Thirty-Five
I’m sitting quietly on my bed, listening to one of Spotify’s carefully curated lists for the broken-hearted, when my phone pings. I don’t even lunge for it this time; there’s no way it could be Ryan, so what’s even the point? I pick it up morosely, and my breath catches in my throat. The name ‘Chris Westwick’ is on the screen. I take a breath and open his message.
Hey Alex. It was weird seeing you the other day… with Madeleine in the store. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Can we get a drink? xx”
I stare. This is pretty much the last thing I expected. I’d have been less shocked by a message from Ryan than this. I pick up the phone, read the message, and put it down again. Repeatedly.
I phone Bea.
“Do not go!” She cautions. “Under no circumstances should you go.”
“But…”
“No.”
There’s a long pause.
“You’re going to meet him, aren’t you?” she sighs.
“Yes, but…I’ll be on my guard.”
“But why Alex? Why? He was so awful to you. You don’t want him. You’re just heartbroken.”
“Bea, maybe it will give me closure.”
“Nonsense! That is a stupid North American pop psychology term. It means nothing, and you never get closure anyway. Life isn’t about closure… it’s about learning from the past and moving forward.”
I know she’s right, but I’m not strong enough. “I’m going, Bea. I’m sorry.”
I end the call, and I know she’s going to worry. But she’ll also be there to pick up the pieces. I just know that I have to do this. Once I see him, I’ll know.
I tell Chris I can meet him, and he suggests tonight at 8pm. Not much time to think about it is probably good. I message back, “OK.” and flop back on my bed. It’s awful knowing you’re making a mistake and still going ahead and doing it anyway.
It’s bizarre. I have dreamed about this moment for so long, and now that it’s happening, I just feel a bit numb and wish it was Ryan instead. Maybe Chris has changed, I tell myself. Perhaps I’ll be surprised.
I still haven’t shaken my funk when I head to meet Chris, and I don’t feel nervous so much as I feel nothing when I see him sitting at a corner table in the bar, having already ordered me a drink. I guess that’s my answer. He stands up to greet me and moves to kiss my cheek, but I move my face, and he ends up kissing my ear instead. Ever confident, he styles it out. He gestures to the seat opposite him, and I sit down, not feeling anything except that I wish he were Ryan.
“I won’t beat around the bush here,” Chris starts.
“You never did…” I nervously try to make a joke.
“I made a mistake. All those women I dated after you…it was a huge mistake. I just…it’s just that everything was getting so serious with us. I knew you expected me to propose. And I just wasn’t ready.”
“Chris… we were together for five years. If you weren’t ready by then…”
“Yes, five years. Five years when all my friends were out dating multiple women, experiencing dating apps, and going on holiday together and hooking up with random girls. I missed all that.”
The old Alex would have lapped all of that up. Not anymore, though.
“Right, I get it. So, you tried the dating apps, hooked up with some randoms, and you’ve now realised that it’s not all fun and games and that, actually, you spend more time wondering why you’ve been ghosted than you do going out for brunch on a Sunday morning with an attractive new conquest? And in that mindset, you miss good old Alex, who was always there and always reliable?”
“Babe, come on. I’m trying to apologise here. I miss you. I love you. I want us to try again.”
“I’m not your babe. So you’re telling me you want to marry me? Is it over with Madeleine?”
He visibly pales. “Let’s not be too hasty. Let’s just get to know each other again and see what happens.”
I stare at him evenly. “Chris. I don’t want to marry you. I’m not your ‘babe’; I’m not getting back together with you just because you’ve had a chance to sleep around, and now you miss the person who put up with all your shit. I’m not some fallback option. And by the sounds of it, you haven’t even ended things with Madeleine.”
“I mean, you’re being a bit dramatic here. I broke up with you. It’s hardly a crime. And now I’m trying to be honest and say I made a mistake, and you’re acting like a prima donna. You’re making me think that ending things was the right thing to do. You’re being crazy.”
The old Alex would have exploded or cried when he called me crazy. Not Alex version 2.0, though. I stand up.
“Chris, for almost our entire relationship, you were an arsehole. You were cruel and rude, and you undermined me. You were embarrassed by me, and you took credit for my ideas. You took more from me than you gave…for years . You never made me feel safe. You made jokes about keeping me on my toes, but they weren’t jokes, were they? We’re done. You and me, we’re done.”
I stand up and turn on my heel, for the first leaving him speechless. I’m sure he’ll fashion this into some sort of self-serving narrative for his friends, but I don’t care. Nothing he does has any power over me anymore.
I text Adam and tell him that I’ve just seen Chris and that I’m coming over. He opens the door and immediately presents me with a glass of wine, ushering me to the couch. I’m absolutely certain that alcohol is the exact wrong thing to do right now, but I take a sip regardless, too tired to start training my willpower now.
“So… what happened?” he asks softly. “You, OK?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” I answer. As I recount what happened, I stand up and start pacing around the sitting room, warming to my theme as Adam starts convulsing with laughter.
“Amazing,” he pronounces when I’ve finished. “Simply amazing. I never liked him anyway.”
Exhausted from my performance, I collapse on the couch and put my head in my hands. “It just made me realise what I lost in Ryan…when I was sitting there telling Chris how awful he was, I could only think about how Ryan is everything Chris isn’t.”
“Seriously, Alex, he’s just a guy. There are plenty of us around. He’s nothing special.” He pats me gently on the back.
He tops up my wineglass and puts on When Harry Met Sally , which is one of my all-time favourite films. Adam absolutely loathes it and never managed to sit through it once the entire time we lived together. He’s clearly making a gargantuan effort. Despite it all, I’m lucky. I have Bea, I have Adam. I can get through this. As Bea said, I just need to keep moving forward.