29. The Wrong Kind of Safe #3
I’m a perfectionist. I’m a person who calculates the exact distance between letters to ensure balance.
I’m a person who makes sure every line is straight and every color is balanced.
But you can’t organize love. You can’t put a relationship into a grid system and expect it to stay there, safe and predictable.
Love is the gas leak. Love is the fire. It’s the thing that destroys the status quo so you can build something better.
I stand up, my legs feeling weak and heavy, like I’ve been running a marathon I didn’t train for.
I walk to the window and look out at the Chicago skyline.
Somewhere out there, the red and blue lights of Station 99 are glowing.
Somewhere out there, Sterling is probably sitting on the bumper of a truck, checking a maintenance log or making a bad joke to Jake, trying to convince himself that he’s fine with the ’arrangements.
’ He’s probably being stoic. He’s probably building a wall of his own.
I think about the poetry night at Kayla’s. ’Authenticity vs. Approval.’ I’ve spent twenty-six years choosing approval. I’ve spent twenty-six years being the wrong kind of safe, making sure I didn’t disappoint people who only love the version of me that doesn’t make trouble.
I look back at the apartment. The prints are straight. The books are categorized. The paint is dry. It’s perfect. It’s exactly as it should be according to every rule I’ve ever lived by.
And it’s the loneliest place I’ve ever been.
I reach out and shut my laptop, and the snap of the hinge goes all the way through the whitewashed tomb of my living room.
I flinch at how final it sounds, as though it has closed not just on the day but on every possible future where I got what I wanted.
I stare at the blank wall in front of me, unable to remember what hung there before the fire, if anything, or whether it has always been exactly this: empty, expectant, quietly judging.
I stand and circle the perimeter of the room, hunting for any sign of comfort, any evidence that this place is actually mine and not a set designer’s facsimile of a life.
The prints on the wall, straight and minimal and antiseptic, read as warnings rather than decoration.
I nudge one millimeter left, then nudge it back, my hands shaking badly enough that I nearly drop it.
The only thing out of order in the entire apartment is the navy velvet ring box on the coffee table, and I leave it there like a landmine.
Bowie watches me from the sofa, tail flicking, registering the tension and declining to involve himself.
I envy him for it. I lean against the edge of the kitchen counter and say, out loud, “I’ve made a complete mess of the only thing that ever actually mattered,” in a voice so small I nearly miss it myself.
Out loud it loses all its drama. It sounds flat and depleted and true in the most humiliating way available.
I wait a beat to see whether the walls will hand me back congratulations or mockery, and they give me nothing at all, just the hum of the fridge and the too-loud tick of the clock by the door.
I go back to the couch and fold into it, knees up, arms around my shins, as though I can compress myself small enough to stop existing.
I’m not even crying. I’m too tired to mount a defense.
The truth rolls over me and doesn’t let up: I ran so far and so fast from the risk of losing something that I have gone ahead and guaranteed it.
I left Sterling. I left the only place that has ever felt remotely like home.
And now my whole-body aches from the effort of pretending that was a victory.
Where the self-congratulation is supposed to live there is a yawning silence, and all I can do is lie here and listen to it.
I wonder whether in some parallel universe, one with a better me and a braver Sterling, we are eating burnt pancakes off the firehouse griddle and making fun of Jake’s mustache and arguing about who gets the too-small shower first. Maybe in that world I am sketching him and not bothering to hide it.
Maybe the ring box is empty and my hands are full.
I say it again, louder. “I ruined it. I ruined everything.” Bowie blinks his mismatched eyes, unimpressed, and yawns directly at me.
I look down at my phone and read my last sent message, Sounds fine, as though I can will the letters into unsending themselves, into crawling backward through time to let me say something real instead.
But I don’t know where I would start. I can’t remember the last time I made a gesture that wasn’t rehearsed.
Even my confessions are monologues now, and there is nobody left in the room to perform them at.
I let my head fall back and close my eyes, and in the dark behind my eyelids I see Sterling exactly as he was that night on the fire escape, a universe ago.
Hands steady. Shoulders squared. Eyes on me and nothing else in the world.
I wonder whether he is already moving on, or whether he was ever really waiting in the first place.