Do I Look Better to You?
julian
I hadn’t been able to sleep. It had been a week since Alyssa’s grief group. A week of dreams about Mama that left me waking up sweating with my heart palpitating and my hands shaking. Of staring at reports and seeing nothing but numbers that don't add up right.
A week of avoiding Alyssa.
I pride myself on discipline and routine. Structure that kept all the moving parts of my life functioning exactly as they should. Now I couldn’t even get through a morning meeting without my mind drifting to things that should stay buried.
Alyssa had been trying to reach me, I answered enough to keep it from becoming a thing. A text back, a line about a deadline, a reason lunch wouldn’t work.
I was at my house on Belmead, when she knocked. I opened the door and she looked at me, unshaven and tired. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Can I come in?”
I stepped back and let her pass. She went as far as the living room and turned to face me.
“I miss you,” she said simply.
I missed her too, desperately, but I also resented that I missed her. Resented that she’d become necessary to me in some ways.
“I've been busy, Lyss.”
“Julian. Work isn't why you've been avoiding me.”
“I haven't been avoiding you.” I moved away from her, towards the kitchen, needing space. But she followed me.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You're not fine. You look like you haven't slept.”
“I said I'm fine, Alyssa. What else do you want from me?”
“I want to know what's wrong. I want to help.”
“Help? I think you’ve helped enough.”
Surprise mixed with what looked like fear crossed her face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I go with you to your grief group, and now I can't focus on anything. I can't sleep. I keep thinking about things that were better left alone.”
“You blame me,” she looked down.
“I didn’t say that. I’m just stating the sequence of events.”
She took a deep breath. “I-I’m sorry you are struggling Julian. That’s not what I wanted. But… don’t you think this tells you that you need to talk to someone? Clearly you have been suppressing a lot and this just exposed it. Now you can’t ignore it.”
I looked at her and apprehension crawled up the back of my neck. “What do you mean?”
She set a folded piece of paper on the counter and slid it toward me. “I did some research. Here are three therapists in the Lennox Falls area who are good. Really good. Individual not group. You wouldn’t have to do anything but talk to one person, once, just to see.”
I looked at the paper but I did not pick it up. “You won’t let this go.”
“No.”
“I told you I don’t need it. I told you that plainly, more than once. And now here’s a list.” I looked up at her. “Why can’t you drop it?”
“Because I can’t stand seeing what this does to you, Julian. It breaks my heart.”
Standing there with that list inches from my hand, I felt the instinct that I had brushed away for a week catch on something and start to turn. “That what this is about? You pity me?”
“What? Julian, no that’s not–”
“That grief group…” I said slowly putting it together.
“You walked out of there fine. Practically skipping to the car. I remember thinking it, that it was good. That it had been good for you.” I watched her.
“Yet I haven’t slept since. I went there fine, for you.
So how is it that you’re left whole and I’m in pieces? ”
She didn’t answer fast enough, thinking. “It was different for me.”
“Different how?”
“I’ve done the work, Julian. Years of it. That room wasn’t new ground for me, it was... I’ve already grieved what I went there to grieve.”
“So… you didn’t need it.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“If you didn’t need it,” I said, “then why were we there?”
“Julian.”
“Why were we there, Alyssa?”
She did the thing with her lips and I watched her decide that the truth argued well was better than a lie defended badly.
“Because you would never have gone for yourself,” she admitted. “Not in a hundred years. So I found a group, and I asked you to go for me.” Her chin came up. “Yes. I did that.”
There it was.
The first thing through was like falling. A floor I’d been standing on going out from under me, with the realization that she had looked at me and decided I was a thing to be moved into position. She felt sorry for me. I almost would have preferred her to have hated me.
“You played me,” I said. “You manipulated me.”
“I was trying to help—”
“By lying to me? By pretending you needed support when you just wanted me where you thought I should be?”
“Yes. But Julian, you need this. You need someone to care enough about you to—”
“To what? To trick me? To decide that you know better than I do what's good for me?”
“You would never have gone otherwise.” She didn’t back down. That was the thing about her, cornered, she came forward.
“BECAUSE I DON’T NEED IT!” I raised my voice and she flinched, but I couldn’t stop. “Because I'm not broken, Alyssa! I'm not a goddamn project for you to fix.”
“I never said you were broken.”
“Then WHY?!” I spread my arms wide, all my anger and hurt spilling out. “Why can't you accept that I handle things differently than you do? Hm?”
“Because handling isn't healing.” Tears were streaming down her face. “Because watching you carry years of grief alone kills me. Because you deserve so much more than the emotional prison you've built for yourself.”
“It's not a prison! It's discipline. It's strength. It's what kept my family from falling apart. What made us successful. Me successful.”
“And what's it cost you, Julian? What has all that cost you?”
I stared at her. “It cost me my peace.” The words came out quiet, deadly. “It cost me the ability to go through a day without thinking about things I'd rather forget. It cost me sleep, focus, the life I'd built before you decided I needed saving. You proud of that?”
“I’m not proud of any of it. But I’d do it again, because you need to face the fact that—”
“Do you hear yourself?” I came off the counter. “You decided what I needed and you went around me to put it in me. You didn’t ask. You managed me. I don’t do that to you. Whatever you think of me, I don’t scheme on you. I take you the way you come. I work with you.”
“You work with me? Julian, you bulldozed half my life before I could get a sentence out. The car. The condo. The things that got fixed that I never asked anybody to fix.”
“Those made your life better! Do I look better to you, Alyssa? Huh? Right now, standing here… do I look like a man who’s better?”
“You look like a man who’s still fighting it,” she said. “That’s the whole difference. When something’s wrong you need to try to change it. To grow. You tell me all the time that I need to learn how to accept help. Why won’t you take your own advice?”
“So I need to change,” I said. “That’s what you’re telling me? That I’m a man who needs improving and you’re the one who can see the version of me I’m too broken to reach?”
“I didn’t say broken!”
“If I’m not enough as I am, then what the hell are we doing?”
“Don’t twist what I’m saying. You are enough — you are more than enough, you are the best thing that has happened to me.
Ever. This isn’t about who you are to me.
It’s about who you are to yourself, Julian.
You carry everyone and let nobody carry you.
Why are you fighting me this hard on the idea that you deserve the same thing you give everybody else? ”
“You stand there and tell me what I need to work on. Like you came out the other side of yours clean.” My words were coming faster than I could weigh them down.
“You don’t let a soul close without running the whole thing from behind a curtain.
That’s not healed either, Alyssa. That runs all over me and you don’t even feel it leave you. So don’t hand me a list.”
Her eyes were wet now and her voice was holding by a thread. “It’s a process. That’s the point. That’s why you talk to somebody trained, somebody who can give you the tools to —”
“I had the tools.” I cut her off. “I had the tools for eighteen years. I WAS the tool, Alyssa. And it worked. It worked until —”
I stopped.
She finished it for me, quietly. “Until me?” She was crying more now, but steady through it. “That’s what you want to say? It worked until me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s what you’re thinking.”
I didn’t disagree. I couldn’t, and not disagreeing was its own answer.
“I changed everything for you. I didn’t do this. Any of this. I didn’t do relationships. But then we met, and I just decided, fuck it, I’m going all in. I took every wall I had down to the studs for you.” I looked at her. “And it still isn’t enough. You still need me fixed.”
She wiped her face, looking as wrecked as I felt.
“This is not me trying to make you into something else, Julian. It’s me watching the best man I know give everybody in his life the exact thing he won’t let himself have.
You deserve to put it down. You deserve somebody whose whole job is just you, for one hour a week. That’s all this is about.”
She crossed the last of the space between us and put her arms around me. “Please,” she cried into my chest. “Understand where I’m coming from. Just talk to me.”
For three seconds I let her hold me, and for three seconds I wanted to set the whole thing down into her and let her have the weight of it more than I had wanted anything in eighteen years.
But another thing came up under it. She had managed to do this.
To me. I am not a man who gets played. I see the angle in a room before I’m through the door.
I have built a life on seeing it. And this woman walked me by the hand into a room I swore I’d never enter.
Anybody else on earth and I’d have seen it coming a mile away.
Smelled it. But I had gone so far down with her that I’d left my own good sense at the surface.
Standing there with her arms around me I understood that I could not trust myself near her, because near her I didn’t think straight.
A man who can’t think straight can’t hold anything up.
I set her back from me, both hands on her shoulders. “I can’t do this right now.”
“Julian, please.”
“I need some space. I can’t be around you right now. I’m too… I’ll say things I can’t take back. I’m already past where I should have stopped.”
She nodded. Her tears didn’t stop the entire time; she just let them come but kept her chin up. “Okay, I’ll go.”
She gathered herself and turned to walk out. At the door she stopped and looked back at me.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” she sniffled. “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
Then she was gone, and the door closed, and the sound of it went all the way through my house and kept going.
I sat down on a barstool. The folded list was still on the counter where she’d left it.
It all came up at once and out of order.
Anger that she lied. Embarrassment that I’d fallen for it.
And a feeling I couldn’t figure out. I loved her.
I had loved her for a long time and never said it out loud to her.
It was the clearest thing in me and it arrived as the shape of what had just walked out the door.
But that wasn’t the feeling I couldn’t identify.
My chest started to hurt. An actual physical pain, piercing enough that I looked down at myself for an injury I could see. There was nothing. Just me, in my kitchen, with no procedure for what a person does next. Then it hit me.
It was heartbreak.