“You put a ring on someone’s finger! If it meant more to you, if you wanted to start a life with me today, you wouldn’t be starting one with someone else,” I said, forcefully.
“Goddamnit Maggie, I thought you were turning me down on your thirtieth birthday,” he said, exasperated. His voice got quieter. “After that night, I thought that for you, the idea of me was always going to be better than the real thing. And then you told me—” He stopped for a moment, words stuck in his throat. “When I proposed to Cecily, I’d…I didn’t think I was a possibility for you. I’d put it out of my head. What am I supposed to do now, knowing that we should be together? You waited until after I’d put a ring on my girlfriend’s finger to tell me that for the last however many years, you were in love with me. And you knew I was in love with you.”
I couldn’t speak, tears were everywhere.
“I would have walked away from anyone for you. Anytime. Anyone,” he said, inches from my face, tears still holding tight in his eyes.
I let my lips part, knowing that the result might throw dirt on our coffin.
“And now?” I cracked, my voice quivering.
He swallowed hard and looked to the darkening sky before his eyes came back down to mine. His lips searched for words, even though it was clear he already had them. He just wasn’t sure how to make the delivery.
“I’m getting married.” He said it like an exhale that hurt.
I felt my chest caving in, my breathing turning rapid.
“That was always your answer, wasn’t it? She was your endgame when your feet led you to this park, when you saw me standing here, and you kissed me anyway.”
I was fully aware of what we had just done. The kiss would live inside me forever, filling me up and then bleeding me dry. From this day forward, “Crash Into Me” would land like tiny paper cuts all over my skin. Silent tears rolled down my chin as I stepped back from him.
Hope is The Unknown wrapped in a safety net. It’s wading through rough waters, clinging to the possibility that a big wave might push your shivering, tired body onto the balmy, sun-kissed shoreline, and ignoring the fact that a big wave might sneak up and drown you. When sparkly hope gives way to a cruel reality, when you can nearly taste the shoreline but you’re caught in the undertow, it’s heartbreak.
I felt my chest split in two. The possibility of Garrett was one of the things that I had allowed to pull me further away from reaching the shore, from finding the right man to start a family with. I believed no one else measured up to him, so I didn’t give myself a fair shot to test the hypothesis. There was a part of me that believed he’d show up on my thirty-fifth birthday and put it all on the line. He’d kiss me, and that kiss would be the beginning of the rest of our lives, just like I had promised. Instead, it was confirmation that Garrett and I fit perfectly, but we would never be. I was thirty-five, and the road less traveled was officially a dead end.
9
TWENTY-SEVEN
I SUCKED THE FRESH BLUE ink off my index finger, rereading the outro. It was beautiful, but thanks to the swaying tour bus, I was certain I wouldn’t be able to decipher my jittery handwriting come tomorrow.
Twisting tides breaking your fisherman’s bend
I like it when I’m afraid of how it ends
I grinned, steadied the open notebook on my bare thigh, and reinked the lyrics as the minor key danced in my brain. The tour bus’s bunk alley had become my favorite place to write. It was a warm cocoon: velvet blackout curtain around my twin-size bed, the lingering smell of frequent palo santo cleansings, and miles of blurry fields and crisp stars out my window. The road swayed my body like a hammock—ideal for focusing and sleeping, not so much for eligible penmanship.
I glanced up from the rewritten words, seeing my phone brighten under my notebook’s leather binding. My heart stayed neutral as I read Garrett’s name atop the lock screen.
When are you getting back here already? It’s peak NYC. Sheep Meadow awaits!
I clicked on his text’s accompanying photo: a picture of barely clothed New Yorkers sprawling all over Sheep Meadow’s green lawn—enjoying the first warm day of the year. I spotted Summer in the corner of the photo, flipping the camera off. While I was on tour, Summer had invited Garrett to come to one of her client’s fashion shows, and apparently, they shut down the after-party together, getting happy-drunk and sharing a cab ride home. And then they started going for coffee. And now my two best friends were sitting in Central Park annoying the hell out of each other in a loving way. I smiled big, comforted by the idea of them becoming friends. I took in the photo, reminded of the first time I saw Garrett running through that patch of grass.
I didn’t see Garrett for three weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday. I couldn’t drag my body through the front door of a TJ’s on our Monday nights, as the humiliation and unspoken awkwardness from our almost-kiss and the fact that he’d gotten back with his girlfriend within the hour played like a horror movie in my mind. I was furious with both myself and him, but I recognized he didn’t do anything wrong. He thought I was turning him down, and so he turned to the next best thing. Three weeks after that mess, he texted me a picture of a bunch of his friends with Solo cups on blankets, sunbathing in Sheep Meadow. Come hang, we’ll be here all day! his text read. He was the bigger person—the person willing to blow past the awkwardness for our friendship. Mortification left my body, I grabbed a light jean jacket, and ran out the door. I walked over to the red plaid blanket from the photo, searching for Garrett, when I got a tap on my shoulder. “You must be Maggie!” said this blond, bubbly, wide-eyed angel. It was Quinn, his on-again girlfriend. With her four words, my heart thudded against my rib cage: I was officially in the Friend Zone. I wasn’t a threat to his girlfriend—I was someone Garrett told his girlfriend about. I had two choices: embrace my role as the next best thing, or walk away. As my heart sank, I saw Garrett running yards ahead, shirtless, jumping in the air to catch a Frisbee like a golden retriever. He turned around and locked eyes with me, grinning from ear to ear as he swooped the sweaty hair out of his face. My body lit up at his smile, and I decided a life without Garrett would ache more than a life spent wanting more from him. Since that moment, I’d met three women who hugged me just as tightly as Quinn, squealing a “You must be Maggie!” in my direction. With each introduction, the pain lessened.
I grinned at the photo of Sheep Meadow, and I curled my body up to the bus’s window, snapping a picture outside of the sun setting on West Virginia farmland.
I’ll be back next week! Keep Central Park warm for me, I wrote, attaching the picture.
I was officially in remission from Garrett Scholl, and my entire body was better for it. Wanting something you can’t have is an all-consuming ache, and if you’re not careful, it can darken your insides. It had been a couple years since my last pine—since I closed my eyes and fantasized about standing next to him in a courthouse or pushing out his blue-eyed babies. I was also incredibly busy, which helped with rumination. Nothing is worse for heartache than idle time.
I was opening for the Violet Bride—a beloved indie band with a small but loyal following. I had made friends with a booking manager in New York City, Josh Wheeler, who knew to call me whenever opening acts backed out anywhere around the tri-state area. It meant playing at midsize venues and selling my demo with the bigger band’s merch—which was incredible exposure and much less horrible pay than I was used to. So, when the Violet Bride’s opening band announced they were breaking up—one month before they were set to leave on their North American tour—Josh sent my YouTube channel their way. I brought my guitar to their lead singer’s apartment at two in the morning, belted six songs for the three-person band, and they responded by telling me to clear my schedule from February to April.