You, Again

by Kate Goldbeck

The stuff you barely notice while you’re in the relationship suddenly require phone calls and paperwork to undo.

But wallowing feels heavy and comfortable. Like a gravity blanket.

“Don’t be nice to me. It makes me uncomfortable. And I don’t deserve it.”

“Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life? Daring Greatly? It’s all the shit the yoga teacher reads during shavasana when you just want to fall asleep.

“No one makes new friends after a breakup. It’s hard enough to be likable when you’re actually happy.”

He would completely move on with his life, the way people do when they’re in relationships—when friends become people you squeeze into your schedule because your world revolves around your significant other.

“Fine. But if I agree to this, you’d owe me a favor, right?” “Fine,” he agrees. “Do you need me to reach something on a high shelf?”

“You had one bad experience,” he says. She shakes her head. “That’s the thing. There were really good parts. If it was all bad it wouldn’t hurt so much and I could just let it go.”

She’s so fucking frustrating in the way she forces him to be exactly what she needs while disregarding what he wants, or how he feels about any of it.

“It takes time to bounce back from feeling blindsided and abandoned.”

“Me, too,” she says, putting on the mittens that she claims are warmer than gloves. An adult wearing mittens. This is who he’s losing his goddamn mind over?

“You’ve made your feelings completely clear. You keep me around because you’re depressed and you don’t want to be alone and I seem to be the one person in this city who you specifically don’t want to fuck.”

“Zeus ordered Apollo to rearrange the entire human body so people could have sex face-to-face. When they found their missing half, it healed their existential wounds.”

“I’m scared, okay? We could really, really hurt each other.” “Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to be hurt?” Josh sits up on his elbow. “You’re the only good thing in my life.”

This is the weird thing that happens after sex: Once you’ve unraveled all the tension, you’re just two naked people sitting there like nervous idiots.

Everyone needed something from me. But I couldn’t live a life where my only purpose was to make theirs more manageable.

“I’m not waiting for more time to pass. I’ve wasted enough of my fucking life. I’m not going backward. You’re not going to insult me and pretend like we can just be friends again.”

He’s been skipping therapy. Some topics are just too big to explain in a fifty-minute session. Better to go without and wait until he gets a handle on the narrative.

“The two of us are not friends, Ari. We were friends and at some point we were something else and only one of us was able to acknowledge it.”

“I think there’s a part of me that still loves you.” There’s a pause long enough to make her hope that the next word is and. “But I’m not going to slip back into some inane conversation with you like we’re buddies. We’re not going to have any late-night phone calls anymore. I’m not your coffee date. I’m not your shoulder to cry on.” He inhales sharply. “I deserve more than that. Even if it’s not with you.”

Trying and failing to ignore the emotional grenades threatening to go off in his head: How he feels Ari’s absence every single day. How she’s taken root in some deep, inaccessible place that can’t be edited or overwritten—just managed. Like a chronic illness.

Or does it get more painful the longer your person is absent from your life? The more weeks and months you spend going over the what-ifs? Did those original humans become more haggard and distraught the longer they searched the world for their lost soulmates, watching everyone else reunite with their other halves?

I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to be the person you crawl back to when the other thing doesn’t work out.

It’s either the beginning of a love story or a moment she’ll be narrating to therapists for years to come.

Maybe being in love is knowing that you’d live it all over again—every part, suffering included—to get right back to the place where you’re standing.

I want you to wake up every morning knowing that you’d have to go to great expense in order to get rid of me.”