I took a picture of the page and composed an email to Jon about what such a diagram would look like of our relationship. Knowing I would never send it, I allowed myself to get a little flowery, describing a day on our honeymoon when crappy free wine and a frankly spectacular sunset had moved him to tell me that he felt “safe in my arms,” and I told him he was “my home,” and it didn’t feel hackneyed or embarrassing, because although it was without question both of those things, it was also, and more importantly, true.
Merris came back downstairs at ten minutes past midnight, two flutes of prosecco in her hands. She peeked around the half-open door to find me on the floor, surrounded by bits of cheap Scandinavian wood. I had a wet, red face and nine grapes in my mouth. Merris sighed. “I’ll get Lydia.”
I curled around the dog’s gargantuan body, letting her soft ears slip in and out of my hands. Merris had made an overture toward assembling the SKURNSK herself, then thought better of it; now she was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table while Lydia and I lay in bed.
“There is a touch of the analyst’s couch to this arrangement,” she said with a wry smile. Then, more seriously: “I hope you’re taking care of yourself.”
I told Merris I was practicing all the self-care I could handle. She scoffed.
“Please. I don’t mean your moon rocks or whatever you’ve done that got oil all over everything down here. That’s fine; so is the messaging. But at a certain point it becomes running, when most of moving on is just getting out of bed and plodding forward. Call it what you must, but you need to practice walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time. Not in an exciting way, where you’re in the thrall of some new person, or buying something outrageous, or terrorizing Jiro, but in the way you still have to go to work when you have a toothache.”
I told Merris it was fear of lectures like this that had stopped me from seeing an actual therapist.
She frowned and folded her hands in her lap, then looked at me over the rim of her glasses like a wizard in a children’s movie finding out the Potions Turret had been breached: “You’re not in therapy?”
I said I didn’t know why everyone was so obsessed with this, but no, I was not. I was not traumatized; mostly I was embarrassed.
“What about?” Merris asked.
I had a sip of her prosecco and thought about where to begin. I was embarrassed:
that I couldn’t do journaling properly;
that we hadn’t given back the money friends and family had given us at the wedding;
that everyone knew I was struggling—worse, that they knew I’d been rejected;
that I had been rejected by the person who knew me better than anyone else on earth, to whom I had shown every part of me, been as vulnerable as it was possible for me to be . . . and that person had decided I sucked;
that despite the fact that I technically had enough perspective to understand that none of my problems were “real” compared with any actual problems that could and did exist in other people’s lives, my pathetic non-problems still occupied my entire headspace and felt enormous, bordering on insurmountable;
that I would do anything to simply have been better at being married—to have properly applied myself toward being a sweeter, sexier, more fun, less challenging, properly good wife;
that this was quite a retrograde way to think, and probably Said Something About Me as a person;
that I was having increasingly persistent fantasies in which singing the correct song at karaoke would somehow fix it all;
that, that, that, that . . .
Sharing any of this out loud seemed like it would be the start of a Thing, and I didn’t want to subject Merris to any more of those, so I said, “You know what, it’s stupid,” and told her I was feeling tired. Although we both knew I was lying, she politely got up to leave. To my dismay, Lydia followed.
I turned off the lights and lay on my mattress in the dark. Last New Year’s Eve Jon and I had a massive fight, the cause of which I could not remember. It was a bad one, both of us retreating behind our favorite defense mechanisms: stony silence punctuated by a bitchy comment for the lady, furious yelling with a side of stomping around for monsieur. Not a cherished memory, exactly, but I wasn’t sure lying here alone having alienated a septuagenarian with my refusal to seek counseling was a better alternative. I looked over my email to Jon, added a few lines about forgiving him for whatever had made us so furious with each other on January 1, 2018, and sent it. When my phone buzzed minutes later, I scrambled over to it, but it was just someone I’d been on a few dates with asking if I was “out.”
As the night grew later, these kinds of texts rolled in from others, wishing me a Happy New Year and subtly or not subtly probing about my whereabouts—it was one thirty, any party prospects had long since been claimed. People were going through their mental Rolodexes, hoping not to greet the first morning of the new year alone. I ignored them, sent the group chat a picture of myself making a kissy face at two a.m., then at two thirty received these, from Amy:
U up?
hahaHA Saw the bread you posted on instagram. . . . . vERY sad
@party near ur house, COME!!! everyone sooooo chiLL :P
k random meant 2 say :） not :P
;）））））
Selected Advice from Amy’s Friends, in Ascending Order of Relevance to Me
“Being single this time of year is awful, isn’t it? I mean, if I think back to being single, this was the absolute worst time for it. That’s why it’s so important to remember that it could be worse. Even if it feels like the worst year of your life, it could always, always get worse. You’re divorced, sure, and that feels bad, but what if you drowned? Anyway, that’s my boyfriend in the blue, don’t flirt with him.”
“I think you can’t force it. Like you find love when you least expect it, right, so if you’re dating too much, and you’re trying trying trying, that’s gonna take too much out of you. The apps are a dead end, trust me. I’ve been with my husband for seven years, without going on them ever. He was my boss, and now we’re married. So . . . maybe try that?”
“Honestly don’t change a thing, babe. This is your year. This is your FUCKING YEAR. I swear, I have a sense for stuff like this, and I can TELL you are gonna be A-OK. You got this, girl! Have the baby, why not?!”
“You know what’s good for us pear-shaped gals? Wrap dresses. Sorry, what was the question? Mmm, yeah, there is dairy in that. Or gluten or something. One of the Bad Ones, for sure.”
“I think if you hate her Instagram Stories so much, just, like, stop watching them? But I think you should cut her some slack. It can’t be easy to raise a diabetic dog in a plant-based way.”
“When my mom’s friend got divorced, she honestly went nuts, but in this totally badass way where she quit her job and fucked off to Europe and, like, found herself, and had this steamy affair with this guy and had sex in this, like, little bamboo house, and . . . fuck, you know what, that was Elizabeth Gilbert, I think, not my mom’s friend Marie. But Marie did read her book, so that’s something you could try.”
“Don’t go in the upstairs bathroom, I—somebody—threw up all over it.”