The Ex Vows

by Jessica Joyce

would I lose them to time and distance and domestic bliss, the way so many adult friendships fade away?

I think about what a fucked-up testament it is to the way we knew each other before: bone-deep, down to the marrow. And I think about how utterly heartbreaking it is that we’re using the same connection that allowed us to conduct a wordless conversation across the room to know each other in such a clinical way now. Like strangers who’ve seen each other naked in every way that counts, in all the ways that wreck you.

“I have a sudden hankering for the hand flex in Pride & Prejudice,

he used to assure me, with a mouth full of Snickers, that the lawlessness of air travel meant empty calories didn’t count.

Maybe we thought it would be easier to let go of a relationship we knew was dead.

It’s a gift to know someone when you’re in love with them, and a curse when you’re out of it.

This car is unbearably small right now. Between me and Eli, there have to be fourteen arms and legs in here.

If I’m going to leave, I want to plant that memory deep in the soil here, keep my roots to this place and these people.

he’s in my periphery, giving off Beautiful, Lonely Man Stares at Nature vibes as he inhales deeply, then exhales slowly.

while he was trying to fix what was broken in his past, he was breaking something that was right in front of him.

I have enough memories that hurt; what’s one more?

this new Eli, who looks so much like the old one I loved,

He’s the same and totally different. The fifteen-year-old boy I liked and the twenty-year-old man I loved, and the twenty-eight-year-old I have to keep right here, because at one point he was the twenty-three-year-old man who broke my heart.

“Upheaval is kind of a shitty rite of passage in your twenties,”

How strange it is to have a first for the second time. How lucky and messy and perfect.

“Are you going to behave tonight?” “I wake up every morning dedicated to not behaving,” he says, a grin working its way back onto his face. “So, no, probably not.”

you’re Adam’s best friends, which means you’re my friends, too, whether you claim me or not,

“Cole,” I venture as Eli pulls my phone out of my purse so he can take video, “are you…a sweetheart?” He scoffs. “Okay, don’t be disgusting.

“I’ve never been good at stopping when it comes to you,”

“I’m going to the kitchen,” he says. “Away from you.” “Right. I’m going…somewhere else.” His fingers drift down the back of my biceps and I give him a warning look as I back away. “Away from you even more.”

“You have our wedding bands, right? They haven’t been snatched by some Gollum-looking dude?” “Is this thirteen-year-old Adam who thinks Lord of the Rings is real speaking?”

It’s a split-screen image in my mind: Eli at work, me at home. Both of us thinking of the other. God, the absolute, heart-crushing waste of it.

we aren’t the twenty-year-olds who loved each other but hadn’t said it yet. We’re the twenty-eight-year-olds who said it hundreds of times and still broke each other’s hearts.

Nothing I’ve cared about most has been tied up with a pretty bow before it was given away. It’s all been messy. It’s made me wish and need and crave. And it turns me into this—a girl in a broken dress, crying alone in a bathroom.

It feels like the fuller your lives get, the less space there is for me. If I leave, maybe that space will go away completely.”

Eli can’t see my heart, and it’s for the better because he’d see his name everywhere in it. But it’s for the worse because he doesn’t see that his name is everywhere in it, and that hurts him.

You were always enough for me. I wasn’t enough for myself. I had to get there, and I’m so fucking sorry I hurt you along the way.”

Time is cruel and a miracle all in one swoop. It shows you what you had, and sometimes brings it back to you, but it’s always different.

We lapse into comfortable silence, soaking in our last hour together before I have to send her back home. It’s strange that the same word can mean different places, and yet the feeling exists when we’re together, too, no matter where we are geographically. What a comforting thought.

he wants to love me in totality. I have to let him. Isn’t that the way I deserve to be loved—completely, messily, imperfectly?

For a girl who struggled so mightily to know the shape and feeling of home, it’s a revelation to have so many places—and people—to call it.