Chapter 25 Chanel
Chanel
The worst thing about heartbreak is how spectacularly predictable it is.
You know exactly what’s coming. You know, and yet you’re powerless to stop it, a bystander in your own disaster, frozen to
the spot as the train tears off its tracks, as the avalanche crushes everything in its path, as the meteor falls and sets
the city ablaze. Every piece of advice I’ve ever given to my friends comes back around to point and laugh in my face. “If
he’s not willing to do this for you,” I recall a younger and wiser version of myself saying, my heart carefully tucked away, “he isn’t worth it. Don’t cry over
him. Don’t bother texting him. There’s no point getting upset.”
As if it’s that easy, that logical.
I do cry over him.
It feels like I’m grieving, but the person is dead to me by his own volition, and somehow that’s worse. When I drag myself
out of bed the next morning, the tears spill faster than I can reapply my mascara.
I give up after the fourth try, wiping angrily at the black clumps on my lower lashes until they’re smudged across my cheeks, my eyes rimmed red, my lips chapped and trembling.
I look like every girl who’s ever secretly envisioned a life with a guy she has no future with.
I’ve become a walking, sobbing cliché, a perfect case study about the risks of falling in love.
Yet, for all its predictability, heartbreak is also so isolating. So contradictory. I’m simultaneously aware that everyone
has gone through something like this and stubbornly convinced that nobody on earth has ever suffered this way before. I’m
not interested in talking about anything except him, but I also don’t want to tell anybody about him. Don’t want to share
him, even after everything.
I grant myself exactly one day to mope in private. That already feels overly self-indulgent, considering that the lunar eclipse
is in three days.
Then I get to business. I make a booking for my mom’s favorite resort in Sanya, the one with the goat enclosure and the underwater
restaurant. I choose the flight that leaves on the night of the vision, calculating it so that she’ll need to head off to
the airport before it gets dark.
I start collecting my belongings. Putting childhood photos and precious gifts in boxes, to be stored somewhere else until
I can be sure the house is safe.
I log into my mom’s email account while she’s showering and track her latest correspondence with Long Ge. He’s already sent
her the documents and the agency pitch deck, but she hasn’t signed anything just yet.
And if I catch myself wondering about Ares from time to time—
Well, I tried it, I think to myself, with a mental slap on the wrist. I’d been frank and disgustingly earnest, offered up a small piece of
my heart—and look what happened. Exactly what I knew would happen. Now there’s no getting that piece of my heart back ever,
no refund or replacement for damaged goods, and I can be certain that I’m never putting myself through it again.
Back to games and tricks and lying through my teeth.