creative nonfiction: CHILL

He’s seeing other people, but it’s not cheating. We haven’t had the “we’re exclusive” talk, or anything. In fact, we’ve pretty much just been binge-watching The Great British Bake-off on my futon about once a week. Some Tuesday night, when we were wine drunk and pretty deep into the Patisserie Technical Challenge, he brought up the fact that we only hang out when it’s dark outside, and have never been seen in public together.

“You know what,” he said. “One of these days I’m gonna take you to a restaurant. A restaurant with a waiter. A restaurant with a waiter and silverware and cloth napkins.”

“Damn,” I said. “That would be a bold move for us.”

“Cloth napkins are essential,” he said.

What can I say, a bitch was hooked.

It should also be mentioned have no proof he’s dating other people; I just have a feeling, and that makes me feel crazy, and the feeling grows a hell of a lot stronger when he doesn’t text me for a few days, and that makes me feel even crazier.

This morning is no different than any other of the past several weeks; it’s 9:35 and then 9:37 and then 9:40 and I’m clicking the little circle on my cracked iPhone, resisting the urge to slide to unlock, but not well, until it’s 9:41 and I’ve slid to unlock, checking the message app as if the magic of Apple technology just decided not to function this morning, and he really did text me, but I just wasn’t notified on the home screen.

He has read receipts, which might as well be the very end of my existence on this earth. He either read my last text and didn’t reply—Read 10:57pm—or is consciously avoiding opening it so he doesn’t have to respond—Delivered. Either way it’s diabolical. Today we’re at Delivered. A casual Twitter stalk reveals that he’s on his phone, and is trying to kill a spider with his roommate. No one Tweets on their computer, right? Whatever, we’re millennials, of course he’s on his phone.

By lunchtime I have sworn off his foolery, and men in general.

“I’m just done,” I tell my work-friend Laurel. “I cannot feel like this anymore.”

Laurel is very supportive, but in a work-friend kind of way.

“You can definitely do better,” she says. “Like, this kid needs to take you on a real date.”

“I mean, I get that we haven’t decided anything, and there are no expectations or whatever, but I have a right to be mad when he just like, doesn’t text me back for three days, right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” says Laurel. “That’s just common courtesy.”

At 12:53, he hits with me a text:

what are you up to tonight?

(I miss you)

I open it immediately, and cringe in the best way, but because I’m not a psychopath with read receipts, but still a psychopath who can play this game, I wait exactly twenty-seven minutes before replying.

1:20 pm:

cleansing myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka

This is a very clever reference to the movie we watched on our first date. And then:

(I miss you too)

Because I do.

Sometimes I am so afraid of how I feel when I’m around him and when I’m not around him that I realize I’m almost thinking of our relationship, if you could even call it that, in the past tense; I’m looking at us from the future, remembering all the ways in which he will love me and in which he will hurt me.

I can only explain it like this: you know when you’re deep in the throes of fresh heartbreak, when the blood from your open chest wound is only just starting to clot, and every casual Facebook stalk of a recent ex is just cause for crying in the office bathroom, because he posted something, not even with some new girl or about how much he’s feelin’ the #singlelyfe, but something, anything he might’ve done or said that has absolutely nothing to do with you anymore, meaning he is absolutely fine saying and doing and posting things without your input, and more importantly, without you? In those crisp fall days of raw anguish, there are still moments when you can’t help but plunge back into old patterns of remembering happy memories as happy memories, even when you know that, post-breakup, they’re supposed to immediately turn into sore and grimy reminders of the love you once had and have now lost.

Before the happy memories turn into shitty ones, before the songs you listened together more than a couple times are expunged from your iTunes library, there’s a true golden hour of time, maybe it’s when you’re waking up in the morning, or dozing off in front of your computer at the end of the workday, that these memories are pulled from in the pleasant, dreamy sector of your long-term memory, replayed in a soft, rose-colored light, maybe even making you smirk at something so fucking cute and dumb that he said to you, that cute dumb idiot, before you quietly pack those memories away on the opposite side of your brain, the storage unit you’ll pull from when you’re calling your best friend crying at two in the morning a week later.

This is the way in which I think about him, now before he’s ghosted or faded out on me or even straight up broken my heart. The snapshots of our (non)relationship are rosy memories I’m waiting for him to turn gray. 

The first and last of these memories take place on the same street in Santa Monica.

The First:

It’s four in the morning and I’m leaving his apartment, after our first date, if you can call it that; we went to some fratty bar and made fun of the frat bros and didn’t buy anything, then we watched Purple Rain in his bed until I was afraid I might fall asleep, even though he said I could sleep over. He walks me to my car and for that minute and a half standing beside it, I regret ever meeting him and I regret not sleeping over all at the same time. And when he kisses me, I am supremely aware of the watchable-ness of this moment, as if anyone is awake to see it. What we might’ve looked like, in the middle an empty neighborhood at 4:12 the morning.  For a reason I can’t explain, I am thinking about how I could be that person watching; how easily I could’ve been some girl who’d rented a room in one of these depressing little houses, unable to sleep some Wednesday and on Tumblr or whatever at four in the morning, looking out my window, and seeing two people kiss for the first time in the middle of the fucking street. Equal parts intrigued and nauseated by the sight, I think. I want so bad for us to be watchable, to be watched, by the insomniacs and night crawlers on that street that night, by the passengers in a plane that sail through open sky above us, and by that girl, that might’ve been me.

The Last:

It’s three in the afternoon and I’m leaving his apartment, after another whatever-you-wanna-call-it night of the fitted sheets being pulled off the sides of his extra-long twin mattress and watching consecutive episodes of a show we’ve both already seen. The traffic has been pulled out into the side streets, so we can’t stand in the middle of the road this time, but instead we’re pressed up against my car, which is in badly in need of a car wash, and that’s what I’m thinking about when he’s kissing me goodbye. Because that’s it what it is this time—a kiss stuck somewhere in between goodbye peck and deep kiss, but that is prolonged by obligation and not much else. Now the watchable-ness of the situation is everywhere; it’s in the people settling into their afternoons on creaky futons and in too-small kitchens, it’s in the cars that idle, standstilled by the rest of the idle cars, just a few feet away from us. It’s the sluggish light of late summer sun, something about it being a Friday, and too lazy of one, and the way his eyes don’t linger on me, on any part of me, the way that they used to, that I don’t want anyone to see us. The eyes that I know and feel are like peeping toms through a bedroom window; they’re seeing something they don’t understand, and they don’t deserve, or maybe it’s that we don’t deserve their gaze, not even a glance. I can see the girl that might’ve been me watching with a Friday-afternoon tired judgment and jealousy and sympathy, but even she doesn’t get it, and she won’t, not until she’s being touched on a too-sunny afternoon by someone who doesn’t really want to touch her anymore.

Okay, that last one hasn’t actually happened. Yet.

I have fashioned an age-old tale of a good and deep heartbreak with this one. Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt this kind of idiotic early Taylor-Swift-song type of crush in years, and if this one doesn’t work out, I may be destined for a lifetime of solo Netflix & Chill sessions. Maybe it’s because I am some kind of future-seer of fuckboys and I’m just warning myself of imminent pain. Maybe it’s because I am just lowkey terrified of love and commitment and all that bullshit as every fucking person on this planet, despite my untiring guffaw at the “fear of commitment” excuse I’ve heard from men my entire life. Yeah, I think that might actually be a thing.

He calls me at exactly 6:30 pm, which is exactly when I get off work, and this shocks me so much (both that he called me—I think you can tell he’s pretty solidly a Texter—and that he remembered what time I get off) that I almost forget to answer.

“Hey,” I say, and my voice sounds all funky, like I was thinking about How to Answer the Phone in A Chill Way, because I was.

“Do you want to go to a restaurant with cloth napkins?” he says.