Spiltsville
It’s officially When Harry Met Sally season, and for the second year in a row, a man is leaving me for Japan.
Japan, you man stealing slut!
In all fairness, I know the situation is both entirely different and unrelated, as last year I was the offshoot fling of a mid-life crisis, a far cry from the loving and easy relationship I find myself in now. But still. TWICE??
I try to stave off Fall. If I don’t touch the sweaters in the back of my closet, maybe it means I won’t need them. I end up shivering my way through an outdoor screening of Eat, Pray, Love (one of the worst movies I have ever seen, by the way). I do not touch pumpkin spice anything. Laundry piles up around my apartment. I don’t take my bags out of boyfriend’s place. I don’t stop time. I just stay messy.
I re-read the Substack I wrote this time last year.
“I leave his apartment around 11 and walk through Hudson Yards. I buy an overpriced lemonade (because I can) and make my way to the A train. I wish I had a sweater, but I’m also relishing the riverside breeze after months and months of sweating my way through Midtown and Hells Kitchen.
I decide to start running.
I decide to eat fruit.
I decide to drink water.
I decide to become a regular at my farmer’s market.”
I did some of those things. I did less of those things than I wanted to. I was in the middle of a long-winded downward spiral and didn’t know it, and would continue to crash and burn until it was undeniable. I’ve changed so much about myself in a year, and although I know I can attribute so much of it to boyfriend, he’s always the one that tells me it’s all myself. That it’s always been me, and he’s just there to help.
It’s part of the reason we’re breaking up. I still have so much to learn about myself and I want to know that I have the capability to do it alone.
We go on one last date, a marathon starting at our favorite restaurant and ending at our favorite bar, hitting (almost) every place we’ve ever been together. The plan was to break up afterwords, but we just pretend to forget to and keep seeing each other until he leaves.
How are you feeling?
Fine. Nothing. Is that bad? Shouldn’t I be feeling something?
I tell a story at the Moth. I eat my weight in Caesar salad. I skip my workout class 4 days in a row. I catch a cold (a parting gift boyfriend gave to me). I wake up the morning he’s supposed to leave and sob in his bed for an hour. He holds me. We order açaí bowls, because NOTHING cures self-inflicted depression like $20 worth of fruit. We watch Conclave. I insist on popcorn and eat so much I get nauseous.
I sit next to him on the subway, trying to not to throw up. I can’t look at him. He keeps saying that everything will be ok, and I know he’s right, but right now “okay” feels unbearably far. When I pictured my fabulous single life, it was so removed from this moment that the two seemed unrelated. Now I realized they were inexorably linked. All the things I’m desperate to know about myself come from who I am after this.
I get off the train at 42nd Street. I stand in the subway station and wait for the doors to close, watching him and his suitcase. The subway doors do not close. Boyfriend notices me watching. This is not as cute as I imagined, more awkward and stalker-ish than romantic. He laughs at me, before he stands up and walks towards the subway doors. I run to him and we kiss, just like they do in the movies. We pull apart and stand watching each other. The doors still do not close, because of course they don’t. When has anything worked out the way I planned it?
I snot and sniff and sneeze my way through the weekend and avoid calling my mother. I look through my camera roll and pick out the most marketable pictures of myself for my future dating profile. I don’t make one. I look at my favorite pictures of him and resist the urge to call.
I make a plan for the kind of girl I want to be. The day after we break up I go somewhere new and do something that really scares me and I have a blast. That Sunday, I go to Trader Joe’s with Stefanie and buy a pumpkin spice candle AND body scrub. I scrub and Swiffer my room within an inch of its life. I buy new sheets. I decide to get up at 6 on Monday morning and run around and finish all the paperwork I’ve put off and do my laundry and eat something with chickpeas in it for lunch.
Then I look at my phone.
“Hey so. Stuff changed. I’m around now until October. If you’d like to, I’d like to see you until then. Or like once or twice between now or then. No pressure if you don’t wanna”
I don’t think before answering.
“Do you want to come over?”
Because when has anything worked out the way I planned it?
Alright I'll admit it: the last part gave me chills.
❤️❤️