The Ex Vows

by Jessica Joyce

Needless to say, it aggrieves me that I can’t list my way out of my recent realization: my closest friends have fully shifted into phases I’m not in—falling in love, cohabitating, building social circles with other happy couples that make me the extra wheel, a feeling I avoid as resolutely as Trader Joe’s on a Sunday.

Sometimes I swear adulthood is staring at your phone and wondering which of your friends has enough time to deal with your latest emotional meltdown, then realizing none of them do.

All I hear is, you won’t be around if you’re too much. It’s an old fear, refreshed on an endless spin cycle.

I learned so young that other people’s needs were default, that mine had to be scheduled to be met, or, more easily, taken care of myself.

I’m FaceTiming with my friends during my six months there, snagging them in parts and pieces when our schedules allow while they integrate themselves deeper into the lives of the same coupled-up friends behind them now, or their new Person, in Jamie’s case.

Sometimes you have to cut yourself open, Georgia, and you hold yourself so tightly.”

“You were shown that you weren’t allowed to need things that inconvenienced people, and you learned to make yourself smaller. But why can everyone else be messy and you can’t?”

“But you deserve to let yourself feel whatever you need to. You can be messy. A disaster, if you need to. The people who love you will accept every single piece of it, I promise you.”

What I’m looking at, what I’m feeling, what’s happening here this weekend. What I crave in every corner of my bones, and what I’m so scared of getting, because so often I lose it.

Building a space that’s mine, rather than fitting myself into the pockets where people have room for me. I can feel myself stretching, a necessary, beautiful pain.

We can be all those things—good, bad, easy and needy, okay or not on an endless cycle—and trust that the other will stay. Our circumstances are messy, but so is life. It doesn’t mean that we can’t love each other through it. We already are.

But I know that fear is my anxiety talking and, let’s be honest, a heavy fucking dose of being a cog in a capitalistic roller coaster you feel like you can never get off of.”