled in every which way as punishment for my actions. During the day, I still remained a secret. Laughing like it was free, smiling like it cost me nothing, while confusion and conflict marred my mind. 

How and why did I do this to myself? And why for that long? 

In exploring these questions, I was reminded of the revelation I had when I broke my ankle into three parts — never think it won’t be you. 

I have learned over time that men often feel like never addressing their problems. Instead, they will avoid them completely with distractions (relationships, vices, improving their image) or express their emotions as anger and emphasize them physically. 

I would say to myself, “I’m not like these guys. I respect women. I don’t hit them, I don’t yell at them - I don’t do any of this stuff,” and yet, I would expect them to run in my place when it came to confronting my pain. Relationships gave me the chance to tap-out from the race against myself. 

How ironic it must have looked, to claim I could handle my torture when in fact, I was doing the exact same thing as these men (albeit, in a much lesser form) by passing it onto someone else.

“I’d take that bomb in your head / and disarm it”.

Summer came back around and I was alone, now between the shelter of tree stumps and the gesture of their leaves as they provided me with shade from the ferocious rays of the sun. 

With the pages of Satoshi’s Yagisawa’s ‘Days at the Morisaki Bookshop’ resting within my palms, Yagisawa’s heroine and her journey of self-discovery post situationship-heartbreak, struck a deep chord within me. 

Takako, the aforementioned heroine, reflects on her time at her uncle’s bookshop. As she sits with her uncle, the both of them drunk as ever, she says to herself, “In my heart I was still dependent on others.”

Somewhere between this line and the following chapter where she confronts her ex-boyfriend and his fiance, I found the strength to remove someone else's grip around my heart.

With my phone taking the place of Yagisawa’s book in my hands, I texted a number I had to search deep within my phone for (after having blocked it while I was with Jo). After opening Whatsapp and referring to an old group chat from my days in university, I contacted Jo’s boyfriend telling him I had something to say.

The idea of telling him was the main factor contributing towards my mind’s deterioration. My self-esteem was in the drain. He was once my friend, my closest friend in university, and yet I did this to him. I went behind his back, living a fantasy that was never destined to be more than that.

Before this moment, for months and months on end, I was telling myself that I wasn’t my thoughts, that I wasn’t the things I was telling myself. The lies I was helping to keep alive were true and therefore needed no correction. 

But by the grace of someone greater than me, and thank God it came when it did, I owned up to my actions.

The conversation with Jo’s boyfriend was hard but worth the temporary discomfort. That’s when I came to learn my biggest lesson with healing. Healing is not just about loving yourself, because that is selfish. True healing is like true love - it starts with honesty. Only when we become truthful with ourselves, with who we are, can love be promised. 

These days I walk the world, still alone, but never lonely. The fulfillment I used to find in loving women, I found within serving my community and confronting the hard parts of myself with the tenderness one would offer to a child. 

I am nowhere near feeling whole again, but at least I am proud of the path I have found myself on. 

When I heard Forever Winter for the first time, it was through a Spotify link Jo had sent to me. She showed me all of Taylor’s songs, actually. This one in particular, reminded her of me. 

And I guess she was right. 

Forever Winter was my invitation to turn inwards, to connect with someone whose existence lingered like a distant memory, like two old friends caught in a blizzard.

Song Credits: Forever Winter by Taylor Swift (2020)