"Kristen Crying"

Here's a true story from my past. I've changed some names, but everything else is true. Enjoy.

One night in the fall of 1996, I sat with Kristen, an ex-girlfriend of mine, in a Dunkin' Donuts and held her hand as she cried. It was weird because Kristen never cried. In fact, Kristen had always told me and several other friends that she and I had in common that she hadn’t even cried when her mother died. Kristen's mother had had breast cancer and we would always ask her, “Kristen, how is it that you didn’t even cry when your mother died?” and Kristen would always answer, “I just didn’t. What do you want me to tell you?” But now here Kristen was, at a booth in a Dunkin' Donuts on Long Island, resting her head on her forearm so I couldn’t see her face, crying. I was sitting across from her holding her hand, but she wouldn’t look at me, nor would she talk with me.

A few months prior, I would have been ecstatic if Kristen would have allowed me to have such intimate contact with her. I had dated Kristen for a brief period in the winter of 1996. I had really, really liked Kristen. She had beautiful eyes, cat eyes, and I had really liked her sarcastic manner. But then only four weeks into our relationship, a mutual friend called me up to say that Kristen wanted to break up with me. This mutual friend, Jessica, said that Kristen felt compelled to end things because one of Kristen's friends, a girl I also knew, had had a crush on me for a long time and had never been comfortable with Kristen's and my relationship.

The excuse sounded like bullshit, but there was nothing I could do. I remember meeting up with Jessica and Kristen a few hours after Jessica delivered the bad news and crying into Jessica's shoulder as Kristen stood nearby.

In the months after the break up, Kristen and I remained in contact. Actually, we remained friends. But the type of friendship that developed after the split was a strange one, as it soon became evident that I was willing to do anything for Kristen. In fact, during the summer of 1996, Kristen's wish was my command. If she’d say, “Jump,” I’d said, “How high?” If she wanted a pack of cigarettes, I'd buy her two or three packs. Sometimes, she would bring me over to a group of her girlfriends and would show them -- literally show them -- the type of power that she had over me. She would say to them, “Chad, tie my shoes” and like a good, trained monkey, I would. The friends would often ask me, right in front of her, “How could you do that, Chad? How could you let her treat you that way?” I didn’t really have an answer. I wanted Kristen and only Kristen.

But then the new school year started. I was a freshman in my local high school that September, and a few weeks after classes commenced, I got to know a girl, a senior named Mona. Mona was a super popular girl who actually drove a BMW convertible to school. As luck would have it -- and, really, it must have been luck or something -- Mona had had a big crush on me. When Mona and I began dating in late September, most of my friends couldn’t believe it. (Even I couldn’t believe it.) But Mona and I were a couple.

It didn't take long, though, for Kristen to get wind of my new relationship. See, Kristen and I didn't go to the same high school -- she went to school in Queens -- but we still had many of the same friends, and it wasn’t long before she learned that I was with someone else -- and an awesome someone else.

Still, because Kristen never hinted that she still had feelings for me, I didn’t think she cared about my relationship with Mona. I was so convinced of that, in fact, that as she sat there in that Dunkin' Donuts booth that night, I was sure that she was crying about her mother. I wasn’t positive about the date of her mother's death, but I'd thought that the anniversary was soon approaching or had recently passed. I never got a word out of Kristen that night. I only got her holding, and sometimes squeezing, my hand.

Then, a couple weeks later, I was on the phone with Jess, the girl who had told me about Kristen's wish to break up, when I asked her what had been wrong with Kristen in Dunkin' Donuts that night.

"What do you mean?" Jess said.

“Well, she was crying all night the other night,” I said.

“You mean at the Dunkin' Donuts?”

“Yeah. Was it the anniversary of her mother’s death or something?”

“Chad, what are you talking about?”

“What do you mean, ‘What am I talking about?’ She was crying because of something with her mom, right?

“Chad, she was crying because of you. She was crying because you’re with Mona now; you’re gone.”

To this day I think back to this story with Kristen whenever I think about how hard it is to truly know someone.