Kiss Slay Replay

Chapter 1

Who knew that time could move so slowly?

It’s been three minutes, and I swear I thought an hour had gone by. Just me, standing in the middle of this studio apartment. My studio apartment. I live here now.

It’s home but it isn’t, because I’m alone.

Alone with the echoes of this empty space.

Alone with stacked boxes waiting impatiently to be unpacked, mocking me from dusty corners.

Alone with an obnoxious question many have asked before me and will continue to ask well after I’m gone, until the earth gets sucked back into the big, dark, hungry maw of the universe.

The question, of course, being: Is home a place or other people?

Is it a feeling? Is it happiness? Is it love?

This is the kind of thing we used to talk about over dinner, back at the beginning.

Ravi loves a philosophical question. Loves deliberating over some cosmic problem, confronting it head-on.

Loves a puzzle. Loves pressing on a bruise to study the feeling.

Loves interrogating life’s complexities, sliding everything under a microscope to see the wriggly bits.

Not me.

It’s a waste not to wonder, he’d say.

I hear him now. His voice in my head like he’s there.

I mean, I guess he is. He’s part of me. We met young, my bones fortifying in his presence, for so many years my heart beating to the rhythm of us.

And now, a void. I think about the life I almost had.

I think about people who survive shark attacks.

Phantom limbs. I think about loneliness, the dorsal fin circling me as I tread water.

Maybe I’m hopelessly self-involved. Maybe I’m jaded.

Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe I’m dramatic.

It’s a breakup. It’s not the same thing, losing a leg and losing a fiancé.

I’m just grasping. I’m just bored. I’m so bored.

There’s so much time. It’s here. It’s there, like the boxes, waiting. Existing. Inescapable.

Four minutes? It’s been only four minutes? Fuck me.

I grab my phone off the kitchen counter and call Cassie. It rings and rings and I worry she won’t answer, and then what will I do? But she picks up.

“Hey, Willa.” I can hear it in her voice. She’s sick of me. “What’s up, doc?”

“Hi, hello. I’m at the new place. All moved in.”

“How is it?”

“Um,” I say, looking around. It’s a decent size for a studio.

There’s an alcove for a bed. The appliances are new, the kitchen and bathroom recently redone.

There’s a dishwasher. Washer/dryer in unit.

Closet space. It’s thirty-five hundred dollars a month, including off-street parking.

Not bad for Jersey City. It’s fine. And I should say so, but my stubborn throat constricts in protest, won’t let the word out.

Fine? Is this how I want to describe my life? Where I live? My future? Fine?

Cassie sighs. “Do you need me to remind you that this was your decision?”

“That’s a gross oversimplification, but okay.”

“It is and it isn’t,” she says. “You’re making your own choices. I get that there are factors outside of your control, but you—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You win. Please tell me again how I’m in a hell of my own making.”

“Willa, honey, you are in a hell of your own making. Is it hot?”

“It’s so fucking hot, Cass.”

“How hot?”

“Scalding.”

“Mm,” she says. “That sucks.”

Cassie is all about tough love. It’s her specialty. If I wanted kid gloves, I would have called Steph.

Honestly, I did want kid gloves, but Steph is busy with wedding preparations. And Evan wouldn’t have answered. And no one else gets me like they do.

“It’s going to suck for a while, Willa. Until it doesn’t.”

I stumble over to the wall, put my back against it. Slide down to the floor. “What if it sucks forever?”

“Then it sucks forever.” There’s rustling in the background. She’s multitasking. Cleaning, probably. “But it’s not gonna. Everything is temporary. Good and bad.”

“Good? What is this gah-uhd of which you speak? Never heard of it. Unfamiliar.”

“Willa.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Look. You’re doing it,” she says. “It’s happening. You’re in it. You’re in the suck. Only way out is through.”

“Or,” I say, hugging my knees tight to my chest, “or I can turn around and go back. Retreat, retreat.”

“It’s too late for that. And what story worth telling starts with a retreat?”

“Oof. You’re right.”

“I love you. You’re gonna get through it. And I get to see you so soon! We’re all gonna be together.”

“Keyword ‘all.’ Including my ex.”

She sighs again. She is a world-class sigher. So full of emotion. Of pure exasperation. “You had the opportunity to veto.”

“I wasn’t going to have him disinvited to the wedding. That puts Steph and Jace in a weird spot. I don’t know. I feel like I’m already the villain.”

“Villain? Really? Villain. That’s a little—”

“Dramatic? Have we met? Have we been friends for fifteen years?”

“Fifteen? Don’t round up on me. How dare you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ve been friends for thirteen years. Thirteen. Next month, actually. Aww.”

“Lucky me. Lucky you.”

“Lucky us,” she says. “I really do love you, Willa Ann Sullivan. And I know you’ll get through this.

Go watch something extremely messed up. Go watch a murder show.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing gives you perspective like a true crime doc.

And if that’s too real, a nice classic slasher bloodbath.

Or a creature feature will do the trick.

Giant monsters. Haunted real estate. Aliens.

You know that’s what I do when I’m hanging off a cliff. ”

“I have always envied your grip strength.”

“Take my advice.”

“I did! I’ve told you. All I watch lately is horror.”

“You’re still in the kiddie pool. You need to come over to the deep end.”

“Let me get my floaties on. Jeez.”

“I’m sending you another list of recs. Trust me. You’ll find them all surprisingly soothing. A reminder it could always be worse.”

“Worse? I don’t think so.”

“Okay, that’s it!” she says, faking outrage. “I’m hanging up!”

“Noooo!”

“I’m kidding. I love you. Have I mentioned that?”

“No. Never. Not once.”

“I actually do have to run. Luke just got home with the kid. He says hi. Luke, not Theo. Theo doesn’t…Is that—what is that? Luke, what is that? Right there, on his head! Willa, I’ll call you back in like an hour, if that works?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I will. In the meantime, enjoy the hellfire hot tub.”

“It’s supremely unpleasant.”

“Great! Bye!”

“Bye, Cass.”

I’m too afraid to check the time, to see how many minutes ticked away during that phone conversation. To see just how much day is left ahead of me.

Scientists should study the phenomenon of breakup time. Why aren’t there dedicated resources? I’m certain heartache bends the laws of physics. Isn’t that worth looking into?

Per Cassie’s suggestion, I put on an episode of some crime series about people who survive plane crashes and attempted murders.

Their perseverance should be inspiring, but instead it just makes me feel inadequate.

I’m barely surviving this breakup, fumbling my intended fresh start.

I’m subsisting on noodles and muffins because they’re the only things I can stomach.

I’m spending more on THC gummies than groceries.

My hair is falling out in clumps due to stress or vitamin deficiencies.

Both. And it was ultimately my call. I was the one who decided that the issues between us were irresolvable, that the life we’d been planning to live together wasn’t right for either of us.

Now I get to wonder if it was a big mistake. The kind of mistake I can’t come back from. The kind that’s going to leave me with a strain of parasitic regret that will destroy me, eventually.

It’s a waste not to wonder.

I go through it all in my head every single day.

Several times a day. On fucking repeat. Flash back to those early years—the spark between us sun bright, everything easy.

Moving in together, the simple joy of falling asleep and waking up in the same bed.

I construct a timeline of domestic disagreements—dishes in the sink, unfolded laundry, hair left to clog the drain.

I make mental evidence boards of recurring arguments—my lack of communication, his lack of communication, my desire to go out, his desire to stay in, my love of the city, his longing to return to his suburban hometown in Northern Virginia.

When exactly did these cracks start to show?

When he applied to his dream job in DC—behind my back, because he thought it was a shot in the dark?

When he accepted the job? When he asked me to come with and to marry him in the same breath?

When I said yes with happy tears in my eyes and a knife at my back?

When was the shift? When I quit my dream job to follow him home?

When I left my beloved Manhattan and began to work freelance, feeling isolated and unfulfilled, subconsciously reluctant to settle somewhere I didn’t want to be?

When he started working late and coming home irritable?

When we stopped fucking? When his father got sick?

When the thought of losing his dad prompted a change of heart about having kids, and he asked me if I’d reconsider becoming a parent?

When I said no, it wasn’t something I wanted, and he assured me it was okay, but I couldn’t shake the guilt or the suspicion he thought I still might change my mind?

When did it get away from us? The nights we spent sleeping with our backs to each other, when I would cry into my pillow, wondering how I could love someone so much and not know how to talk to them anymore.

A year like this. A year trying to ignore it, to reassure myself it was just a phase, that we would figure it out, because love conquers all.

Until it doesn’t. Until I was hyperventilating three weeks before our wedding, breaking down in the kitchen telling him I couldn’t go through with it.