6. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
The sublet is small enough that I can stand in the middle of it and touch nothing and still hold all of it at once in my eyes.
It came furnished, which is a generous word for a couch that’s seen things and a coffee table with a ring stain someone else made and a bed that squeaks if you so much as think about rolling over.
I found it fast, faster than a place this close to the Hills has any business coming up, because Trisha knew someone who knew someone and I signed the sublet the same afternoon I saw it, before the city could remember to be expensive at me again.
The city is expensive up here. Four hundred square feet a short walk off Franklin costs what normal people pay for an actual home.
So I didn’t escape the glamour, not really.
I just traded my old life for a place around the same Hills, close enough that on a clear night I can still see the sign lit up over the ridge, reminding me exactly whose town I’m still living in.
The whole place would fit inside the kitchen of the house I left.
There’s one window that gets good afternoon light and one that looks at a brick wall, and the radiator makes a sound at night I’m told I’ll get used to, and the shower takes a full minute to decide whether it’s in the mood to be warm.
I love it so much it’s embarrassing.
I unpack slowly, because there’s no reason to rush, because nobody’s waiting for me to be done and nobody’s going to walk in and ask why my things are all over the floor. I hang my own clothes in a closet the size of a phone booth.
The whole time there’s a feeling moving around in my chest that took me an embarrassingly long while to name, and when I finally do, standing there holding a mug of tea I made myself, it lands with a small quiet shock.
I can breathe.
That’s the thing. I am standing in four hundred square feet of somebody else’s furniture with a squeaky bed and a temperamental shower, and finally, my lungs are working at full capacity.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
I spent three years suffocating slowly in a house so big you could get lost looking for a person who was never home, and I had to shrink my entire life down to a shoebox in the middle of the glossiest zip code in the country before I could finally take a full breath.
Same town, same lights. A tenth of the square footage and all of the air.
It doesn’t even feel reckless, which is the part that tells me it’s right. I keep waiting for the panic to arrive but it doesn’t come. Because somewhere underneath the last year, I think I’ve been walking toward this exact small room the whole time.
Every lonely dinner was a step. Every cold morning. I just didn’t know that’s where my feet were taking me until I got here.
I sit down on the edge of the squeaky bed.
My body does a strange thing, or rather, it fails to do a strange thing.
For three years, every time I’ve stilled, some part of me has been reaching, tuned to a door, listening for a key, half-braced for the man who might finally come home. I catch myself doing it now, out of habit, that old animal alertness.
And there’s nothing to listen for. No key coming, no door.
I let my shoulders drop.
Grief is here too, I can feel it sitting in the room with me, weighted and patient.
But it’s not alone anymore. Relief moved in with it, and the two of them are going to be roommates for a while, I can tell, and I decide I’m okay with that. I’ve lived with worse arrangements.
I’ve had my phone off since I walked out. I finally turn it on to check that the rent transfer went through, because being free doesn’t exempt you from being an adult, and the second the screen lights up it starts convulsing.
Missed calls. A whole column of them, all Hendrix’s. Texts stacked under each other, previews I don’t let myself open, the first words visible and then cut off.
I look at his name repeated down the screen, over and over, a pulse that won’t quit, and I feel the ache come up, real and physical, because leaving a man doesn’t turn off the part of you that loved him.
It just takes away the place to put it.
I don’t open a single one. I’m not being cruel. I just know myself, and I know that if I start reading, I’ll start explaining, and if I start explaining, I’ll start hoping, and I have finally, finally gotten out of the business of hope.
After I thumb over to my banking app, I’m about to turn the whole thing off again when the notifications start piling in from the other apps, the ones I never should have let send me anything.
They stack and stack, and I go to swipe them all away without reading, and one of them catches under my thumb on its way past.
@reel_deal_gossip: OMG. OMG you guys. I THINK SOMEONE FINALLY FOUND WHO HENDRIX CARVER’S FIRST LOVE IS ???? thread below
And I know I shouldn’t. I know it the way you know the stove is hot. My thumb opens it anyway.
The thread is long.
People have been busy. Someone cross-referenced the college years, someone else found an old tagged photo, and they’ve built the whole case with the giddy thoroughness of strangers who have decided your life is a puzzle they’re entitled to solve.
At the center of it, in photo after photo, is a woman.
@reelgoss: her name is Bridget Walton. rising Hollywood actress.
GUESS WHERE she went to school ??@lanternlight: no bc they were at the same college the same YEARS this is not a coincidence@sad_at_the_movies: she’s literally stunning?
? like of course he wrote a book about her.
@onlyhere4drama: u guys crazy for supporting this. his wife IS BEAUTIFUL btw
I make myself look at her.
Bridget Walton.
Fate must be laughing. It took me a second to place why she was familiar, until I realized.
That woman, the woman on the screen… when I was buying him cake.
Funny coincidence, huh?
She’s beautiful in the specific luminous way of women whose faces are their profession, and the pictures they’ve dug up are all soft light and film-set glamour, and people are stringing them together with mine and finding mine wanting. I can see them doing it in real time in the replies.
The muse and the wife. The love story and the arrangement. The woman he chose to write three hundred pages about and the woman he was handed by a contract.
The ache in my chest doubles, folds over on itself, because it’s one thing to know abstractly that there was a woman before me. It’s another to watch the whole internet fall in love with her on my behalf.
Fortunately, the phone rings in my hand, an actual call, and I’m so deep in the thread that I jump hard enough to nearly drop it.
Trisha. I answer before I’ve decided to, because it’s the one name on this phone right now that doesn’t come with a knife attached.
“Please tell me you’re not sitting in that new place doomscrolling,” she says, in lieu of hello.
“I am absolutely not doing that.”
“You’re such a liar. I can hear it in your voice.” A pause, softer. “How are you, Imo? Really. And don’t give me the fine. I helped you carry a mattress up three flights of stairs yesterday, I’ve earned the real answer.”
“I don’t know.” I set the phone thread down, screen against my knee, so I stop looking at Bridget Walton’s face. “That’s honestly the truest thing I’ve got. I’ve been here half a day and I feel about six different things an hour and none of them stay long enough to introduce themselves.”
“That tracks. You just turned your whole life upside down. You’re allowed to be a mess about it.” She says it warmly, no judgment in it. “The place okay, though? It’s not a total dump? Because I know it went fast and I basically strong-armed you into it.”
“It’s perfect,” I say, and I mean it, and my voice goes wobbly on the word. “Genuinely, Trish. Thank you. I don’t know how you found it in just a few days. I don’t know what I would have done.”
“You’d have figured it out. You always figure it out.” A beat, and then, carefully, the way you approach a thing you’re not sure you’re allowed to touch, “So what happens now? Not the internet stuff. The real stuff. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to figure that out too.” I look around the small bright room. “One thing at a time. I’m here. That’s step one. I did the impossible-feeling part, so.”
“And your parents?” she asks, gentler still. “Because, Imo, no offense, but I remember your mother. I remember what she’s like. She is not going to just let you…”
“I know.” My mother’s face rises up, cool and disappointed at the head of that dinner table, and I push it back down. “I know exactly what she’s like. I’ll deal with her when I have to. Not today.”
“Okay.” Trisha lets it go, the way she always does.
“I’m coming to see you this week, I don’t care what you say, I’m bringing wine and terrible snacks and we are going to sit on your sad little couch and not talk about any of it if you don’t want to.
And you call me. Any hour. If it gets loud in your head, you call me, I mean it. ”
“I will.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I’ll call you, Trisha. I promise.”
“Better.” Her voice gentles one more notch. “You did a brave thing, you know. I know it doesn’t feel brave. It feels like falling. But I watched you shrink for years, Imo, and today you’re bigger than I’ve seen you in a long time. Hold onto that.”
I hang up holding onto it, or trying to, the warmth of her lasting about as long as it takes me to set the phone down and remember there’s a television bolted into the corner of this little room, and nothing but my own head to fill the silence if I don’t.
Eventually, I finish unpacking because I need my hands to do a task that isn’t holding a phone, and when the last box is broken down and stacked by the door, I sink onto the tired couch and turn on the television just to put a voice in the room that isn’t the one in my head.
I don’t choose the channel. It’s already there, whatever the last tenant left it on, some glossy evening program with a white couch and softer lighting than any real room has ever had. I almost change it. My thumb is on the button.