Co-addicted – Chapter 2 – Fun Until It Isn’t

The months that followed had the quality of the best kind of early relationship – the kind where everything is interesting because everything is new, where the other person is a subject you have not yet exhausted, where ordinary evenings acquire a brightness from the company that ordinary evenings do not usually have.

We were good together in the visible ways and the invisible ones. The visible: people noticed us. The specific, involuntary attention that certain couples generate, the sense that the two people make a visual argument for the plausibility of romance that observers find themselves responding to. I had been looked at my whole life – the cheerleader thing, the blonde-and-blue-eyed thing, the performance of a particular kind of femininity that generates attention without necessarily generating connection – but I had not before been looked at as part of something, as one half of a unit that worked. It was different. I found I liked it.

The invisible: we talked. Really talked, which is rarer than it should be and which I had not had in my previous, briefer relationships with people who were interested in the visible version of me and less certain what to do with the rest. Matt was interested in the rest. He asked about my family – my mother’s particular competence, my father’s particular absence, the cheerleading years and what they had cost and given in approximately equal measure. He listened to the answers with the attending quality that had first distinguished him in the kitchen, and he offered his own equivalent: a father who was present in the logistical sense and emotionally elsewhere, a mother who compensated with warmth that sometimes felt pressurizing, the engineering obsession that had started with Lego at age seven and had never been interrupted.

“You still have the Lego?” I said.

“Some of it,” he said, with the slight defensiveness of a man revealing something he has not decided whether to be embarrassed about.

“Show me,” I said.

He showed me. A box under his bed. Not the childhood sets – those were at his parents’ house – but a specific set he had bought last year, complex enough to constitute a project. He had built half of it and stopped.

“Why did you stop?”

He looked at it. “I don’t know. Got busy.”

“Finish it,” I said.

He looked at me. “You want me to finish a Lego set.”

“I want to see what it looks like finished.”

He smiled, and it was the good smile, the unperformed one. “Okay,” he said.

He finished it the following week and sent me a photo and the text: “Finished. It looks like the box promised. You were right.”

This was the first three months. Easy, interested, the specific pleasure of genuine compatibility rather than performed compatibility. The parties were part of it – the social life of two students in their early twenties, the rhythm of the week building to the weekend and the weekend built around where people were gathering. We went together, usually. He knew more people than I did – he had been here a year longer and had accumulated a wider social circle with the easy sociability that was simply how he moved through the world.

I want to be precise about the drinking and the substances in those early months because the precision matters: they were normal. Or they appeared normal, or I appeared to believe they were normal, or I was twenty-one and in love and the context I was using to evaluate normal was a university social scene in which the frequency and quantity of everyone’s drinking was calibrated upward from what any reasonable standard would suggest.

Everyone drank at parties. Most people smoked. Some people took things occasionally – the recreational use that exists in every student population and that most people navigate without it becoming a narrative. Matt drank. Matt smoked. Matt took things occasionally, at parties, in the way that several other people in the room were doing, and it registered to me as part of the texture of the life we were living rather than as information requiring a response.

I want to be honest about this: I was not naive. I was not looking away. I was looking at the same thing everyone in that context was looking at and drawing the same conclusion that most of them were drawing, which is that this was a phase of life and people did these things in this phase and they went away when the phase was over.

I was not wrong about most people.

I was wrong about Matt.

But I did not know that yet. In those first months there was nothing that distinguished his use from the baseline of the environment we were in. He was fun at parties – genuinely, entertainingly fun, the kind of presence that makes a room better, that generates the specific social energy of someone who is enjoying himself authentically rather than performing enjoyment. I loved watching him in rooms. The easy way he moved through conversations, the laugh that was reliable and real, the specific quality of a man who makes everyone feel like the most interesting person he has talked to tonight.

When we came home from parties he was warm and slightly elevated and we would stay up too late talking or watching something and the nights had the specific, slightly unreal quality of young life lived at full volume, and I would fall asleep against him with the contentment of someone who has found something they didn’t know they were looking for.

The parties became more frequent toward the end of the first term.

Not dramatically more – incrementally, the way things shift when you are not keeping count. We had been going out two or three times a week. It became three or four. The midweek nights that had previously been for study and quieter things acquired social events more often. Matt always knew where something was happening. His circle was larger than mine and more consistently active, and being with him meant being more embedded in it.

I noted this without particular concern.

I noted, also – and this is the thing I come back to, the data point that was available to me and that I processed without fully processing – that he was different at parties than he was without them. Not in a dramatic way. Just in a slight, specific way: more alive, more animated, more like the fullest version of himself. And on the mornings after, sometimes, a slight contrary quality – quieter, slightly less present, needing coffee and silence and time.

I thought this was simply who he was. The social energy of an extrovert and the required recovery period.

I thought this for longer than I should have.

But in those months, with the autumn going golden and then to winter and the relationship accumulating its texture and history, it was easy to think. It was easy to be in it and believe that what I was seeing was what was there and that what was there was simply the life we were building.

He finished the Lego architecture set and we went to a party to celebrate, which was a joke we had between us  – any occasion for a party, the justification always slightly absurd, the point always just the going. He was brilliant that night, funny and warm and entirely himself, and we came home late and fell into bed together and he pulled me close and said, into my hair, something so specific and tender that I held it for days afterward.

“I didn’t expect you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I didn’t know it would be like this. With you.”

I lay in the dark and felt the specific, vulnerable warmth of being told something true.

“Me neither,” I said.

We lay there. The winter outside. His breathing slowing toward sleep.

I did not know, lying in the dark that night with his arm around me and the party-smell still in our clothes and everything feeling like the exact right shape of a life, that what I was lying inside was already beginning to change.

I was not looking for signs yet.

I was just happy.

That was the whole of it.

Just – simply, completely, presently happy.

The happiness had approximately six more weeks of its uncomplicated form before the first thing happened.

I am going to tell you about the first thing in the next chapter.

But I want you to hold this version for a moment longer.

The parties and the winter and the Lego and the being genuinely, simply happy before I knew what it was also the beginning of.