12 St Johns Place

I want to start learning many things with the same person

I just moved in with my boyfriend. This is the sixth time I’ve lived with someone, my seventh long-term monogamous relationship. I’ve been mostly in relationships, with the exception of a year I was purposefully single and a year I was not purposefully single, since I was nineteen, when after basically not doing anything or dating anyone, and feeling really out of place and like I had zero conception of how to have a boyfriend, I started dating someone — and kept dating him for almost four years — my junior year of college. I like long things. I like to see them through. I like to not give up until the very bitterest of ends. I always thought it was a good quality. Then I thought it was a less good quality. Now I think it’s fine. 

I was a sort of normal partier around my college boyfriend until I moved to New York and got a dealer’s number, and then I started basically staying out every night until four or six or eight or even ten am. I wonder now how that was even a thing that was a normal thing in a relationship — like, why didn’t we ever fight about that, or, do I just not remember that we fought about it? Our relationship was in many ways sort of an ideal, a friend of mine who’d been around for it told me recently. We were friends, and we got along, and we had great sex and minor conflict and communicated well, but it just wasn’t what I wanted. I just always wanted a bigger life, more excitement, more chaos, more instability, and I hadn’t yet figured out that those drives are part of a way my brain tries to cope with some of the chaos and instability of my early life, and my boyfriend after that sort of fit the bill: he was older and married when we met, and then left his marriage, and we lived together in a house in Red Hook, and I did a lot a lot a lot of drugs. I also spent time with his kids, which was a whole thing, and then sort of around eight months of that I realized that I really needed to get sober and I didn’t think I could get sober if I stayed with him. 

I started dating the guy who lived at St Johns basically the day I broke up with the guy who lived in Red Hook because that was just what I did at the time, even though I considered myself extremely independent. I told him I was sober but what I didn’t tell him was that I was basically one day sober. That sort of came out in the course of conversation, but I had really no help staying sober and was just trying to white knuckle it, as I try to do almost everything until I just hit some sort of rock bottom, which eventually happens. A few months into our relationship I ended up getting some help because he was like, listen, I can’t help you with this thing but there is a whole room full of people who could, and he was right, my god was he right about that room full of people. He didn’t really wonder why I came to this relationship a ghost. I had no friends. I had no friends because I hadn’t yet made the rounds of amends, hadn’t yet shown, over the years and through consistent actions, that I could one day be trusted again, hadn’t yet stitched together all the friendships I’d stretched to their limits of compassion and understanding. I read somewhere that it’s okay not to trust a sober alcoholic for the first two years but after that you kind of need to try to give them a chance. So I just stayed inside the back studio of 12 St Johns Place and watched Battlestar Galactica. 

A few months before we broke up, I started complaining that his life wasn’t big enough for me, that he didn’t show me love the way I wanted him to, that I needed more. This is my standard complaint, I have to come to see, one that I have delivered to every single person that I have ever been with, until now, because I have learned now that the problem is actually never them. The problem is that I have a hole the size of God inside me and no matter how loved I am, it will never feel like enough. I was obsessed with the fact that he’d been married before me and that he’d been briefly suicidal after his divorce, which I thought meant that he would love his ex-wife forever and always definitely more than he loved me, and of course as you all know I’ve been married before and was briefly suicidal during my divorce, and do not and certainly did not love my ex-husband more than I love my person, so joke’s on me, life always catches up with you, but I was in this phase of just thinking, well, it’s not enough, it’s never enough, I want to remove this person’s soul and put it into my own body but I can’t, and so instead, next. 

It’s been two years since I’ve lived with someone. When I try to explain the arrangement that I had in my marriage, it doesn’t really sound like it’s been two years since I lived with someone. It sounds like what it was, which is that it’s been two years since there was someone else in the living room of the apartment in which I lived, two years since I’ve wondered why I’m going to sleep alone and waking up alone, two years since I’ve realized that no, I’ve waited long enough. 

When I was telling my ex-husband that I wanted a divorce he said, clearly reading from a script, that I needed to give him a lot of money and then he also said something like, I want you to find someone better suited to you and me to find someone better suited to me. You can get married again and I can get married again. I was in Union Square and dropped my voice so so so so so very low, which is how I know that I’m really truly actually angry, and I said, I will never give up my freedom again, I am never getting married again, marriage is a fucking trap, I see that now. This couple walked by me — they were old and they both had wedding rings — and they smiled at me and then one of them said, I swear to God, “it always feels like that after the first one.” I’m not getting married today, but I live a life with a person today. 

I walked by that old St Johns place a few months ago maybe and remembered the coffee place that had been on the corner, where I met a friend who a few years later would write about the person I live with now, and I remembered the Key Food grocery store, and I remembered my St Johns boyfriend and me going to the Coinstar because of how broke we were, and I remember smoking cigarettes on the street and how his sister caught us while she was on the bus, and I remember feeling like I was just small enough to slip into his life, how I didn’t want to make a fuss, how I was so afraid of everything, of life, of not being anesthetized, of all the harm I had caused and all the damage I believed I’d done, how nothing would ever get better or ever be fixed, but all of it did, because as my friend T once said, everything is fixable as long as you don’t drink. 

Every few years I fall in love, and when I do I think about my friends, many of them, who’ve been with the same person for decades. I wonder if we’ve all learned the same things, and it seems like we have — they’ve just learned them all with the same person, and I’ve learned each of them with a different person. I want to start learning many things with the same person, living in the same place, being together, living together, living our life together. The person who moved into 12 St Johns place is both the same person who just moved into the place where I live now, and someone I can barely recognize. One day I’ll know with certainty what I am doing now but for right now I think I’ll just do it. 

12 St Johns Place is at 12 St Johns Place, Brooklyn

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