the time i said 'i love you' for the first time ever

it involved a severed finger

I was twenty-three years old when I fell in love for the first time. His name was Roy (it wasn’t, but for the case of privacy and respect, let’s call him that) and for weeks I cried every time we had sex.

That meant it was love, right?

“I must have something in my eye!” I’d say afterwards, dramatically burying my face into his chest like Scarlett O’Hara.

“Honestly, I just chopped onions before you came over!” was another excuse I used.

“Am I doing something wrong?” he’d ask me, his face a mixture of horror and concern, as he laid underneath me.

“No, of course not,” I sniffled.

The truth is, I wasn’t sure what exactly I was feeling because I hadn’t felt anything like it before.

I was living in New York City at the time, a wide-eyed undergraduate from NYU, working as a waitress, living with a Scorpio roommate in Brooklyn, and awkwardly navigating my very first relationship. Roy was a bartender who poured drinks as smoothly as he charmed his way into my life. We met at a very famous West Village establishment where we were both hired on the same day, during one of those New York City treacherous downpours in June. It was my first job after graduating from college, and his first job since moving to the city from Houston with his best friends. Besides us both being Capricorns, on the outside, we couldn’t be more different.

He was a brash Texan with a quick smile who flirted as naturally as “y’all” slipped from his mouth. I was a quiet and quirky Canadian who hated small talk as the occasional “eh” slipped from mine. While Roy was tall, dark, and handsome, and therefore definitely my type according to my (short) list of crushes, both celebrity and normies, I wasn’t immediately attracted to him. For the longest time (which, in your twenties, is roughly a month) he was just Roy, this guy who wore tight t-shirts, which may or may not have been purposefully done to highlight his pierced nipples.

Then, one day, suddenly something switched.

I was waiting for my order of falafel to come up, and the next thing I know I’m staring into his chocolate brown eyes and thinking, “Oh, it’s you.”

That was it. From then on, I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but I always knew Roy was going to be someone special in my life.

Of course I kept this sacred knowledge to myself. I had no idea if he felt the same about me as he was very good at keeping his cards close to his pierced chest when it came to his personal life, as most charming men are. My being the inexperienced Bambi on ice, all limbs, no game, meant there was no way I was going to make the first move.

For weeks there were stolen glances and friendly banter as we waited for our food orders to come up, moments I clung to like saran wrap, and I found my crush growing despite the fact he proudly sported frosted tips. I convinced myself that whatever was meant to be, would be, and if my feeling was right about Roy, somehow, some way, we would find our way to each other.

And we did, a couple months later.

Me, at 23, in NYC and in love for the first time.

There are some moments in life you’ll never forget, and I’ll never forget that hot sticky night in August, walking out of a soiled bathroom at the raucous Hogs and Heifers bar in the Meatpacking District (RIP) after successfully not touching anything with my bare hands, only to look up and see Roy coming towards me. I softly smiled at him, thinking he was headed to use the facilities, and then before I knew it he was grabbing my face and kissing me for the first time.

It was electric, magical, and stupefying. Had he liked me back all this time? What did this mean? I had no data to draw from – no ex-boyfriends or even guys who had properly kissed me before. What do we do next? WHAT ARE WE?

Well, if you’re a pair of inexperienced and extremely vulnerable young twenty-somethings like we were, you avoid answering that question for another year. Instead we engaged in a push-pull dynamic that included multiple hookups, having sex once, and then not speaking to each other for months. We eventually made up, hooked up again, and even dated casually, only to break up weeks later. Then one summer day Roy took me to the Bronx Zoo, and before I knew it we were in a full-blown relationship and MySpace official. We were truly crazy about each other, spending as much time together as possible like all heart-eyed new couples do. When we weren’t waiting tables side-by-side, we were jogging in Prospect Park, disclosing our worst fears and deepest dreams underneath the covers, and enjoying hot animalistic sex.

Which brings me back to the sex crying.

It was becoming an issue. I didn’t know how to explain it to Roy. So when he called me the next day to make sure we were still “cool,” I chalked up my post-coital tears to my being in oxytocin overdrive.

“You...just make me happy,” I told him, which was true. “They’re tears of joy.”

“I’ve never made a girl cry tears of happiness before,” he said. Nor had I cried them before.

I knew I felt something different with Roy – something that made me question everything about what I understood about love and relationships.

In case it wasn’t obvious at this point, I was a late bloomer and a big old virgin before I met Roy. Up until our meeting, I believed that whenever I did fall in love, it would happen with the right guy, at the right time, and when it would happen, it would be big. Monumental. Life-changing. Romantic settings including votive candles, scattered rose petals, doves being released, and “Dreams” by the Cranberries blasting in the background– yes, movie love, or at the very least, a low-budget music video – but this is what I expected to happen. I always thought love would hit me like a ton of bricks and I would just know.

I know I loved when Roy rubbed my back at night. I know I loved it whenever he surprised me with grilled tuna fish sandwiches from my favorite diner. I know I loved how he listened to me like I was the most important person to ever say words. But was I in love with Roy? Was that the reason why I cried after sex? Or was I just a weeping heap of hormones? I didn’t have a clue.

It was a month later, in October, when the clarity I sought hit me not like a ton of bricks but with a loud “pop” instead. I felt – and heard it – as I was on the treadmill at my gym in Greenwich Village, easing into a slow jog. I immediately sank to the ground writhing in pain.

“Ooh. Yeah, you definitely dislocated your shoulder,” a trainer said to me after assessing my injury. “We’ll have to call an ambulance.”

A wave of panic washed over me. Other than spraining my ankle in the eighth grade, my limbs, and all other body parts, had perfectly stayed healthy and intact. Freaking out, I called Roy.

“A dislocated shoulder? That’s nothing! I had tons of those playing football,” he said to me. “Just pop it back in.”

“Pop it back in?!” I was not popping limbs back into place or traveling via ambulance for the first time alone. I hadn’t had a serious boyfriend before, but I knew enough that, besides having cool, ratty T-shirts to borrow from and surprising you with morning sex and coffee in bed, this was the sort of thing boyfriends did.

“I’ll be right there,” he said. And he was, holding my hand in the ambulance, scooping my tears away and doing whatever he could to help distract me from the pain.

Hours later, an intense (and probably very overworked) ER doctor informed me that I didn’t break any bones nor did I dislocate my shoulder. I had suffered some kind of obscure rhombus muscle tear, that, to this day I can’t even explain properly to any physiotherapist. He asked me if there was any reason for my back and shoulder muscles to be exceptionally tight.

“I’ve had a bad cough for a few months,” I said. “There’s a window in my apartment that’s stuck. It won’t close, so there’s a draft.” (I didn’t add that, despite our pleas, my roommate’s goofy boyfriend had insisted on opening it. Upon discovering it was indeed stuck – just like we knew it would be – he shrugged and took another chug of his purple Gatorade. Since then I’ve never trusted a guy from Buffalo).

The doctor turned to Roy: “You better shut that window for her.”

Armed with aspirin and a mission to close a hundred year old building’s window, we shuttled back to my apartment in Brooklyn, my left arm in a sling. I was still in my gym clothes, so Roy helped me take off my clothes before I jumped in the shower; he then went to work to unstick my window.

Under the warm water, I thought of the day’s events, of us, of him. How he called my mom to break the news to her and reassured her that I was in good hands, how he tried to make me laugh by making fun of my Celine Dion iPod playlist, how he delicately took my top off while he was undressing me and kept his eyes squarely on my face and not my breasts even though I knew he wanted to. Was this love?

if this park could talk…Roy and I had mannnyyy life-changing conversations here, including getting together and breaking up. Another story, perhaps.

I hopped out of the bathroom, a towel gingerly covering me, when I heard: “Babe! Babe! I closed it!” I looked to see Roy hovering underneath the windowsill, proudly showing his handiwork: he had indeed shut the annoyingly impossible double-paned window.

The next portion of the night reads like a terrible comedy sequence that I couldn’t make up even if I tried. No sooner did I manage to squeeze out, “Awesome—” when, somehow, someway, the top pane of the window became unstuck and slammed shut on his left hand.

Roy cried out, but I didn’t know the seriousness of what happened until he said, “Yep. I can see the bone. I can see the bone!”

The tip of his left middle finger had been severed.

Panicking, I hurriedly pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a sweater without a bra or underwear, shouting, “Hold it above your heart! Hold it above your heart!” because that’s the only thing I remembered from my high school first aid class. I clumsily rushed to the window, attempting to lift it with my one good arm, so I could retrieve his finger tip because I remembered from watching a lot of Clooney-era “ER” that you needed to put severed limbs on ice “stat.”

After a few lame attempts and lots of grunting and cries of, “Come on! Almost!” in which I was nowhere close to almost opening the window or being of any real help whatsoever, Roy finally told me to forget it.

“We’ll have to leave it,” he said, looking wistfully at his finger stub lying precariously on the window ledge, looking eerily like a chewed off baby carrot.

“I’ll call 911!” I cried, desperate to be of some use despite being one appendage down. I frantically reached for my cell phone (a flip phone in those days) to call 911 but Roy stopped me because he didn’t want to go to a Brooklyn hospital.

“No, let’s go back to Manhattan,” he said. This was the early aughts. Brooklyn had a different reputation back then.

Respecting the fact he wanted his finger tip to receive the best possible care in the Tri-borough area, I called a cab instead. Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the exact same hospital we had just left only two hours before, entering the same ER, sitting in the exact two seats at triage, seeing the same intense and overworked ER doctor walk by us. The doctor pulled a classic double take when he spotted us.

“What are you two doing back here?”

Roy raised his maimed hand. “Remember that window you told me to close? Well, I closed it.”

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.