Chapter Eleven
Ashish
What do you do when you’ve royally messed up your life? I mean fucked up your life way beyond what you thought was possible? Found the girl of your dreams, somehow convinced her you were someone to pay attention to, and then boom…threw it all away because…because why? I don’t know, but here I am in Indiana, standing in line at a bakery explaining that yes, I do want more cream cheese added to the cinnamon rolls I’m ordering because the woman of my dreams wants nothing to do with me.
I pass my card over and take a deep breath. Looking around the packed bakery, I think this is the first crowd I’ve experienced since moving to Indiana. I’m almost overwhelmed with space compared to Boston.
It was a long, lonely two-day drive from Massachusetts. Ravi, being ‘helpful,’ made a playlist to keep me company. I should have known that fucker was trolling me when he gleefully added it to my streaming app. In hour four on the first day, I couldn’t make myself listen to another podcast. Starting the playlist, Kelly Clarkson’s Since You’ve Been Gone piped through the car speakers. What followed was song after song that must have been on some kind of top one-hundred break-up angry girl mix.
Not for the first time in the last few months, I wonder what the hell I’m doing with my life. The pandemic hit a lot of people hard. For me, it made me question everything about how I’d built my life. How I was living my life. What was important to me.
Like many people, being stuck in my house, first with my family, then by myself, the days stopped feeling separate from one another, and as they stretched on and on…it changed me.
Before, I’d been happy to work at the firm I’d built with my brother, growing it from a few clients to a well-known company with a growing client list. I’d focused on work and dated. Mostly I just cared about the next project or the next problem we needed to solve.
Then my mom got breast cancer. And if that wasn’t hard enough, the world turned into a fucking dumpster fire with COVID. Everything that once felt important felt so far away. Instead, our every day was worrying about the possibility of getting sick and how to protect her from getting sick. Her illness and her fragility, despite going into remission, made us all wake up and realize my mom was the load-bearing structure of our family. She held us up and transferred the weight and connections we had with each other into the foundation that united us.
The threat of the pandemic and not knowing how it might affect Mom made it that much harder, more isolating, scarier. So, we stayed in. We took less work, and it gave me space to think. To think about all the things that were wrong with our business.
I thought a lot about what we paid attention to when solving problems and what we didn’t. How the design of products and some of our work focused a bit too much on the desires of people paying for the project and not enough on the people using it regularly. It made me think about how frustrating it was that our new hires weren’t prepared to be engineers.
After months of yammering Ravi’s ear off, he'd finally had enough. ‘What are you going to do about it, Ash?’ he’d said, exasperated. We’d been huddled in the kitchen working on plans for yet another remote presentation. Both of us sick of living out of our childhood bedrooms. I signed up for an engineering education conference the next day.
I’ve since learned that higher education is like a prism: depending on where you stand, there are only certain facets in your line of sight. One remote conference after another, it became starkly clear to me that just like any business, you had to follow the money to get anything done. I’d signed up for the higher education research development conference to follow the money. If I could get a big enough grant, perhaps I could get a dean to pay attention to me.
The girl behind the counter calls my name, snapping me back to the present. I give her my most charming smile and she blushes as she hands over the bakery box. I bought a full dozen cinnamon rolls with extra cream cheese frosting. I figure Bernie is more likely to accept them if it seems like a treat for her team versus something specifically for her.
I walk to my car, nerves thrumming through me. These days, it feels like all I think about is her. Bernadette writhing under me, kissing me, smiling for me, coming for me. Bernie curled in on herself, looking so distant my chest still aches with it.
Gripping the steering wheel until the leather creaks, I try not to be angry. I know it’s my fault, but I’m still angry. I just want to shake her and make her listen . I want to kiss and fuck that sad look off her face. I want her to look at me with that sweet shyness where she was brave enough to agree to the possibility of us. I know deep in my bones that I’m meant for her.
Not for the first time, I think about what this summer would have been like if it had rolled out differently. If I could explain to her I hadn’t meant for it to go that far, that I planned to tell her, take her to dinner that night and explain that I was an engineer, not a doctor. While I worked with a university, I’m definitely not a professor, and she’d misunderstood. I planned to kiss her softly and tease her into taking the risk. Convince her I was worth taking a chance on.
I consciously relax my grip on the leather, pulling into the parking garage before walking to the tall brick building where my fate awaits. I shift my bag higher onto my shoulder and juggle the bakery box so I can open the heavy glass door.
What do you do when you royally fuck up your life?
Ravi was right. You try to fix it.