I think possibly my husband has stolen our cat, or is going to move somewhere new without telling me and take her with him, or simply hates my guts and wants me to struggle, or the cat is a hostage, or this is an elaborate scheme to win me back, or maybe he’s gone insane, and this is a cry for help, and I need to find h—
“Not much.”
Olivia laughed: “Same old, same old!” She said this with enthusiasm, like it was a fun new phrase she was trying out. I tried to turn back to my computer, but she was clearly in the mood for a chatty little break. The thought crossed my mind that she might have come in here, with this attitude, on purpose, to cheer me up—horrific.
The problem was that Olivia was a wonderful, considerate person, and she always brought extra almonds in case anyone wanted some, and she’d never asked me to do a 10k with her even though she was always doing them and had once asked Merris if she’d like to join. Merris had not joined, and we sometimes had a little laugh about the Pocket Eggs, but it was not pleasurable or even really possible to dislike Olivia, so you had to take the eggs as part of it.
“。 . . which isn’t terrible or anything, but it’s not my job to field those kinds of questions when Google would answer faster than me,” she finished, making me realize I hadn’t been listening, just staring at her hands picking haphazardly at an eggshell. It was not peeling easy—the egg beneath was pocked and uneven, the shell chipping and pulling little chunks of white along with it. I felt sick.
Olivia continued: “There’s this one girl who emails me almost every day, and on the one hand, I empathize, and I hope she’s got friends or loved ones or, you know, people in her life, but it’s not really my job to be there for her like that . . .”
Was this because I emailed his parents? It was only to say thank you for welcoming me into their family, and that I would miss them, and that if they wanted to hang out sometime, surely we still could? What was so wrong with that? They hadn’t responded, and I’d only followed up once.
Olivia was still going. “I’m being so mean . . . but if I responded to every lonely student with no boundaries, it would be another full-time job, and I basically already have three. Are you sure you’re okay?” Olivia seasoned her second egg with a limp little salt and pepper packet that was also in the bag. “Can I get you a coffee or something?”
She took a big bite and I imagined her at home, wiped from a day of mountain biking with her fiancé, filling a twelve-gallon pot of water to boil a thousand eggs.
“I know you’re going through a hard time,” she said.
I shrugged and said I was okay, a bit bored and broke mostly. “Don’t worry,” I said, adopting a faux-brave expression. “I’m only suicidal on Mondays.”
Olivia’s face was suddenly very grave.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Olivia folded the plastic bag the eggs came in and put it back in her pocket.
“Change can be so difficult,” she said. “Are you getting out of the house? Seeing friends?”
I said something about doing my best. Her head was tilted so far to the side it looked uncomfortable.
“Listen, if it ever feels like too much, if you ever start to feel like you might, you know, if you need someone, in an . . . emergency situation . . .”
“Jesus, Olivia, it was a joke,” I said. “Come on.”
Olivia swallowed. “Of course it was,” she said. “But you have to do your due diligence with these things . . . and you’ve been looking so . . . Anyway. If you ever want to talk to someone, for any reason, I’m here. Just don’t tell my students, right?”
She tittered nervously and turned to leave, looking back at me with such genuine concern I blushed. I turned to focus on my computer. Dozens of Drew Barrymores grinned back at me, sticking out their tongues and flashing David Letterman. They looked good, but their eyes were empty.
I tried to remember the last time I’d been in touch with Jon. A voicemail a week ago, because Bean Pun, our favorite coffee shop, was turning into a Starbucks. Text messages the week before that said, i don’t know what happened to us, then sorry, that was stupid, then haha, hope you’re well!! But what had happened to us? Weren’t we going to do this the nice way? At the very least, wasn’t the cat conversation fucking ongoing?
He didn’t get to slink away in the night with the animal I had jokingly but also incredibly seriously referred to as my only child. I would not be denied a final boop on her soft nose, or a bittersweet moment where Jon and I wished each other well and exchanged platitudes about growth, where maybe he wistfully kissed my forehead. We had decided it was over, yes, but we were supposed to work together to end it properly.
Merris came in, wearing one of her jazzier sweater shawls. She was holding a small baggie of eggs. “You have unsettled Olivia,” she said, putting them down in front of me. “Apparently B12 will help.”
“He took the cat,” I said.
Merris patted my back, an uncharacteristically maternal gesture. “Well,” she said, “at least you won’t be coming to work with vomit on your shirt anymore. Not cat vomit, at any rate.” She chuckled, and it really felt like I was going to laugh too—the sound started the right way. Instead, I let out a loud and unexpected wail and felt myself crumple in half. My head dropped first, then the rest of my body, a little pile of woman where a competent human had been. Merris seemed to be expecting this, pulling my head to her shoulder with one hand and closing my office door with the other.
I had cried a lot since Jon moved out, but this was different, intense and animal. It was all spilling out, at work, to my boss: Jon’s refusal to return my calls, my relief that he was leaving and immediate regret when he did, the Cointreau and burgers and reckless credit card activity, the hours on Instagram and the impossible rent and the rapidly dwindling bank account. The fact that my parents were hours away, that I knew my friends were already finding me a bit much, that my lawyer seemed unconcerned about the biggest decision in my young life, that I was writing poems again. And, worst of all, the knowledge that none of these were real problems, that spending every moment dwelling on them probably made me a very bad or at least preposterously boring person who would never accomplish anything or help anyone, who would die of climate-related flooding or cancer or famine, alone and hated.
I wiped my nose, and the silence of a crossed boundary settled.
“Well,” said Merris, before I could finish the apology my mouth was forming. “I hope you can take some comfort in the idea that I think you did the right thing. You’re not supposed to say that, in case a couple gets back together, but that doesn’t seem much of a risk here.”
I told her I was continually surprised by how horrible I felt. When my first boyfriend and I broke up, at eighteen, it cured my fear of death—eternal nothingness seemed preferable to the cavity wound in my chest that Jason had left when he chose a different university （despite an express agreement to move to Toronto together!）。 I’d assumed, a full decade later, that heartbreak would feel different, that I would have acquired some skills to manage it with grace and dignity. But no. In a post-breakup email, I’d told Jason it felt like he’d ripped open my rib cage and shit inside me. This felt almost exactly the same—worse, if anything, because of its familiarity—and here I was, crying at my desk in the middle of the day, being given pity eggs by younger colleagues.