I still met with Jordan Catalano that Friday night. I figured that, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t never fully understand who I am as a person or how I felt about anything ever again as Jordan Catalano may just be the core of my experience as human in this incarnation, if there is such thing as incarnations. To be fair, I also assume it’s not often that someone you broke up with over 20 years ago shows up out of the blue in your life precisely in a moment when you had been thinking about them. It felt… extramundane – in a way – and irrefusable.
Nothing happened, though everything happened.
We talked for hours about life and us. It was like traveling in a time machine to the inside of my soul… to a place where all my feelings were totally exposed in glass shelves and there was nothing I could use to cover them and stop him from seeing through me. We talked about who we had become and how we got here. He did not seem surprised with my choices. He remembered exactly the person I used to be and knew me even better than I did. It was undeniable that he knew my essence and I was surprised when he brought up elements of me I had completely forgotten about. And it was all true. Everything he said was true. I realized I hadn’t changed that much, though I was definitely not the same. Most of all, our conversation made me remember why I chose him when I was 15. I remembered everything that I loved about him. I remembered the songs he wrote, the words he couldn’t speak… and even the way he leaned against our high school locker, drowning in a level of teen angst only the 90’s could provide.
I thought I had grown into this mature adult who, if ever given the choice to do it all over again, would probably make smarter decisions regarding all things, specially Jordan Catalano, but, as I set there in front of him… I realized that was not true at all.
He told me about how he was never really capable of writing another hit song… which lead him to the life of a one-hit wonder … living in L.A. , performing the same song over and over again in random bars. The song he wrote about how he felt when we broke up made him famous for a minute and shaped his entire future. I had unarguably shaped his entire life.
Though we talked about many things, I never had the courage to ask him the actual question I had in my mind. How could I possibly, really? So I am still wondering what that would be. I wonder about the answer to that question back then and I also wonder about it now. What was I to you… and what am I to you, today, Jordan Catalano? What he says could damage me so deeply and in such irreversible ways I guess I am better-off wondering… at least for now.
As I set in my car and drove back home, I just missed him. I instantly missed him.
Angela Chase's diary 