Twenty-one
My phone’s incessant vibrations on the bedside console wake me up from my third (or is it fourth?) nap of the day. Then again, does it really count as a nap if I’ve only gotten out of bed to pee? Isn’t it more of a prolonged sleep cycle?
I hesitate but ultimately pick up.
“Oh god, we thought you were dead. Didn’t you get our texts?” comes Thidar’s voice.
“What?” I grumble. “What time is it? I was asleep.”
“Asleep? It’s four.” She sighs like a mother who’s trying to wake up her child for school for the fifth time. “Just come and open the door.”
“The d—”
“Now!” Nay yells. “We will camp out here if we have to!”
“I am confiscating your key cards,” I groan as I clamber out of the bedroom.
Both of them physically recoil at the sight of me. “Have we…” Nay sniffs the air. “Showered recently?”
“Yes,” I mumble with all the confidence of someone who is knowingly deploying a liberal definition of “recently.”
“Of course,” she responds.
“What are you guys doing here?”
Thidar glances down at the phone in her hand, and my stomach sinks. “What?” I repeat.
“Did you know Tyler was leaving today?”
Oh. I nod. “He told me at the wrap party on Thursday.”
“We saw the photos of him at the airport,” Thidar says, motioning with her phone. “How are you?”
“Honestly?” They both nod. “I’m… I don’t… We…” It doesn’t come. I’d hoped that not talking to anyone for thirty-six hours would mean that I’d have recuperated enough to get my thoughts in order, but that clearly hasn’t been the case.
“Can we come in?” Nay asks.
While they shut the door and remove their shoes, I pull my robe tighter around me. “So how—” Nay starts.
Detaching itself from my brain, my body lets out a sob, and then another, and another, and, no longer seeing the point in remaining upright, I’m sitting on the floor, knees pressed into my chest, rocking myself as tears that I was certain had dried up stream down my face. Two hands land on either side of my spine—not stroking, not rubbing soothing circles, just secured there, letting me know that it’s okay, I can fall apart, they’re here now.
I slouch sideways into a fetal position onto Thidar’s lap. Nay lies down sideways, too, one hand propping up her head while the other tucks my hair behind my ear.
“I almost murdered someone,” I blubber, figuring, hey, there’s never going to be a good time to tell them.
They both freeze. Nay chews on her bottom lip, and, after a period of silence, asks, “Like… in a dream? Or metaphorically? With your words?”
I shake my head. “In the park. In the flesh.”
“The park,” Thidar states.
“On the first day of filming. And Tyler was involved and the police were looking into me and it turned out the guy had been stalking me for months but then it—”
“Woah there, halt, time out,” Nay says, grabbing my face with both hands. “You’re saying a lot of weird combinations of words right now, and frankly, the snot is making it difficult to understand you. I’m going to go and pee, and then I’m coming back with tissues and some water, and then you’re going to walk us through the whole thing. Okay?” I nod.
Approximately five minutes later, she returns and plops back down on the floor in her initial position, but not before first placing the promised tissue box and mug of water between us. “Take a sip,” she instructs, and I lift my head and obey. “Now blow,” she says, giving me a piece of tissue. When I’m done, she says, “Now talk to us.”
“Well… fuck,” comes Thidar’s voice from above when I’m done laying it all out. “You… and then… I mean… fuck.”
I rotate so I’m on my back and I can look up at her, although from this angle, all I can see is her chin. “Are you guys mad I didn’t tell you?”
“No, we’re—” Thidar starts at the same time that Nay hits my shoulder and says, “Of course we’re mad!”
Thidar tilts her head to glare at Nay. “We’re not mad .”
“Yes, we are!” Nay snaps. “You were going to go to prison and not tell us? What the actual fuck? We’re your best friends! I once fished a menstrual cup out of your vagina!”
I snort despite myself. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I… I didn’t want to implicate you, and also… I didn’t…”
“What?” Thidar prompts when I trail off.
I inhale, no longer able to avoid what I know is the truth. “Also, I felt like such a huge disappointment. Every night, I would lie awake in bed and stare off into space, wondering what the fuck happened. I didn’t have a marriage. I didn’t have a house. And while Ben was so goddamn happy with his new sweet and talented photographer girlfriend, I was running around the city dodging the police after having murdered a man. Oh, and I was also head over heels in love with a guy who I knew I couldn’t be in love with, but still I was, like a complete fool, and I couldn’t do anything about it. It felt like I couldn’t do anything right anymore. Do you know how humiliating it is for your husband to divorce you after less than a year of being married? It felt… it felt like he’d been right to leave me.”
Nay snatches another tissue and dabs my cheeks. “No, but we do know how unhappy you were during those last months of your relationship.”
I face her to make sure I heard right. “What?”
Her smile is kind. “You weren’t happy anymore. We could all see it. Of course we were still rooting for you both, but… Ben made the right call, Khin.”
“But I did everything right,” I say bitterly.
“I know. And I know it sucks that it still didn’t work out,” Thidar says, pushing away wet strands of hair from my forehead. “But that’s what happens in life sometimes. Things just… don’t work out. Sometimes you fall out of love. And nothing you could’ve done or said would’ve stopped that.” When she slants her head downward to look at me, I’m not expecting to find her eyes glistening with tears. “It hurt, you know, that you wouldn’t talk to us about it. We saw what you were doing to cope.”
“To—”
“Look around.” Nay chuckles and makes a wide, open gesture with one hand. “You bought the most expensive apartment your half of the house money would let you. And we know you like nice things, but this? This isn’t merely a new apartment, this is a ‘fuck my ex-husband, I’m doing better than I ever was’ apartment. That, and the rug, and the wardrobe, and the nonstop freelance assignments you buried yourself under. We know you. You were trying to prove you were okay, and instead of admitting to us that you weren’t, you distracted yourself.”
Despite myself, I want to laugh. How did I ever think I was successfully lying to them? How did I ever convince myself that these women, my people, people who know me down to my blood and bones, would fall for the mirage? “I didn’t know how,” I say. “All I wanted to do every time I thought about it was cry.”
“Then you could’ve just done that,” Nay says, and when I look at her, she’s crying, too.
“And what? Show weakness? Never. God, it’s like you don’t know me at all.”
She doesn’t accept the joke. “It’s not weakness. Something terrible happened to you. You lost your marriage. Your relationship. Your partner. You could’ve called us up every night at two A.M. , and we would’ve answered, and we never would’ve pitied you or thought you’d failed or whatever else you’ve been telling yourself this whole time, because that’s not how our love works. But we needed you to talk to us, and you wouldn’t—”
“Because that’s not what you do when you fail,” I say, aware how stubborn I sound. “When you fail at something, you don’t sit and wallow. You get back up and make a plan and you try harder next time.”
“Khin.” Nay wiggles closer until our toes are touching. “Your marriage ended. Of course you sit and wallow. Not forever, but definitely for a fucking while. We love how determined and driven you are, you know that. We love your planning and your Post-its—”
“And your color coordination—” Thidar adds.
“So many colors!” Nay yells, and I chuckle. “But some things in life, you can’t plan. And some losses, you can’t just dust yourself off and immediately bounce back from. Despite what you’ve been trying to convince us, we’re aware your spine isn’t actually made of steel.”
After a pause, Thidar clears her throat. “Are you really moving to Singapore?”
I consider before I answer. “If I get the job. But I have to deliver on the article first. And to be honest, I don’t want to write it anymore. I don’t have the words or the emotional capacity or, even on a practical level, the time. The draft is due in two weeks, and right now, I can’t even write something that’s good enough for an Intro to Journalism blog post.”
“You are going to get this job.” Thidar states it like a fact. “Because you’re you, and I know it might not seem like it right now, but if you want this, if you really want this, you will rally and you will write a damn good article and you will get the job. That’s not the question here.”
“She’s right,” Nay says with a determined nod. “You will get the job. If you want it and you write this piece. But Khin, do you actually want to move to Singapore? Do you even…” She studies me with caution before finishing, “ Want the job?”
“It’s Vogue, ” I reply automatically.
“Yeah, and Vogue is impressive,” she says, pursing her lips. “But is Vogue you? Is Vogue the career you want? This is your first celebrity profile, right?” I nod. “Do you like it? Do you want to do more of this?”
“What we’re trying to ask,” Thidar says, “is whether you want this job because you want this job, or because you don’t want to be here. Because if it’s the latter and you’re simply running?” She smiles, seeing right through me in that way only the two of them ever do. “I hate to break it to you, but you might get to Singapore and realize you still want to run. You can’t outrun this. Sometimes, no plan is better than a bad plan.”
“So what do I do? Just sit around feeling shitty?”
“Pretty much,” she says, throwing her hands in the air, her legs under my head jostling with the movement. “You sit there, and you feel shitty, because that’s how people feel when they have to sit in a pile of shit. And then eventually, you realize you don’t want to feel shitty anymore, and you work on it. And every day, there’s a little less shit to deal with until one day, poof. No more shit. Or maybe a little shit.”
“But not a giant football field of shit,” Nay adds.
I snort. “You guys are making it sound really appealing.”
“That’s life,” Nay says with a shrug. “One day, you’re profiling the biggest movie star in the world, and the next, you’re being forced to sit in a field of shit.”
That night, sandwiched in my giant king-sized bed between my lightly snoring best friends, I stare out the window, watching the clouds move steadily as they play a game of hide-and-seek with the moon, whose light is bouncing off of the sliver of lake in the far distance.
I had once judged Tyler for not knowing what he wanted. But the truth was—is—he found me in the exact same situation. I’m thirty, divorced, and don’t have full-time employment (aka overachieving teenage me’s worst nightmare). I don’t know what I want either. Do I want a full-time job at Vogue ? Do I want to move to Singapore?
Do I want to be with Tyler?
It feels scary and ridiculous to even allow myself to think that last one because it implies that I might have a reasonable shot, which I don’t. I take my mental eraser and scrub away that last question. The ones before that, though, stay. And no matter how hard I try to come up with answers, I can’t.
I know what I don’t want, though. I don’t want to be mad at Ben anymore. Because Nay and Thidar were right, and so was he—by the time he asked for a divorce, we had stopped being in love for a very long time; the cracks had already started to show pre-wedding, but I figured that they were surface cracks, and besides, marriage would “solve” all of that; intentionally vowing to spend the rest of our lives together would bridge the increasing gap between us. I’ve been deliberate about never thinking about him, but tonight, I force myself to do just that. I miss him, it occurs to me, like you miss your childhood home. Nostalgia about something that was so familiar and yours for so long. Although, when you look at it objectively, you know that you should move on because you’ve outgrown it. The bed is too small. The color schemes that your parents picked and that you didn’t think twice about when you were a kid aren’t what you want in your own house now that you’re older, different, someone new. It’s not right for you anymore, but that doesn’t erase the fact that it once was. You don’t miss the home, you miss what it used to be.
He wasn’t to blame for what happened.
Neither am I.
And I can’t blame him for my own self-imposed shame either. This anger I’ve been harboring this entire time isn’t because we got divorced, but because the divorce upended everything I’d known up to that point, like a tornado barging in and destroying my color-coordinated wardrobe, leaving behind a mess that I didn’t even know where to begin to sort out. In a matter of months, I went from being someone who had it all figured out to someone who knew… nothing. That is the crux of it. I know less now about where my life is headed than I did when I was twenty-three. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.
I’ve always known what I wanted to do next, where I was going next, what the next goal was. Next, next, next. Will I never be able to know any of those things again? What’s next ? I become someone who doesn’t have a daily alarm and “wakes up when she wakes up”? This is how society deteriorates into chaos. These are the people who die first when the apocalypse comes, or when the ship starts to sink—the ones without a plan.
Just then, Thidar rolls over and slaps me in the face. I gasp and my open mouth is ready to shout at her when I realize she’s still asleep and not telepathically reading my thoughts. Gradually, her hand slides down my face and curls into the crook between my neck and shoulder.
I watch her and Nay continue to sleep, breaths steady, foreheads not peppered with beads of sweat, and it occurs to me that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least try things their way for a little while. After all, they’re not desperately fighting off panic attacks in the middle of the night.
Baby steps, I remind myself, and surprisingly, it gets easier to sleep once I stop thinking about sinking ships and the end of the world.
In the morning, as we settle around the table with our own portions of caffeine, Nay snaps her fingers. “Mugs! That’s what we should’ve gotten you!”
“What?” I ask, blowing on my coffee.
She widens her eyes down at her own. “We were trying to figure out what to get you as a housewarming gift. We should’ve each gotten you a new mug!”
“Yeah,” Thidar says, eyes jumping between the three in our hands, as though noticing them for the first time. “No offense, but these are boring.”
I give a small chuckle. “None taken. New mugs would be great.”
“What should we have for br—”
“I changed my mind,” I cut in. “I want to write this story.”
They both turn to me, their mugs making a near-synchronized muted thunk as they place them down on the table. “What?” Thidar asks.
“The Vogue story. I want to write it. I don’t know about the overall job yet, you know, assuming I even get it—” I look back and forth between their faces, and they both give me warm, sleepy smiles that say, That’s okay, keep going. “But I definitely want to write this story. I’ve signed a contract, the photos have been shot, and the rest of the issue is already being planned around this article; if I take myself off of it, then Clarissa will have me blacklisted for the rest of my career, but more than that, she’ll get someone else to do it. Someone who doesn’t know Tyler like I do. Someone who wouldn’t—” I think of May. “Be fair . And besides, I also kind of really… want to.”
“Good,” Nay says, beaming through her bedhead bangs. “Now that we’ve figured that out, let’s tackle the next step. What are you going to give them?” When I look at her quizzically, she shrugs. “Do they get a, you know, scoop?”
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? “This article is going to publish at the same time that the movie comes out. Which was when he was going to announce his retirement himself anyway,” I say, speaking the thought bubbles aloud as they pop up in my head. “I would just… be the first person to have it in print. And this way, he’ll at least get a heads-up about it instead of being blindsided by someone else. I know he hates me, but I’d like to think he’d still rather I break the story than, like, TMZ.”
“That’s a fair point,” Nay says.
“And Clarissa is editing this herself. I file the draft, we work on it for a few months, and then it sits in her inbox until next year. We could easily keep this between the two of us until it publishes. Even for the layout, we could use placeholder text and change it at the last minute. A story this big, she would make sure this never leaked.”
“Right,” Nay says again. “But do you want to be the first one to print it?”
I open my mouth to say I need some more time to figure that out, but the words don’t come. Because I know the real answer. “No,” I answer truthfully. “I don’t.”
“Even if it means you don’t get the Vogue job?”
I smile up at them, blinking through the wetness. “It was just a job. He’s a person. A person that I… really care about. And maybe if I could ask him, he might say that from a purely publicity standpoint, he wants me to be the one to break it, but knowing that I was responsible for him not being able to do it entirely on his terms? I can’t do that to him.”
Thidar reaches over to squeeze my shoulder. “Okay, then.”
“Hey, guys?” I say, and they both perk up in their seats.
With a low groan, Nay says, “ Please don’t tell us you snuck out last night and accidentally potentially murdered another man. I mean, of course we’ll help you cover it up, but I have to start work in a few hours and—”
I let go of my mug so I can take both of their hands. “I wasn’t running away from you two, you know that, right? Singapore, that was… I was chasing that because I’d wanted something solid. I figured that even if the rest of my life fell apart again, at least I would have a full-time job that was stable. Something reliable. Something that wouldn’t snatch the rug out from under me on a random afternoon. A safety net.”
“But you love freelancing,” Thidar states in a matter-of-fact way.
I nod. “I do. You know what else I love?”
“What?” she asks, although the smile tugging her lips tells me she already knows the answer.
“You two,” I confirm. “Your friendship, our love—that’s the most stable, reliable thing I’ve ever had in my life. It’s the one thing that has never, ever let me down. You guys are my safety net, the one constant that catches me every time I fall on my ass. I love you, promise me you’ll never doubt that.”
“We know,” Nay says, squeezing my hand. “Forever.”
“And ever,” Thidar says.
Like the sun melting a Popsicle, the incontestable warmth of their love makes my grin unfurl to an uncontrollable length. “And ever,” I say.