second loss

the story of Phil is in an interesting one in itself. i met him in October 1990 at a halloween dance sponsored by a catholic grade school. that should tell you something right there. i went with my friend, Kristin. i don't know if we knew that people we knew were going to be there (it wasn't our school) or if we just went because it was better than being in the house, but we went and saw a classmate of ours there, andy. he was with this other boy i had never seen before. he was dressed as a Marine. yes, it is true what they say. chicks dig men in uniform. i think i may have mentioned the he was cute, so, being in high school, kristin and andy conspired to get me and this mystery boy to dance together. it was awkward, yet cute. we all chatted after that and after the dance, we went our separate ways.

i think he asked andy for my number, who then contacted kristin for my number, who then gave it to phil. a few days after the dance, kristin and i were walking down her street when this beat up grand am pulls up next to us. it was andy and phil. i remember the passenger side door being bashed in, so phil had to get out through the window. it was nice to have someone pay attention to me. turns out he actually went to school with me, but i had never seen him before. i was, of course, dating someone else at the time, but that didn't seem to slow phil down any. he was soon calling me and hanging out with me. he was a rebel, with his ears pierced, skater haircut, absent parents. he smoked and hung out with the group of kids we kindly referred to as the "burnouts." he was the polar opposite of my current boyfriend. he was funny, goofy, passionate, moody, impulsive.

it was a hard road during my junior year. i didn't know how to break up with my current boyfriend (because i'm a huge pussy when it comes to stuff like that), so i went with him to all of the dances and social functions and just pined for phil in the background. rumors started going around about phil and i and it finally started to wear my boyfriend down. eventually, we broke up at the end of the school year. i started dating phil right away. but something wasn't right. something had changed.

i don't know if he didn't trust me anymore or if he had just given up hope and couldn't get it back. but he wasn't as attentive. he spent more time with his friends. he started smoking pot every day, three times a day. he started dropping acid. we hardly did anything by ourselves, it was always with him and his group of friends. he never tried anymore. i was background noise. the chase was over, he had won and now he didn't know what to do. or didn't care.

a year after we officially started dating, i ended it. i don't think he really gave much thought to it. i didn't see him much after that. we graduated from high school (well, i did. he failed some class, so he had to take summer school) and we went our separate ways. i saw him once over the summer and then i went to college. i heard through the grapevine that he joined the Air Force, got married, lived in AZ. good for him.

fast-forward to 2001.

out of the AF, divorced, and fresh from rehab, phil walks back into my life like a ghost from the past. he is amazingly tattooed, still smokes, still looks exactly the same. we start talking. and we don't stop.

he lived in a halfway house. he had not wanted to go back to his previous apartment because his friends (haha, same ones from HS) still were doing drugs and drinking and he didn't want to go back to that. i was proud of him for finally getting his shit together. i begged him continuously when we were 18 for him to stop doing that shit, to stop hanging out with his enablers. he just wasn't ready. so, now he's clean and he knows he's not ready for a relationship. shit, that's the first thing they tell you when you get out of rehab. i told him this. but things got heavy quickly. we already knew each other, so we didn't have that crappy getting-to-know-you stage. i told him as long as he focused on himself and got better, then it would work.

he started having a hard time with his curfew. he also couldn't find a job. he didn't have a car. he hated being away from me and he couldn't keep his room in the halfway house and spend the night. he is not a patient soul, so soon he was being asked not to come back to the house. he came to stay with me, which i wasn't too pleased about. he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing. but he was also cleaning, cooking, doing dishes and laundry. and i was nice to have a live-in boyfriend, which i had never had before. but it bothered me that it happened so fast. we got in touch around the middle of September. it was now October.

i remember going to the doctor to talk about getting a varicella shot. my friends were starting to have kids and i had never had the chicken pox before, so i thought why not? the catch was you couldn't get the shot if you were pregnant. i told them of course i wasn't pregnant. i still had to pee in a cup. 20 minutes later, she comes back. "you're pregnant." excuse me? when was the last time you had your period? oh, hell, i don't know. flashback to 1997. shit.

on the way home from the train, i run into phil, who was going to an AA meeting. i was going to wait to tell him, but i just couldn't. right there, in the middle of fullerton ave, i told him i was pregnant. and he just about jumped for joy. meanwhile, i was terrified. get this thing out of me. right. now. was what i was thinking. i have a boyfriend with no job who is so fresh out of rehab he can still taste the withdrawal. i make about $32k and lived in a 2 bedroom, but i had never wanted kids. i also didn't want to raise this child alone, and i could totally see phil being a "when i want to" kind of father. he tended to take his women for granted. i told him all of these things and i made the appointment at Planned Parenthood.

i guess my healthcare would have covered a sedated abortion, but i would have to wait until after the new year. i just couldn't wait. i don't know what my problem was. i had brainwashed myself into thinking that i was NEVER going to have kids and i certainly couldn't look like a fraud. i was 27 with a good job, a guy who loved me, a two-bedroom apartment in lincoln park... i certainly could have made it work. but all i could see was the bad side: getting fat, having to do almost all of the work, losing any momentum in my career. hardly any of my other friends had kids, either. i certainly didn't want to be a pioneer.

december 15. it was a saturday. i don't remember phil's attitude before the appointment, but we had a huge row and told him to get out. he left. i went to appointment with kristin. it was the worst thing i ever had to do ever. ever. i went home, curled up on the couch and waited for phil to call to see how i was doing. the call never came.

turns out he never wanted me to get an abortion. i guess it's hard to talk to someone about something that huge when you know how dead-set against it they are. my mind was closed. i still remember getting the ultrasound and seeing it on the screen. at PP, they have the screen behind your head instead of next to or in front. she asked, "do you want to see?" but i had already turned around to look. there it was. a little, tiny bean of a thing. and i just didn't care.

12 years later, i do care. hindsight sucks.

our relationship didn't end there. we went on to date for almost three more years.