I just need to have a picture of me uploaded onto my own webspace for Asylum, and it’s easier to do this way than to try to remember my FTP login info. If you’re getting this via an RSS reader, ignore it, please.

JUST RELEASED – Six Additional Seats – Saturday, September 12th – 8pm (East Austin)

Jennymarie put together the official flyer today.

It’s always a little bit weird to see things materialize. This started, like most things tend to, as a discussion at the kitchen table. Just a little earlier this summer, too. And now it’s something tangible – or, at least, as tangible as things get on the Internet – that a good number of fairly remarkable people have invested themselves in, contributed to, and transformed into something I had only hoped to see.

There’ll be time to thank everyone properly later, but one should go to Jennymarie for donating her prodigious talent as a designer to this flyer, as well as Erica Nix, whom everyone should hire to take pictures for every occasion, for shooting the publicity shots.

Like most members of my generation, I’m ashamed of sincerity, so I won’t go on, but I really am so proud to be a part of this.

I was nineteen and still living with my parents, and I started getting letters placed in the mailbox, sealed with dark red candlewax. They were from the girl.

I never wanted to open them, but I did, because it hadn’t been going on long enough for me to not open them. At nineteen, getting letters sealed with wax and your name written out in her best handwriting – Daniel in a cursive script, even though she never called you that when you were together – is still too novel to dismiss. (I say as if now I’m so bored with women offering such things I discard them like magazine renewal subscriptions.)

Inside the envelope would usually be something small I had left at her house, or some reference to an inside joke between us, as well as a handwritten letter explaining the agony of being without me. It did little to abate my growing teenage ego, as I discovered that many of the things that I had attributed to my failures with women when I was younger were actually appealing to a certain kind of girl.

I’ll admit it. I kind of loved it. I would have loved it more if I hadn’t been handed the letters each morning they arrived by my dad. (They were never mailed, always placed in the box overnight.) I would have loved it even more if each one hadn’t been accompanied by several pages – also handwritten – from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

“Speak to us of love,”… the first one started, before the titular Prophet rained down what she took as wisdom with his trite aphorisms. Subsequent ones were drawn from the other entries – “Reason and Passion”. “Joy and Sorrow”. “Pain”.

There were phone calls, too, lots of them. I was working for a local magazine, writing a weekly column. I was not very mature and had published one all about Christina Aguilera’s midriff (this was 1999), onto which I wished to ejaculate. She called me the day it ran.

“You used to love when I wore that shirt I wore,” she began, and I told her not to call me at work anymore.

And all of this makes her sound like she’s the crazy one, but there’s a part I’d become accustomed to leaving out when I would tell this story. (It’s been many years since I told this story.) The part that I would leave out is that I made her break up with me.

It was my fault, really, and her reaction was the reaction of a person who was tricked and didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t ready to break up with her. I didn’t know how, and I thought much too highly of myself to just end the relationship, because I decided that I’d be devastating her, or whatever bullshit I had come up with to excuse the fact that I was scared. So instead, I sat through painful conversation after painful conversation in one awful week, gently hinting that it wasn’t working, but responding to every question she asked to get to the heart of the matter passive-aggressively. Eventually, tired of the way things were playing out, she asked if it was worth trying anymore. I said something real cool like, “I dunno”, and she said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

And so I was off the hook, and she was left feeling like she had chosen something that she hadn’t wanted. No wonder she thought the Gibran and the phone calls at work suggesting that she’d be delighted to allow me to put semen on her stomach would be well-received. I’d tricked her into doing the dirty work.

I was in a very heart wrenching, crying all night all the time kind of relationship, and I knew that I only had a small window of opportunity to get out of it before my will left me completely. I launched the first assault as we sat on my balcony for that evening’s poetry reading session. These sessions consisted of him reading poems from his favorite poet in his favorite poet’s exact voice while I lapsed into what he must have thought was adoring silence. He probably didn’t notice at all, except to get angry when I tried to gently suggest that perhaps I would like to read a poem. My poets weren’t as good, my reading was terrible and the whole thing usually devolved into a screaming argument.

That night, however, he hurled my favorite stuffed animal to the floor in a fit of childish rage and although I had not been able to look out for my own happiness, self-interest or needs for the past two years, the sight of my favorite childhood friend crumpled on the floor finally snapped something loose inside me. “Hell naw,” I thought, “that is so not on.” So I told him we were over but like most things I said, he brushed this away as something stupid. I said it again. And again and again and again and again until he kind of believed me. He burst into wails, the kind a two year emits at the store, the kind of blubbering, hyperventilating squalls that make you want to kill whatever is making that godawful sound. This did not elicit any sympathy from me but after two hours of it (in which he did not pass out, as I was hoping), I relented for the evening. My ears were too sore and he would. not. leave.

The next night (no poetry this final night), I lauched a clever counteroffensive. I don’t remember the exact words, but I’ll reconstruct the conversation for the readers’ benefit.

Me: We can’t be together.

Him: (Indrawn breath, the beginning of tears on his part.) Why not?

Me: I’m gay. Sorry.

Him: (Immediate subsiding of tears.) Really?

Me: Yeah.

Him: That’s kind of what I thought.

Me: Huh? I mean – yeah. Gay.

Him: I’m so glad that you’ve figure that out about yourself. It must have been so hard for you. I’m honored to be the first person you told.

Me: Um… good.

Him: But if you ever, you know, if you ever go back to men again – I’ll still be here.

Me: Right. Definitely.

Him: We can give it another shot.

Me: Yep. Okay.

He was full of warmth and understanding after that. So much so that I wondered if maybe I was gay. I had to believe it pretty hard for him to buy it. I half heartedly posted a woman-seeking-woman personal ad in the week that followed and wondered what in the hell was going on. The facade broke as soon as I told my best friend about, who laughed and laughed. Once my ex was firmly out of my life, I told him that I was not actually gay. I ran away before he could cry again.

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you haven’t. Cool – There are all kinds of break-ups. Some are bad, the painful kind that you dread being asked about by friends who haven’t seen you since before it happened, the ones that are going to be met with shocked looks like, “Oh, shit, I never thought it’d happen to you!”, so instead of just dealing with the pain of the break-up, you also have to know that you let your friend down. Others are kind of funny, like the one about the dude who refused to accept that his girlfriend could possibly be breaking up with him for any of the reasons that she listed, and so she had to tell him that she was a secret lesbian, at which point he shook her hand and wished them both the best of luck with the ladies. It doesn’t matter which kind it was – break-ups suck. Even the most callous among us dread them, no matter which side of the equation we fall on.

But they are fun to talk about. After the fact, anyway, and sometimes it takes a while. Even the girl who had to tell her boyfriend she was gay before he’d accept that it was over – at the time, that probably felt like the most appalling she had ever done. In 2009, the time that I woke up next to a note that said, “Joined the Air Force, drop off my things at my dad’s house” instead of the live-in girlfriend I expected to see – that’s kind of funny. In 2001, it was the worst thing there was.

We’ve all got our stories, though. And after the relationships are done, the feelings are dried up and we’re left wondering why we cared so much, all we’ve got are the stories. The things we did or the things that were done to us. The things we shouted or the time someone sent us an eleven page email that ended with the words, “No one else will ever love you.”

Good or bad, let’s share them here. Send them to breakups@nooneelsewilleverloveyou.com and they’ll appear on the site. You can be anonymous, or not. The worst break-up – or maybe the best, depending on your perspective – gets a free pair of tickets opening weekend^[‡]. All of them get posted. The relationships are over, but the stories are forever. Let’s share them.

Jennymarie Jemison, who stars as Nora, designed a rough flyer for her blog. The gratuitously talented photographer Erica Nix is taking publicity shots this week, and the poster will follow, but I like this as a teaser.

As we’re still in the midst of the rehearsal process, I have no idea at this point if directing theater will be something I revisit in the future. It’s nothing I’d considered doing in the past. But the role of the critic isn’t meant to be a one-way conduit of opinion – it’s to create a dialogue between the theater-makers and the theater audience. In an attempt to broaden that dialogue, I’ve also invited the director of every play that I’ve reviewed in 2009 to review No One Else Will Ever Love You. All reviews will appear on Austinist.com in the theater criticism section. I expect that I’ll learn as much from them about the role of the critic as I will the role of the director, and I’m looking forward to the process.

–dan solomon