When love has gone in a relationship, letting go is often harder than the prior period of giving in to the passions of falling in love. The situation becomes more complicated when only one party in the relationship falls out of love while the other remains reeling and lost in the emotion. While the truth remains untold, the urge to come out clean becomes the dilemma of the one who already wants out of the relationship. However, when the truth does come out, it could cause unbearable pain to the aggrieved partner and, therefore, plaguing the offender with guilt. It is hard to stay in a relationship when you do not love the other person, anymore; yet, it is equally painful to initiate a break-up. This struggle between getting away and staying in a relationship where one does not want to be involved in anymore is explored in Luisa Lopez’s poem, “Junior Year Abroad”.
The poem is structured like an interior monologue of a woman who finds that she does not anymore love the old boyfriend sleeping beside her in bed. They have kept a long distance relationship. He comes from another country or a place far from Paris where the girl goes to school, in that he has to travel by plane just to see her. They agreed “the summer before” (2) that he was going to visit and keep her “company at Christmas.” (3) However, that night, while “the invited man snored beside” (12) her, complacent and confident of the relationship, she could not sleep, bothered by the self-knowledge that she does not love him anymore. She tried to pretend to be as “perky as a circus pony (15)” upon meeting him earlier at the airport. But on their very first night together, she feels “betrayal” (18) instead of affection. The reason for this change of heart is revealed to be “a new boy” (22) she has met just a month ago. Of course, in fairness to the female speaker, she tried to resist the new boy; but she could not deny the attraction so she allowed herself to be carried away with the growing emotion.
The betrayal that happens in the narrative of the poem, however, is not just on the part of the speaker to her boyfriend. It is also a betrayal of the speaker upon herself. While she does not love the old boyfriend anymore, she is there in the room with him, pretending that all is well. She does not prevent his coming when he could have told him a story or any excuse to detain him and kept him from flying to spend the holidays with her. She meets him at the airport with a put-on excitement on her face. Then, she invites him into her bed. She betrays her own self by being dishonest to the old boyfriend and keeping him hanging in hope. Since the truth behind one’s feelings could not be denied in the intimacy of a common bed, she is simply forced to “move away and hold the sheet against (herself)” (32) although she also knows that she could not keep doing this the whole night, and the succeeding nights thereafter, because the boy expects her to be involved in the relationship, sharing the same romantic feelings. The result of this self-deception is a sense of loneliness upon the speaker. She could neither be with her new boyfriend much as she would like to, nor could she enjoy the company of her old boyfriend even if they are already sharing the same bed.
The internal conflict and tension in the speaker is played out not only in the poem’s meaning but most notably in the manner by which the poet narrates the situation and the metaphors to describe the woman’s feelings. The subject is common not only in real-life but even in numerous poems, but Lopez’s imageries make the treatment of the subject unique and interesting to think about. The speaker compares her love that died to an expired “shelf life” (4), connotative of how young people treat relationships: like products with expiration dates. When she meets him at the airport, she is as “perky as a circus pony” (15), recalling upon the reader’s minds the image of an animal that may have been forced against its will to perform regularly to a paying audience. In bed with him, meanwhile, evokes “nightmares of flood and dying birds” (19-20), the hyperbolic metaphors making the experience as displeasing as possible, even horrifying, to the reader’s perception.
Finally, the line “together alone” (7) is distinct for its placement in the poem: two words set off as a stanza in itself. The words both express, figuratively and literally, the speaker’s feeling about being trapped in her kind of dilemma. The two words beside each other are like her and her old boyfriend, together in one bed; yet, at the same time, the coupling is as oxymoronic as her situation. They are together in bed but not bonded by a singular feeling. As a result, she feels separated from him. She reiterates this, as a sort of confirmation, when she begins the next stanza by declaring that “Certainly I was alone” (9) and further emphasizes her detachment from him by describing it as being “inside dark hair, inside foreign blankets, against white sheets swirling like a cocoon” (8-9).
The experience of being torn between two loves—the old lover whom you do not love anymore but who continues to love you, and the new lover whom you want to love fully but cannot because you still have to settle things with the old beau—is familiar to most especially to young people. In the peak of their lives, with the future just starting to unfold before them, the story of the junior year student in the poem is typical. The final line provides a climax to the tension present all throughout the lines of the piece:
“He made a journey. I offered a welcome
Why should he give me up?” (37-38)
Ultimately, the speaker realizes the kind of power that her boyfriend holds over her at that moment. He flew just to be with her for the holidays. She did not give him a clue about anything being amiss. She even welcomes him into her bed. She cannot simply reject him right then. For all her hesitation, and the fact that she does not love her anymore, she cannot refuse him because she is the betrayer of the moment. Maybe after the holidays, when he goes back home, she can start being honest with herself and break things to him gently.
Work Cited
Lopez, Luisa. “Junior Year Abroad.”
