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Keep us close to your heart, so if the skies turn dark, we may live on in comets and stars.
It’s the same in relationships. We form a connection with someone at a writers’ event or in a hedge fund café, and over time that connection gets replaced by its memory, and so we edit and rewrite and delete in an effort to recapture what we felt.
Why wasn’t I happy for him? Was I jealous that I wouldn’t be the one sharing in his success? No, I knew what the problem was. Ruth told me that he was the issue, that he struggled with commitment and intimacy and insecurity, and I had started to believe her.
But if he was thriving then maybe she was wrong. Maybe I was the problem.
But I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed and bought stuff for breakfast? Why was that my problem? I hadn’t asked him to do that.
Of course, he said. But he didn’t mean it. He was insecure. I was making him insecure.
I was looking at Virinder the way that I used to be looked at. And still, it was Virinder that I blamed. I wanted to take his love and beat it out of him.
He wanted me the way that someone wanted a tattoo or a sports car. I was his fetish. And he was my fetish too. The fetish of being treated well. The kink of a different life. It was a magic eye, and now that I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. There was nothing to be conflicted about; it was sad but inevitable: it was over.
Why can’t women ever tell men that they don’t want to be with them? Why do they need to make up an excuse?
An anger grew where my stomach met my chest. Did men sit around wondering if they were good enough or right enough men?
The world isn’t made up of two men! It is possible for both of them not to be right for you! And, Enola, he is not right for you. Until he sorts his shit out, he isn’t going to be right for anyone.
He told me that he wasn’t interested in watching me cry. He had packing to finish and a chapter to reedit. Then he continued putting things in boxes to demonstrate how little he cared about the argument. Fuck him. FUCK him.
The platform drew a uniform breath as he was sucked beneath the train. All the pieces of him that I loved were destroyed. The mole on his forearm and the glint in his eye. The items in his pockets and the smell of his cooking. His favorite songs and the sound of his laughter. His reading glasses and the gray in his hair. His silver chain and his plans for his weekend. His unpublished book and his unspoken words.
try to wriggle free, but he holds my face. I try to remove his hands, but I can’t, and so I hold them as they hold me. I tell him to stop it, but he says no. His eyes are burning. “I’m sorry, Enola. Okay?” “It’s not enough.”
“Yes! Look, it was a huge mistake. She’s very intense and she thought that it all meant something that it didn’t. If anything, Enola, you’re the one who put the idea in my head.” I think about how he speaks about the women in his life. His ex-girlfriend, Jessica. His stepmother, Karen. Now Steph? Everyone was intense, everyone was crazy, lunatics all. “So it’s my fault you hooked up with your ex and lied about it?”
“Well. That’s something … isn’t it?” “What is?” “That I’m telling you I want to be with you.”
“You can’t just turn off your feelings, Enola.” I move back on my chair. “No, but I can change my actions.”
“Yes, of course I do. I love you.” This is only the second time that I’ve articulated it. The words feel powerful. “But it doesn’t matter what I feel because it’s not what I want.” “And what about what I want?” “I’ve been compensating for what you want for two years. You don’t love me.” “That’s not true,” he says.
“Enola, I”—my heart flips the way it did that night outside the beach house—“I do love you.” But after he says the words I have waited to hear for two years, he swallows and puts his fist to his mouth, grimacing in a way that implies it was last night’s alcohol he just regurgitated. I turn back to the books. “Did you hear me?” he says, voice croakier from the stomach acid. It’s strange, but I always assumed it would feel like a victory when he said those words to me, like his love was a trophy I could win by running faster than everyone else. But now that he has said them, they sound
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“How dare you tell me how I feel? That’s your problem, Enola. You always assume that you know how I feel. Fuck me. You’re acting like you’re perfect. Well, let me tell you, you’re not fucking perfect. You’re selfish. Self-obsessed. Self-centered.”
“Fine. I’m a big stressy nightmare. I’ll do better,” he says with a sigh. “No.” “No?” “No.” “We’re not even going to try?” “We have tried.” “I haven’t tried!” “That’s not my problem.”
“This is your problem. You only care about people when they’re useful to you.” “What the fuck does that mean?” “It means that you love me until you don’t. You’ve just come in here and told me that you’re happy with your book and you’re thirty-seven and all that shit and now you want me. People are people. They’re not things you can pick up and put down. You want me right now but tomorrow I’ll say or do something that doesn’t serve you and you’ll lose your temper again!”
I can be selfish sometimes, but you’re the one who got insecure and sensitive and stopped being able to laugh at anything.” “I didn’t stop laughing, you just stopped being funny.
“Steph and I happened when you were with someone else, so it shouldn’t really concern you. I didn’t even need to tell you and I’m really wishing that I hadn’t, to be frank.”
“No, I am sorry that I lied. But you are insecure, Enola.” “If you think someone’s insecure, then you reassure them! You don’t double down!” “I’m not going to pander to people,”
All Ruth has ever done is ask me what I want. When have you ever asked that? When have you ever cared about what I want or feel or think, even?”
You broke up with me, remember? You’re so quick to forget the things that don’t support your argument.” “I broke up with you because I told you that I loved you and you told me not to be silly.”
“Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with wanting that stuff and, secondly, stop telling me what I’m thinking and start listening to what I’m saying! God, why do you feel the need to dominate everything? You take up all the room! What I want is to be a person. A whole fucking person. And I’m never going to be that if I’m with you!”
“Feeling happy and being happy are different things.” His face contorts. “What the fuck would you know about being happy? You’ve just told me you’ve spent years feeling not good enough and not loved enough.” “Fuck you.”
“Normal things make me happy. Not existing from one fight to another, not wondering how you feel about me every second of every day, not spending those days thinking about you instead of myself. Not being in constant fight-or-flight.”
The last two years have been about you. The things you’ve said and the things you haven’t. Even when I was with someone else, it was still about you—which makes me a really shitty person, by the way. But I’m done. I don’t want my good days to be days that you decide are good and my bad ones to be ones that you decide are bad.”
“Wait.” His hand stretches before I can close the door. “I’m sorry.” “I don’t need that.”
I think about the perfectly cylindrical mole on his forearm that looks like a planet, how it’s not actually a mole, it’s a pencil mark from school. Then I close the door and I am still alive.
You’re going to be eager to organize your thoughts. But it’s not about deleting the good; it’s just about making room for the bad. Likewise with your mum.
“I’m glad that I met him, though, Roo. Maybe these two years have been necessary. Like how a summer storm clears the air?” But as I say it, I know that’s the wrong metaphor; it’s more accurate to say that something was disturbed, like how a change in weather can reveal a body.
But I don’t think that love is one thing. We pretend that the word means the same thing for everyone, but it doesn’t. I’ve been pushing you away and I’m so sorry. I promise I won’t do it again. Because the way I love you is every definition, every dictionary, every translation.”
And with the winter sun pouring through the window, together as we’ve always been, as we will always be, Ruth and I drag the body across the kitchen floor and burn the remains.
