Hair Ties
Opening up about one of the topics I feel the strongest about, yet is the absolute hardest to write: my first love.
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This is the story I haven’t been wanting to write. This is the story of my first love. Who is now my ex.
I’ve picked up and put down the figurative pen on this story many times, mostly because it’s a box I don’t want to open. But as a writer on this platform, I don’t dream up stories in my head before I start writing them down. This form of expression is a free outpouring of whatever is currently weighing on my heart and mind. I know this story will continue to chew at me until I finally get it all out. So here’s a little bit of our story. This is a longer one, so maybe settle in for the evening with your favorite warm beverage (and a tissue, if you’re an easy crier like me).
I had spent most of my adolescent years almost completely free from the experiences of romantic love and partnership. I was close with my family, confided in my parents, and had a wonderful, steady group of girlfriends. While I was never the prettiest one of my friends who was usually hand-picked by the attractive boys in my teenage years, I wasn’t necessarily seeking them out either. I never had a middle school or a high school boyfriend. I had crushes, sure, but mostly as people that sparked temporary interest or excitement; not anyone I would consider seriously becoming a partner with in life.
My real love in life was my passion for art. I consider myself lucky that I discovered what I loved to do organically, at an early age. I started reading at the age of four and writing shortly after. I joined theater, led an improv comedy group in high school, and served as managing editor of the school paper. I found opportunities to publish my writing. I was sure of what I wanted to pursue in college, and with plans of moving across the country to New York for school, I didn’t see a point in dragging along a teenage boy who would get in the way.
I also seemingly couldn’t understand my friends who jumped from relationship to relationship, desperately finding someone to cling to through the hell that is growing up in school amongst your peers. People definitely found soulmates and high school sweethearts in these relationships, but I barely knew myself well enough to comprehend starting to share my life with someone else.
I always had a wonderful family and quality friends to lean on, but I also became great at being alone. It was fine that I wasn’t the pretty or most attractive one in my friend group; I could be the interesting one. I focused on my dream of moving to New York City. Once I got there, the independence continued. My confidence skyrocketed, I felt attractive, and I had men in my life. But they were never boyfriends. They were hobbies; different things to do, like a new restaurant to try in Greenpoint or a pottery class in the Lower East Side. Never more.
I attracted artistic, interesting, eclectic men, many of whom made music, wrote books, and had interests that brought them closer to the world. Some of them wonderful — but I kept them all at arm’s length. Trying to analyze my behavior at the time, I know that I wasn’t doing this consciously. It came in subtle forms: only revealing surface-level information about myself, prioritizing novel experiences over the simplicity of truly getting to know someone, then disappearing after a few encounters. I wanted love, connection, and a partnership, but I was enjoying experimentation too much at the time. I loved what I was studying at university, landed prestigious internships and had a varied social life in places and with people that shared my passions. One thing I do consider myself lucky for is that I never based my sense of self worth or confidence on the attention or validation of men. I never felt insecure being single, because I had also never been in a relationship. By this time, I had years of experience being single. If you never invest feelings in anyone, you’ll never get hurt. Perhaps a tiny part of it was that the teenager inside of me still harbored the same fear that I wasn’t attractive enough, smart enough or responsible enough to be ‘selected’ as a serious partner. These were the sophomoric thoughts of a 20-year-old.
It’s a cliché, but my first love, who I’ll refer to as ‘J’, came into my life when attracting a partner was the furthest thing on my mind. I was in the best shape of my life, held a stable and well-paying job, lived with my four close friends in a spacious apartment in Clinton Hill, and felt fulfilled. Of course nothing is perfect, but it was pretty good. I didn’t need or necessarily even want to add anyone to the equation. I didn’t know how deeply he would change me, or how much I needed his love, because I hadn’t experienced it yet.
J had a soft spoken and gentle nature that quietly chipped away at the walls I had built around my heart. He was sweet, and he seemed to compliment everything I was not. It was the kind of all-encompassing, free-falling kind of love that moved so rapidly, I didn’t even know how far I had jumped. He was a wonderful listener and took each and every one of my faults with stride, never with judgment. J accepted my faults as much as he celebrated my strengths.
A natural homebody and someone who didn’t grow up with a lot, he was an expert at making any ordinary space, environment or day at home seem like a novel adventure. That was one of the things I loved most about him: the little world he built for us. He never let himself feel like he didn’t have enough, which was a quality I deeply admired in him. I remember a date in our second month of dating when we were deep into the pandemic. Restaurants were closed, so all of the dinners we had eaten together so far were cooked for each other, at home. One evening after some homemade butter chicken, I told him that I missed listening to music, and I missed dancing. He looked around the apartment with a curiosity, as if a nightclub was going to appear from a corner. He grabbed a blanket, two champagne glasses and a speaker and led me out of the apartment, up the ladder to the roof. He spread the blanket, poured us some wine and told me to take my shoes off. He wrapped his arms around my waist and swung me around until I started to laugh, our feet rhythmically bumping on top of the blanket to the Soul For Real song he had put on.
As we danced and smiled, we suddenly heard noise from a neighboring apartment’s backyard. It looked like a family, enjoying dinner in their backyard with some twinkling lights—creating the togetherness we were lacking during the pandemic. Seemingly inspired by J’s idea, they turned on music as well as starting swaying to the beat. They had powerful speakers that really made it sound like we were on a rooftop party somewhere, and a woman in the family waved her arm, as if to say, “Join us.” J and I smiled at the family and they beamed back at us. Two groups of people, strangers to each other, dancing together on our respective roofs. J and I ended the evening by looking at the city skyline and he told me he was grateful for this beautiful view, and then I laid on his chest while we gazed at the stars. I still smile thinking about that memory. It was the best date I had ever been on.
When he used my laptop for work one afternoon while I was out of the apartment, he found some old artist interviews I had published years ago. When I came home that evening, he spent an hour praising me on how beautiful my writing was. I remember thinking, “You actually read that?” I had a supportive family, sure, and good friends, but even they could not be expected to read every single story I was publishing. No one had ever shown such dedicated interest and investment in getting to know me before.
Bell Hooks famously writes in All About Love that love is attention. His intense level of attention to detail, and to me, culminates in one story that I always return to at the start of our relationship. It’s a memory we often talked about and reflected on fondly during the course of our three-year romance. When J used to ask me the moment I knew that I loved him, I used to recount this story.
About half a year into our relationship he started spending a fair amount of time with me in my apartment, namely because that was one of the few places we could spend time together during the pandemic. I am messy, he is clean, and that was something we often butted heads on. It was something we endearingly teased each other about, but never a glaring problem. J was the kind of neat where he almost found it difficult to relax when the apartment was messy. Although I mostly couldn’t care less, he always seemed to be fidgeting with something around the house, adjusting a picture frame, dusting a surface.
One evening I was cuddled in his warm embrace watching a movie, and I casually mentioned the universal female experience of buying a pack of a dozen hair ties and inevitably losing them in two days. We had become comfortable enough with each other to the point of not feeling self-conscious about any thought that came into my head, no matter how inconsequential. I told him how I got a pack of hair ties last week and couldn’t find most of them.
“Seriously? That’s so weird.”
“I can’t explain why it happens, but every woman will agree with me that it does. It’s super annoying. I can’t find my hair ties anywhere.”
He stroked my hair and we continued watching our film, forgetting about my seemingly inconsequential, throwaway comment.
I don’t know if this is a common feeling, or if it’s the thought of someone more lonely than the average person, but I feel like I’m not used to the people around me really paying attention to what I’m saying. Sure, my close friends and family make eye contact with me, lean in, and nod along to what I’m saying, but how much of a person’s undivided attention can we really expect, in this day and age? Most people are focused on themselves, so we are told, and have their own narratives constantly running in the back of their thoughts. We’re thinking about our to-do lists, our grocery shopping list, our errands for tomorrow or when we’re going to schedule that next appointment. Consciously or subconsciously, we are unable to be fully present in the moment and it has become increasingly more difficult to truly make someone feel like they’re the only person in the room.
That’s why J’s focused, unwavering attention on me felt so new and powerful. I wasn’t used to it yet. And as Bell Hooks and dozens of other perceptive scholars on love have written, attention is synonymous with love. Love is attention.
The next morning, we made breakfast with coffee for me, tea for him, and I headed off to work. He worked evenings, and told me he would stay behind in my apartment for a bit before leaving himself. I kissed him goodbye and returned through the front door hours later.
As soon as I entered my bedroom that night, the first thing I noticed was one of my old jewelry stands propped up against my dresser, where it never had been before. I couldn’t originally find a place for it, so I had tossed it into a drawer. But there it was, propped up against my mirror, with the arms of the stand outstretched in a unique way to hold the weight of at least four dozen hair ties. Almost 50 hair ties, picked attentively and patiently, peeled from underneath my pillowcases, the corners of my carpet, out of pockets of jeans, and the bottoms of my purses. Neatly lined up, stacked obviously so that they would be easy for me to use. I had voiced a small annoyance, and he had fixed it for me. Even more than that, he had remembered it and thought it important enough to take action on. I remember my chest swelling up and smiling at the thought of him dutifully collecting all my little black hair bands. When I saw him later that evening, I told him I loved him for the first time.
This was one of the simplest, yet fondest memories I have of our relationship. A gesture so small, yet an act so thoughtful. Throughout the years we dated, when we would share treasured moments we loved on birthdays, anniversaries, or just staying up late talking in bed, I often told him the moment I knew we were serious about each other was on this day. We called it ‘the hair tie story’. Later in the relationship, at times of tension or to break the ice after an argument, he would playfully place a hair tie in my palm. It never failed to make us smile.
I loved J wholly and completely. His soul, his kind heart, his melancholic, searching eyes and the sweet dimples that dot his smile. There are times I miss him so much that I wish I had never met him. I described it to one of my friends as the feeling of eating chocolate. If you don’t eat chocolate for the first 15 years of your life, you’ll never miss the taste — because you don’t know what it is. But once you experience that first bite, you can’t forget the taste of chocolate. You’ll want it again and again. You’ll remember how delicious it was. You’ll crave it. I started craving love and partnership only after I dated J, because I finally experienced how good it felt to have someone in your corner. On your side. Someone you love so fully and unconditionally it starts to fundamentally shift parts of yourself. Loving J meant I could love the other people in my life even more fully. Loving him expanded my heart. But now, it’s the size of a balloon and it has nowhere to go. Following our breakup, I desperately wanted to give that love to someone else.
The breakup was not a clean cut. I find that it rarely ever is. In the year and a half since I moved away from New York to create the greatest possible distance between us, there have been yearning text messages that turned into emotional phone calls, loving emails and letters written to each other on our birthdays, and then the inevitable painful communication that reminded us why we separated in the first place. Some messiness in between, but I can firmly say that it’s now been two years since he really was my boyfriend.
Although he’s not the first thing on my mind every morning, and memories of him are no longer intrusively invading my thoughts by the hour, I still think of him almost every day. Perhaps a day or two goes by in between. I think about how he’s doing, if he’s happy, if he’s feeling content in his life. But the thoughts of him are no longer a yearning, a desire to go backwards and relive the experiences we had. It’s turned into less of a heart-pulling intensity and more of a relative hum, and the feelings I experience most overwhelmingly are those of nostalgia. I look back at our adventures with fondness, care and love. A time in my life that I needed to experience but I am relieved I am no longer a part of. I choose to see my relationships this way. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism, but it’s never served me to look back at the ones who have wronged me with negative feelings. Close friendships have ended, strong bonds have been broken, and my heart has been torn. But the only way I can reconcile those feelings is by actively choosing to remember the good parts. To remember why I loved this person, and what this person loving me did for my soul.
This is the way I now think of my memories with him. My heart is swelling like a balloon writing this, yet I wear a smile on my face and let out a breath of contentment, because I’m happy that it happened. I think of all the walks we took around the parks in Brooklyn through the city’s changing seasons. How it felt when he used to hold my hand, kiss my cheek, or the warming sound of his giggle, the taste of his Trinidadian cooking. Our favorite Italian pizza shop in Crown Heights, our favorite movie theater in the East Village, the street corner where he first told me he loved me, all the paths we ran through together. The city is painted with our story. I’m happy these memories are a part of me, that I knew such a tender and encompassing love at a time when I needed a friend the most. As confident as I am that I loved him fully, I am equally sure that we should no longer be a part of each other’s futures.
One of my favorite columns of all time, “Modern Love” is published in the New York Times, telling people’s real stories of platonic, romantic, familial, and friendship love. They made a wonderful rendition of the column in a video series titled “Modern Love”, in which there’s a line that continues to stick with me:
“Sometimes you realize that true love in its absolute form has many purposes in life. It's not actually just about bringing babies into the world or romance or soul mates or even lifelong companionship. The love we had in our past, unfinished, untested, lost love, seems so easy, so childish to those of us who choose to settle down. But, actually, it's the purest, most concentrated stuff.
I like to look at the loves in my life in this way, even if they are not a part of my life now. I thank J for showing me what unconditional love could be, true partnership could be, and for loving the parts of myself that I had forgotten. When I feel proud of something I’ve written, a tiny part of me thinks that he would be proud too. I carry his confidence in me in my heart, even if I no longer tangibly hear the regular reassurance. Whenever I start to hate the picture in the mirror, and find reasons why I can’t stand by two big front teeth, I remember that they were J’s favorite feature. So many people I love, including J, love my smile.
I think that’s what the great loves in our life do for us. Even if they’re not the ones we end up spending the rest of our lives with, they change us in ways immeasurable and unspoken. If we’re lucky, they sweeten our tea with a little bit of sugar before parting ways. They remind us why we should keep going when we feel like giving up on ourselves. Perhaps it’s painful at first, but the songs you share together, the streets you walk together, the foods you love together, become sweet stickers in the scraps that end up bookmarking your life. I feel lucky to have loved J, and that J loved me, and I hope I continue to feel that way.
I moved away; from him, and from my life in the East Coast. Remnants of our memories are tucked away in boxes scattered around my home in California. And in my room, I now also have a designated container for hair ties.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read this, and the time you are giving to support independent writers. If this piece moved you or made you think, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or directly at anbhanot@gmail.com. Dialogue is what makes this community so valuable. I hope to see you again.