One night I was in the den “stretching” after a bike ride, which mostly meant lying on the floor with my legs up the wall. Usually I spent this post-workout time trying to sit quietly with myself, but if I did that for too long I almost always became overwhelmed with memories of the phone calls and voicemails and texts to Jon, or the image of Merris on the ground outside the wedding, or how Amy’s face had looked when she told me I was being mean. It was horrible to remember these things. I knew, theoretically, that to err was human, but it sort of seemed like there should be a limit on how much erring one human could do.
I thought about that first night with Simon: how can you tell if something you did was a stupid mistake or a real sign of your character? I still didn’t know, but it was starting to feel like thinking about it all the time was not as useful as just trying not to do it again. I nudged my butt closer to the wall, pushing my legs up higher, and stretched my arms out on both sides until my left hand curled around my phone. Outside the door, I could hear my father plodding around, probably making some wild Dad Snack—he had recently bought us individual his ’n’ hers jars of applesauce—or watching the news on both the television and a nearby iPad.
I was looking over old photos I’d sent to/received from Simon when the screen went dark and his name appeared. I stared at my phone for a few confused seconds before realizing it was a call. Simon was calling me.
I held the phone to my ear tentatively, like it was a trick. “Hello . . . ?”
“Maggie, hi,” he said, his voice as warm and steady as I remembered. “Sorry to call. I was thinking about you and had an urge, but maybe I should have gone for a walk or something.”
I told him it was not a problem and asked how he was. He was good, of course. Work was busy. His parents had decided to move. He was tuning up his bike in preparation for spring. He missed me and wondered if we could get together and talk a few things over.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “About the last time we talked.”
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I feel like we really rushed into things. Like it was nice to meet you, and it was so nice to feel something other than incredibly bad about my breakup all the time, but I think I should have been better about keeping it casual, giving us some time to get to know each other. I guess I’d like to take you on a date and see if we want to go on another one a week later.”
“God,” I said. “Shit.”
“Oh, right, well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Never mind.”
“No, not shit like bad, shit like good.”
“That famous application of the word ‘shit.’”
I looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Well, I guess shit bad, because I can’t see you,” I said. “Helen and I have agreed to put that area of my life on hiatus.”
“Who’s Helen?”
He was going to love this. He was going to cream his jeans.
“She’s my therapist.”
Simon was quiet, a therapist-acquired trick if there ever was one. It worked, unfortunately, and I went on a long rant about how we were doing the smart thing. The mature thing, even! Ultimately, we were being wise. Yes, I liked him, and he liked me, but nipping that in the bud meant I did not have to disappoint Helen. It also meant neither of us had to disappoint each other, eventually. It had gone bad so quickly the first time.
“Sounds like decathecting to me,” said Simon.
“I don’t know what that is, but don’t tell me.”
“Okay. Well, call me if you change your mind.”
“Okay.”
Another pause.
“This is embarrassing,” I said, “but I haven’t been alone in a long time, and now I am, and if I don’t stay that way for a bit, I will never understand what it is I actually like or want or even, maybe, feel, so I have to be a careful little nun for a few weeks or months, and then who knows? Maybe I’ll have missed the window and every person worth dating will be taken and I’ll just stay alone for the rest of my life.”
“I think that’s unlikely,” said Simon. “But it sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.”
A non-negligible part of me was screaming, run, run toward the kindness the handsome man is offering, it may be the last time this ever, ever happens. But I had meant what I said. It was not a good time. I closed my eyes and said, “Thank you, Simon,” and I felt like I could hear him smile.
After he hung up, I looked up the word “decathecting,” then spent twenty minutes trying to compose a tweet listing the events of a decathect-lon—like a decathlon, but for protecting your emotional sanity. I did not even save it to drafts.
I wandered into the kitchen and told my father I was experimenting with interiority. He looked up from the crossword only briefly. “Oh?”
“This sounds very basic,” I said, “but you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.”
“‘Teaspoon,’” he said, filling in 10-down. “That’s lovely, sweetheart. As you know, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”
I told him my discovery had inspired some fruitful experimentation. My options, when I had a thought, experience, or god forbid, a feeling, were to write it down and resist the impulse to text or tweet it, or to mentally note what I was feeling and—and this was the thing that seemed impossible, possibly even fake—let it pass.
“Well,” he said, counting out the letters in the word “petrichor.” “Could have saved us all a lot of trouble by discovering this in high school, but better late than never.”
“I’m serious,” I said, grabbing some milk from the fridge. I told him I’d realized recently that almost nothing had ever happened to me that I had not shared with someone else. This had, after all, been one of the big appeals of marriage: somebody to say all my stupid bullshit to or run my decisions past, someone to listen to me forever. I poured the milk over an enormous bowl of cereal, letting it crackle and hiss before digging my spoon in and taking a bite.
“Of course, the whole point of a relationship is you’ve also got to listen to—pardon my French—their stupid bullshit,” said my dad. “I assume you struggled in this area.”
I ignored this, though he was not wrong.
“I saw Mom yesterday,” I said. “She’s still mad at you.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “I was kind of an asshole.”
I asked what had happened between them, really. He told me he was almost finished with the crossword and would prefer I experimented further with interiority.
“Aside from the fact that it’s none of your business,” he said, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I thought I did, at the time, but the further I get from it the more I see how little I understood what was going on in there. My feelings about it and your mother’s feelings about it are very different. Neither of us is exactly right, but both versions are accurate.”
I said this was disappointing to hear. Distance was supposed to give you more perspective, not less.