I interrupted to tell him he could still sleep with other people if that was his concern. He said it was not, and the tension crept up my back and into my shoulders. “You can do whatever you want,” I said, “but everything is easier if I can say, ‘This is my boyfriend.’” He asked why, and I sighed and described in great detail an orange-brown powder I often mixed with water and spread on toast in place of peanut butter.
When he did not understand what I was getting at, I picked up a dark chocolate and almond butter treat and showed it to him. “I pay extra to eat this instead of a Reese’s,” I said. “Like, what the fuck is a Snacking Cup?” He still did not get it, and I saw that the moment had arrived. I was being forced to take him on a tour of my insanities, to show him their contours and detail their depths. We were going to have a fight and he was going to hate it.
I explained to him that I was busting my ass every day to stay just a little bit beautiful, like maybe seven out of ten, because everyone was looking at me and feeling sorry for me, and I could not deal with their pity about my body or my face as well. “Do you remember when we ran into that girl Liz on the bus?” I asked. I told him Liz had given me a particular look when she realized I was with him, a look people used to give when they heard I was engaged, like they were proud and happy and, most importantly, not worried.
He was sitting in a chair by the window and had been jiggling his left leg up and down since I started talking about Liz. My head and ears were hot, and he said, “is this why you were talking about my coming to that wedding like I could have been anyone?” I said I liked him a lot, but it was complicated, and he sighed. The conversation had gotten away from us and now could only be as bad as it was or worse. We slipped into cliché, and he said maybe we needed some space, and I said it was a Me thing, not about him at all, and he said he wanted me to “let him in,” which unfortunately was the last straw.
I yelled, “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and he yelled, “why do you cry every time we have sex” and I screamed, “it’s BIOLOGY” and he quieted down and said he knew breakups were hard, that his had been the darkest period of his life, so he understood if I was struggling with my divorce. He got up from his chair and looked at me with almost comically sympathetic eyes, and I felt sick to my stomach and started saying things I didn’t mean.
Things like: “you don’t even know me” and “I’m completely over Jon” and “men who are obsessed with therapy are always the biggest psychos.” I said, “I looked up your ex and she’s so thin,” and he said, “so?” and I said, “so what are you doing with me” and he said, “why do you keep asking me that?”
My heart started beating too quickly, and I did not stop myself from saying, “if you’re so emotionally healthy, why is the first person you dated after your ex an emotionally fucked-up divorcée who cries all the time?” and “I don’t have to be a therapist to see that you have very intense commitment issues,” and “you’d be so scared if I was taking this even a little bit seriously. You’d probably have to run out and cheat on me too.”
After a very long and very awful silence, he said, “this is not an emotionally hygienic conversation,” and I told him he was not better than me because he paid someone to tell him his feelings were valid. He sighed, and I accused him of gaslighting me, and he started to define the word “gaslighting” and I absolutely lost my shit. I told him it was unfair that he could treat his girlfriend that way and have another woman line up right behind her. He asked me to please leave his relationship out of it, and I said, “why should I.”
My intestines twisted in on themselves, and I told him I knew dozens, maybe hundreds, of gorgeous, funny, smart, amazing women, none of whom needed a boyfriend, but none of whom could get a boyfriend, and the fact of that was slowly corroding their belief in themselves from within. “They’re not even allowed to talk about it,” I said. “We’re not allowed to talk about it. Even though the whole world is set up to cater to couples, and it’s more expensive and dangerous to be a woman on your own, and the only thing you’re unequivocally rewarded for is finding someone—a man, preferably—who wants to be with you. And if you can’t, you have to walk around knowing that people are judging you—often out loud, to your face—and blaming you, and finding you wanting, and you have to smile and say something bullshit like ‘I’m never lonely because I love my own company!’ or ‘this tastes JUST like peanut butter, only it’s half the calories!’”
Seeing that we had come back to the peanut powder, Simon grabbed his coat and said he was leaving. I sat on the edge of my bed, and my chest hurt and my head throbbed. I dripped big, stupid tears onto my duvet and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as he took his scarf and the extra toothbrush from my bathroom and said, in a resigned and gentle tone that made me want to rip my hair out, “I hope you have a nice time at the wedding.”
Chapter 14
The mornings were so dark it was almost impossible to get out of bed. Even if you did manage it, and sunlight did appear, it lasted for about three hours total, so if, for example, you went into a drab concrete building at three p.m. to lecture fifty-eight undergraduates about the Long Parliament’s banned plays, you would emerge to the same late-evening blackness you had woken up to, and the urge to never go outside again, or to move to Sweden where they understood how to manage these conditions, or possibly to end it all, was almost overwhelming.
I couldn’t tell if this semester felt so bad because of the weather, or my deteriorating personal life, or my students seeming genuinely dumber and less engaged than usual. I had been a little stern with them, maybe, but they needed discipline! This was a difficult field! The professor who wrote my letter of reference for grad school had attached a sticky note to the envelope warning me, and I quote, “The humanities are a sinking ship, just as you are starting to set sail”！
The students responded to my small acts of tough love by becoming somehow even less dedicated, arriving to class late, ice jangling in their keeper cups, teeth clinking against metal straws as they airily announced that they had not done the reading. There were a few kids who showed up early and read everything, but I didn’t like them either. I gave everyone an extension on their midterm papers and made my office hours appointment-only.
I sat at my desk on a long Wednesday and ate a pot of yogurt that claimed to provide an experience as delicious and indulgent as lime cheesecake. Products like this produced in me a deep melancholy, but also I could not stop buying them, in case one ever made good on its promise. Every time I ate a dessert-themed yogurt, I felt like a stupid little bitch.
I took out my phone and looked at my message history with Simon. After our fight he had been silent for four days, then sent a Long Text saying that although he cared about me and had enjoyed our time together, he did not think he was ready to be seriously involved with someone new, and he hoped I understood. I wrote back, ok. He wrote that he also hoped, after some time apart, that we could try to be friends. I wrote back, lol. He did not write back to that, and now it was over. It was the least fun way I had ever been proved right.