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Or because we fell in love too young, and how could our actual lives compare to the idea we’d had of what our lives could be when we were barely twenty and our bodies were almost impossibly firm?
Or because I’d stopped imagining what our children might look like. Or because he’d never started.
Or because he called me a cunt. Or because sometimes, I was one.
Of course, it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved.
The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the “what if two meals a day were soup” stage.
I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.
An underwhelming breakup. No affair; no big, blowout moment. Just a series of small fires that we let burn out around us, clutching our coffees like the dog from the internet: this is fine.
Like everyone I’ve ever loved, both of them were capable of being a Bit Much.
I found cooking for one exhausting and depressing.
Maybe this was the hidden blessing of a breakup: not “haha, so what,” but a new tenderness, an opening up.
The more maternal women and optimistically horny men would reach out for a shoulder rub, patting me like a child who’d done a bad job at kickball, instead of a woman whose plan for her life had fallen apart one day over mediocre pad thai.
in a voice I hoped sounded wise and resigned and maybe a little European,
like it’s not sparkling but I am, like “wearing sequins” is a vibe and I’m dressed head to toe in that vibe exactly.
Deciding your ex was a villain seemed like an easier way to go through a breakup.
The night before our wedding, Jon had wondered aloud whether something would change, if we would feel different as man and wife. After the ceremony, I asked him if he did. “Not really,” he said. “Still love you a lot like normal.”
I felt different, though: calmer, safer. Buckled in.
“You’ll like dating,” she said. “Everyone eats ass now.”
Amy drained her martini and puffed her cigarette, looking more divorced than anyone in history: “Good luck.”
I reshaped our happy memories until they were revealed for what they truly were: false moments of hope concealing the truth.
Having dated Jon since I was nineteen, I wasn’t making some grand comeback to single life. This was my debut.
and I could see a row of crisp blue collared shirts, exactly like the one he was wearing now. I wondered what this meant about his personality, if he was risk averse or wealthy or had merely found out Uniqlo was going to stop making a particularly well-loved style of oxford.
His sentences were full of conditions, deferments to his various privileges. He used a lot of therapy terms. This was clearly a man who journaled.