Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
My first boyfriend broke up with me on a bus. On a city bus. It was the H4 bus, heading from some part of Washington, D.C. to another part of Washington, D.C. I’m not particularly good with directions, and to be honest, I don’t ever plan to be. I’m gay.
But that’s not the point. The point is that I was broken up with on a bus.
We had been dating for six months-ish, depending on who you ask. Embarrassingly, I was in love for the first time. And although we would continue having sex for the better part of another year, for all intents and purposes, this was the “end” of our “relationship.”
Pop culture would have you believe six months is a long time for a gay relationship, but I think this isn’t true. It’s a myth that stuck because somewhere between seven and 12 queer people on Twitter dot com dictate what life for gay people is actually like. “Six months? That’s half a decade in gay years!” a friend would yell over buy-one-get-one rail vodkas months later. At the time, maybe it felt like it. But now, an actual half-decade removed, I can definitively say it was absolutely just six months.
The reason he was breaking up with me, in his own words, is that I “wouldn’t make a good pastor’s wife.” I think he was trying to make a joke, but it didn’t land. Famously, he was and is a pastor. A man of the cloth, if you will, and they’re not exactly known for their humor.
Now, I feel like when I say pastor, people draw up images of someone who’s balding a bit and has calloused hands and bad breath but a sweet smile. Straight, married, maybe a kid in second grade. Depending on my mood, I would totally fuck that pastor. However, this wasn’t him. This pastor was a twink. An out and proud, gay little twink. For Jesus.
And this pastor twink, who yes, I met in church, back when I still went to church, told me that I wouldn’t make a good pastor’s wife, which is why he was breaking up with me.
First of all, that’s ridiculous, and second of all, it’s also probably correct. On one hand, I would’ve made an incredible pastor’s wife. I challenge you to find anyone who could do a better job organizing a bake sale or Easter egg hunt or Christmas pageant. I’m incredibly organized. I love telling people what to do. And if I’d had the slightest opportunity to dive head-first into any kind of interpersonal drama that might have been taking place between congregants, mama, I’d have been there. I was raised Catholic with a southern Baptist twist, shaken, not stirred. I was born for this.
On the other hand, I love to drink excessively, do drugs occasionally, smoke cigarettes (it’s bad, don’t do it!), and swear like I’m stuck in the second act of a ‘90s romantic comedy. Which, if you look at the evidence, are not disqualifying qualities for participation in religious life. Yet my flamboyant, profanity and tobacco-laden, vodka-soaked antics were, I guess, understandably (?) irreconcilable with the life my twink pastor saw himself leading. And, as such, I was kicked to the curb. Or, rather, the bus stop.
As the H4 hurtled down 14th street, stopping for everyone to hop off on their commute home, I sat in mostly silence next to my extremely recent ex-boyfriend, who kept patting my right leg while silent tears ran down my face. Space slowly began to clear on the bus, and as it did, the bench across from where we were sitting opened up, so I walked over to it, now sitting directly across from him in the back of the bus. I mainly moved because I wanted to get away from him, because he had just chosen to break up with me on a bus, but also because it felt dramatic and appropriate.
Myriad thoughts were running through my head in the moments after he broke up with me (while we were on a bus). Some are the ones you might expect and never wish to feel. There was a deep, deep sadness that draped over my entire body, pressed through my sweater, past my skin. That feeling that you are wrong and broken and unlovable. That I was ugly and that I didn’t deserve to be loved or touched or held or acknowledged or thought of or seen.
This was, truly, my first real relationship, my first real boyfriend. It was the first time in my life I’d woken up next to someone in bed. The first time I was woken up with a kiss and wished goodnight with one too. The first time I had someone to tell that I missed them, someone who also missed me back. It was the first time I held someone’s hand while we walked down the street, which was thrilling and also scary because we were two boys, and even in a city as blue as Washington, D.C., there are just some things that will always be a little terrifying (but I hope one day they won’t be).
It was only six months. And six months isn’t half a decade. But it was six months longer than I’d ever been with anyone before, and as it turns out, it was just long enough to start imagining endless six months in my future.
It was the first time for all of those things, and so it was also my first time losing them. And so, in the moments after I was broken up with on a bus, I thought about all of them, and I started to cry. And I pulled down my sunglasses to cover my eyes, and the next thing I thought was, “God, the people in this city don’t know how to fucking dress.” (The capital G is for him.) I looked around at the thinning crowd of commuters in pantsuits, sneakers, pleated khakis, and boat shoes. What a bunch of absolute losers. I adjusted my gaze to find my reflection in the window across from me on the bus that I was just broken up with on, and while I was staring past my newly ex-boyfriend into the window behind him, my very next thought was: This. Is. Incredible.
Gay people all over the world have spent their entire lives riding public transportation, listening to sad songs, staring out of windows, faux-emoting, pretending they’re in some kind of movie. It is a wonderful and longstanding bit of theater so many participate in. And here I was, actually living it.
Totally devastated. Absolutely broken. Entirely glamorous.
The drama of it all was almost like a kind of bliss. No longer was I pretending to be some kind of sad ingenue; I was the sad ingenue. A lifelong dream of mine had just been fulfilled. It was the worst moment of my life up until that point, and also, it was the greatest thing that could ever have happened to me. I’d ascended to my highest form. I had actually experienced the public breakup I’d always pretended to be part of.
My twink pastor boyfriend wasn’t breaking up with me over dinner in private in one of our apartments, or over text message, or God forbid over a phone call. It was on a city. bus. A city fucking bus. I knew, just then, at that moment while I was still crying, still in the absolute throes of feeling broken and hopeless and like I might die alone, that I was also living part of my history. There was, past some of that sadness, in the far recesses of my brain, a little portal that opened up and showed me a glimpse of a future scene.
I saw my future self. I was sitting with a new group of friends, and we were all talking about our first breakups, and I saw myself lean in and say, “Honey, get this — my first breakup was on a bus. A city bus.”
I would be a little drunk, probably on a patio somewhere, with a cigarette in my hand. I’d take a long drag and say, “That’s right, babe. My twink pastor boyfriend, the first love of my life, broke up with me on a fucking bus.”
And someone would refill my martini, and everyone would be laughing and apologizing on behalf of all first boyfriends that this was the way it had to happen to me. And I’d light another cigarette and take another sip, and we’d all keep laughing at my sad, sad, hilarious story. I knew then on the bus that it would become one of those tragic things people get to use later in life as a shield.
Or, more than a shield: a gown. Something pretty and fabulous to drape over yourself. Heartbreak, that once you're far enough away from, is just something deeply human, and usually a little melodramatic, that everyone will experience in some form. The world isn’t always set up (in fact, it is never set up) to make queer people feel like they are part of the society they exist in. But crying on a city bus made me feel like I belonged to this big, gross world, which is nice sometimes, even when it isn’t.
“Love, Us” is looking for readers to reach out about your queer love stories. Have a love letter to share or a story you’d like to tell? Send a note to loveussubmissions@gmail.com with all the details, in 500 words or less, and we might just be in touch.