Chapter 1 #2
We were holding each other hostage in a relationship that wasn’t working anymore, and I felt like I was underwater, like I was drowning, like I was screaming but no one could hear me. I would sit around and fantasize about another life, one free of that feeling.
But now here I am in that life, hurting, just in a different way, on the floor of this studio apartment, with time standing still.
—
The dress I got for the wedding no longer fits.
It hangs off me. I need a full-length mirror to properly examine, but I don’t have one.
I have nothing. When I met Ravi, he had the stuff.
Mirrors. Silverware. Plates. Lamps. An ironing board.
Two sets of sheets. His own place. An IRA.
He was responsible, twenty-four going on forty.
I was a twenty-three-year-old party girl, a perpetually hungover barista at the coffee shop around the corner from his office, where he’d get a small black coffee every morning.
He asked me out, and that was that. I never learned how to be an adult.
I deferred to him, so I never acquired the skills, the adult stuff.
Linens. Tools. Do I need tools? Like, a hammer? Is that something I should own?
I don’t fucking know. I’m thirty-one and making ramen for dinner, about to eat it out of a plastic bowl while watching a movie on my laptop in bed, my bed being a mattress on the floor.
I slip the straps off my shoulders and let the dress fall to my feet.
I pick it up and hang it in the closet, on one of the six plastic hangers I went out and bought after realizing I didn’t have any.
Ravi had the hangers. Nice ones. Velvet.
Why didn’t I buy myself nicer hangers? Now I regret not investing in the velvet ones.
Now I regret everything.
I can hear Cassie sighing inside my head. She lives up there, too, apparently.
“Go figure.”
A soft grunt emanates from the bathroom, where my cat is wedged between the toilet and the wall. “Archimedes. The reason you can live here, rent free, and that I feed you, scoop your litter, and take such good care of you, is so that you reciprocate with love and affection.”
Another grunt.
“Fine. I knew I should have gotten a dog.”
This gets him. He emerges from the bathroom to scowl at me. He crosses the apartment to the closet, where he hides behind a tower of boxes.
“Why are all my relationships so dysfunctional?” I ask him. “Is it me?”
I reach behind the boxes, attempt to pick him up, and he scratches me.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Maybe he’ll come to me if I’m patient. I abandon my ramen, let it congeal on the counter, flop down on my mattress and skim through movies on Netflix.
Again on Cassie’s recommendation, I try the first installment in a famous horror franchise.
A dumb slasher where pretty teenagers get eviscerated by some masked assailant who, from what I gather, is an interdimensional grim reaper.
I half watch while scrolling on Bumble, which is honestly scarier than any horror movie.
These dudes…The audacity. The delusion. The deranged hatchet-wielding teen murderer is a more eligible bachelor.
I drop my phone, slam my laptop shut, and roll out of bed. I pull on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Grab my purse, my life crisis cigarettes, and step into my boots. I leave my phone and take a book instead.
The sticky summer heat is overstaying its welcome, and it makes me ache for fall. There are no leaves on the ground yet, only trash. I kick through it on my way to the bar around the corner. They don’t know me there, but they will.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks, cool as can be with blue hair and a septum piercing.
“Whiskey sour, please.”
They nod.
Across the bar are two women seemingly on a date.
They sit close, elbows on the counter, faces almost touching.
They look so happy, breathing in each other’s air.
Their drinks are near-empty, glasses sweating, soaking the cocktail napkins underneath.
I inhale, hoping for a contact high. New crush, young love—the best drug on earth. And maybe the most dangerous.
So many years I spent on the couch next to someone I loved more than myself, someone I made the center of my universe, my whole life, distance growing when we weren’t paying attention, the chasm between cushions sucking up loose change and lint and romance and connection and we were just sitting there, fucking around on our phones or computers or watching TV, none the wiser.
Now I sit alone witnessing lovers, with my love lost, my universe laid to waste.
Now I sit crying in public at this bar I was hoping I could frequent. I wipe my tears on the backs of my wrists and open my book, pretend to read.
The bartender slides my drink across the counter.
“On the house,” they say, winking at me.
The kindness is too much, and I can’t be subtle about this. About the crying.
“Thank you,” I whimper.
They salute me and turn their back.
Now the lovers watch me. Probably full of pity. It’s easy to be smug when you’re newly in love. They must be thinking, Not me. Never me. Never us.
I know because I thought that once, too.
Kissing Ravi’s hands on our first date, as we walked through the West Village on our way to eat at a hole-in-the-wall place that served exclusively chicken fingers.
I remember picking our dipping sauces with such glee, discovering a mutual love of spicy mustard.
The establishment literally blew up a few weeks later thanks to an illegally installed gas line, killing two people and injuring many others, collapsing the building. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
I left Ravi thinking it was the right thing.
I left hoping to feel something again, but all I feel is pain.
And those two women, their legs tangled under the bar, hair spilling over each other’s shoulders, I envy them.
God, I envy them. For the joy they feel in this moment.
But it’s inevitable. If they feel sorry for me, I feel sorry for them.
Because love cannot be kept, cannot be sustained.
It cycles through. With the euphoric highs follow the brutal lows.
They will be me, someday, as I was them.
I down the rest of my whiskey sour and leave a twenty on the counter because I can’t accept the generosity of a free drink. I don’t deserve it. I smoke half a cigarette before going up to the apartment that is now mine. Archimedes is on the bed but evacuates to the closet when he sees me.
On my mattress, on the floor, I open my laptop and resume the movie. Watch a bunch of beautiful young people meet horrible fates. A hatchet to the head. An unfortunate fall into a sawmill. They run, they scream, they cry. They fight for their lives.
When the girl with hair almost as red as mine gets her hands hacked off while attempting to rip the mask off her assailant, I lean close to the screen and whisper, “Could always be worse.”