Adelaide

by Genevieve Wheeler

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I know that that sassy little minx called love will find me when I’m ready, but right now, it’s time to write.

The funny thing about hitting rock bottom is that you never quite know once you’ve reached it. That whooshing, falling feeling never ceases, and at every preceding level you’ve thought, This has to be it, right?

Adelaide still couldn’t be certain this was it. Rock Bottom. She was waiting for the floor to give out from under her or the ceiling to cave in, for something else to push her further down. This can’t be it, she thought. It never was. (Though, this was the closest she’d come.)

Did Rock Bottom even permit visitors?

Physically, Adelaide was held together—her thighbone connected to her knee bone, and so on and so forth—but internally, mentally, she was a mess of jagged, disconnected pieces, and she didn’t believe she was capable of putting herself back together.

She didn’t want to die, per se, she just wanted to stop existing. Stop being. And, frightening as it was, Death felt like the only avenue by which to get there.

A handful of pills and a swig of water and she’d be free—her broken pieces swept up and transferre...

And she sat in the waiting room, wondering if this, indeed, was Rock Bottom, or if she still had further to fall.

In Adelaide’s mind, the nurse was thinking, Ah, yes, another brokenhearted girl playing Juliet and wasting our time and resources.

She had a Venus symbol tattooed on her middle finger and a cardboard box labeled FEMINIST LITERATURE waiting to be unpacked in her new home. She was prone to intense crushes and loved Richard Curtis films, yes, but Adelaide had never thought herself the type to become swallowed whole by unrequited love. Boys were dumb! She didn’t even like them! Women were better, smarter, stronger! Yet here she was in a hospital room, answering questions about her relationship status with a sardonic Very single, seemingly incapable of coping with the fact that one boy did not love her.

Was there a Suicide Section in heaven? Adelaide imagined the smoking room of a Tex-Mex restaurant in her hometown—literary greats mingling over ashtrays and red plastic baskets of tortilla chips. Would Virginia Woolf even talk to her if she showed up there?

Her heart didn’t break once. It had broken multiple times over the last year—over the last decade, really—and each time she’d started to put the puzzle back together, to reconstruct her heart and soul with metaphorical superglue, they would shatter again. The pieces were getting smaller, less recognizable, more difficult to reconnect with each blow.

If one were to cleave Adelaide’s adult life in two—like a melon, split clean down the middle—those halves would likely be Before Rory Hughes and After, a different version of her sitting on either side.

On the Tube en route to their first date, drinking dregs of wine and playing Ginuwine’s “Pony” on a loop, she had no idea that this was it. That these were her final moments in this particular body, in this identity. Maybe she would have done something differently if she’d known; maybe not. (Probably not.)

She liked to imagine their lives tied by fate into an inextricable knot.)

Adelaide was just so glad to be near him, next to him, with him (with! him!) that she’d melt and oblige each time. He could have asked this question at a cliff’s edge—gesturing to a rocky canyon below—and Adelaide would have gleefully replied, We shall!

But they weren’t at a cliff’s edge. Not yet.

Adelaide nodded. She had the words of Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, and Emily Dickinson tattooed across her wrists and hip bones; illustrations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince were etched onto her rib cage; and a tiny peach sat on her left buttock in a cheeky nod to Call Me By Your Name.

Books—words, really—were her favorite things, her greatest love, and the thought of working and playing with them each day was thrilling.

It seemed so intentional—the way their lives had been woven together. Like some deity had spent centuries writing their story, meticulously planning the details and paving their paths. But again, Adelaide didn’t know all of this just yet. For now, all she knew was that the Disney prince had his hands wrapped around her and there was a chill creeping up her spine.

She was always going to jump into this lake, no matter how dark or dangerous it might turn out to be; she was too intrigued by its shimmering surface to even consider turning away. There was no world in which she wouldn’t dive headfirst in love with Rory Hughes. This was the only way.

Third dates were interesting, Adelaide thought, because you’re sitting in this odd conversational limbo. You know the basics of another person’s life—their hometown, their job, their favorite drink, perhaps—but it’s still too early to brush past superficial topics and dig into the grittier details of their character. Her past conversations with Rory had been easy, like spreading warm butter on toast. This evening’s dialogue was choppier, a bit crumbly.

Emory Evans.

Even if I’m not the one who gets to marry you someday, I hope I can shake the hand of the man who does. At these words, Adelaide felt everything inside her light up.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Adelaide shrugged, rolled her eyes a little. She knew she was being a fool this time. The trouble was, she didn’t care. It was pathetic and pitiful and yes, foolish, but she just wanted to hear from Rory. An acknowledgment, a question, a word, even—anything from Rory.

A few months before meeting Rory Hughes, Adelaide had been reading Call Me By Your Name on the Tube when it hit her: She’d never really known love. Not like this, not like Elio and Oliver’s. Nothing full, unconditional, romantic, apodictic. She’d started sobbing on the Northern line that afternoon and, just, never really stopped.

What if she was broken, she wondered. What if she’d been broken as a teenager and was now incapable of eliciting adoration, affection? What if her heart—or whatever thing existed inside of a person that made them worthy of love—was irrevocably damaged? She could charm strangers, and she could sleep with them, and she could remain cheerfully detached. But what if this was the...

She’d not found an answer or resolution at the time, but she had found an artist in Shoreditch who tattooed a small peach onto her body. It was meant to be a reminder that she was, in fact, capable of regrowth. Of a love like Elio and Oliver’s. Lately, though, it just reminded her of the first time she slept with Rory Hughes.

What she next thought—and absolutely did not say—was, I love you.

Adelaide had not fallen in love slowly, or carefully, or with intention. She had fallen in love the same way one slips at the grocery store, despite the CAUTION: WET signs lining any given aisle—quickly, accidentally, and fully aware of the mess into which she was getting herself. But it didn’t matter. She’d loved Rory Hughes instantly and with a fervor that was all-encompassing, reality-altering, seemingly nonsensical. There was something so ineffably special about him. She never wanted anything, or anyone, to hurt him again. Ever.

Perhaps he wasn’t a prince at all, she thought. Perhaps he was yet another dragon she needed to slay, another hurdle to overcome on her own journey to self-actualization. Or love. Or something. And, perhaps, the only way to find the meaning of this relationship was to let it end.

Because if we knew, if we honestly knew the price of love was grief, we’d never do it. We’d never succumb in the first place. And once we do—once we fall in love, against our better judgment, with something or someone—we never want to let go. No matter how many dinners they miss, how many texts they ignore. None of it matters. And none of it mattered. Adelaide was never going to let go.

I’ve only had one boy love me, Adelaide said, her eyes welling up. The same boy who held my head down and stuck his cock in my mouth. Who poured drinks over my head while I was driving and told me my tits were too small and still broke my heart

I know, she said. I don’t want you to lie. I just. I want it to be true. I want you to love me. It’s increasingly difficult that that’s not true.

She thought about the way falling for Brennan felt like curling up by the fireplace, drinking hot tea, warming her bones and her heart and her soul with each metaphorical sip of his company.

She knew that not all love felt the same, of course, but she tended to experience love (be it romantic, platonic, or familial) in all-consuming, dizzying proportions. For her friends. For her family. For fictional characters and adopted dogs named Fitz and now, for Brennan Uralla-Burke. She dove in headfirst. It was the only way she knew.

Rory Hughes didn’t love like that. His heart functioned very differently from her own, she realized.

She fell fully in love with him, as she always did. Jumped in without hesitation. It was chilling and exhilarating, like swimming outside in winter: an icy rush. But it was also painful and numbing and impossibly cold. It was never a comfortable kind of love, no matter how desperately she tried to bring warmth to their relationship.

She doesn’t know that she’ll write her own vows, calling Brennan a dream, comparing him to a nap in the sunshine—warm and comfortable and the closest she’s ever felt to real magic. (She won’t say the next bit: That she once thought Rory was the sun. That she’d flown too close, like Icarus. She knows better now.)