Chapter Three In Limbo
I told myself: he doesn’t want to date you, and he doesn’t want to be your friend. It’s over.
I’d only met him three times. It should have been easy to get over him.
But it wasn’t. I’d been dumped by girlfriends lots of times.
That was nothing like this. What made it worse was that superficially my life hadn’t changed: same job, same friends, same apartment, same Undeclared Mustard.
But nothing felt solid or worthwhile anymore.
I’d turn up for work, do my job, eat lunch with Trish, and hang on every word she said about him. I asked her every day how he was doing. If he was okay, I was okay. Actually, I wasn’t, but it made things bearable.
He kept his word and didn’t tell her. Trish treated me like she always did: friendly, chatty, not suspicious when I asked about him.
Then Valentine’s Day came. I was feeling sorry for myself because I was still single—not that I wanted a girlfriend anymore.
At work, someone had cut out red paper hearts and pasted them all over the workstations, and I was dreading lunch because I figured Trish would tell me all about her Valentine’s Day plans with him.
Except, Trish didn’t come in. Which was weird because Trish never missed work.
Around noon, the phone rang, and Roger answered.
“Uh—” he said. “Y—uh-huh. Okay.” He winced and hung up.
“What happened?” I said.
“Trish quit.” He started walking away.
“Wait—what happened?”
“I told you. Trish quit.” Roger left, presumably to break the news to Simon.
I knew Trish wasn’t happy working in the lab, but she didn’t hate it, and she’d been acting normally the day before. I expected her to come back and tell everyone she was joking. But she didn’t. Four days later, Simon posted an ad for her job.
My situation had been bad before, but now it was worse. Because the one person I could talk to about him was gone.
I didn’t have her phone number, but I found her email address in the university directory, and, after chickening out for a day, I sent her a message:
Hey. It’s Craig. You want to meet up some time?
She didn’t reply.
I needed to know what had happened. I needed to know he was okay.
Because it was keeping me awake at night worrying.
I got this sense he was in trouble, that something awful had happened to him, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So, a couple of weeks after Trish quit, when I found a letter addressed to her in our lab’s mailbox, I took it and walked over to her place in the Annex.
I knew it was an excuse. I knew he didn’t want to see me, that I’d have to apologize again. But I figured if I saw him one more time, saw that he was okay, I’d be able to move on.
I knocked on the door, trying to think of what to say, and, almost immediately, someone opened it.
It wasn’t him. Or Trish. It was some lanky guy in a U of T sweatshirt.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Is Trish around?”
“Who?”
“Trish Brockherst. She lives here.”
“No, man. I moved in yesterday. There’s mail for her, though.” He ducked back inside and came out with a long, white envelope addressed to Trish. “If you know where she moved to, you can give it to her.”
“Sure. Um...is Eddie here?” I felt a horrible, tightness in my chest at the thought that this might be Eddie’s new boyfriend.
But the guy just squinted. “Who?”
“Never mind. Was there any mail for him?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
The guy shut the door in my face. I looked at the envelopes in my hand. I had a plan.
I searched for her online. I wasn’t being creepy. I was trying to find her to let her know I had her mail and to ask her where I could forward it. And how Eddie was doing.
Except, the only social media she was on was LinkedIn, and it listed her as still working at the lab. I messaged her but didn’t get a reply.
So I looked for him. I wasn’t planning to contact him if I found him.
I just needed to know he was okay. But all I knew was his first name and that he’d acted in some indie movies I didn’t know the names of, because he hadn’t told me and I hadn’t asked, and there were tons of Eddies on IMDb with no photos on their profiles, and any one of them could have been him.
I started to feel like a creep. I barely knew him. What right did I have to go searching for his personal information?
Feeling guilty, I gave up looking.
I tried to ride it out. But I was so messed up that one night, when Bexley and I were sitting in the van after rehearsal waiting for Ben to join us, he said, “What’s going on, Craig?”
I hated lying to Bex, but what could I tell him? That I’d met this guy, known him for three days, hadn’t seen him for almost two months, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him?
So I said, “Trish left the lab.”
“You still hung up on her? She’s still with her boyfriend?”
“I don’t know.”
“Time to move on,” said Bex.
He was right. And I did try to move on. But I couldn’t.
And then one day, I didn’t have to.
Because I found him again.