I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(15)

Every time these neon signs appeared, I doubled down on devotion. What I wanted was to get back to the parts of the relationship I did like—the jokes, the dinners, the walking around in public with a guy prone to yelling “I LOVE YOU!” aloud on a crowded sidewalk. So, while my friends went out and had fun, I’d sit on the same corner on my dorm bed for hours-long phone calls (a necessary form of communication in the pre-texting age), my back against the wall and my blue duvet pulled over my knees, saying things like, “I FEEL that you’re not respecting me WHEN YOU say you’ll call me at eight but you don’t call until eleven the next day.” He’d say, “Don’t give up on us, we’ll work on things,” and I’d say, “Okay, let’s work on it.” And I’d cry. Then I’d keep crying. I swear if I saw that duvet right now, my eyes would well up.

When I look back at my young self all mixed up with this person who did not care if I got sad or hurt (or arrested), I feel for the fate fairies, and I can see the moment they said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” and pulled out all the stops. It was the night he came over and lifted his shirt to show me his giant new tattoo: P-O-I-S-O-N with a skull and crossbones.

Did I take the hint? I did not. This was my Very Adult Relationship and no one—no friend, no parent, no symbol inked on skin—could talk me into letting it go. I was not going to fail at it. “Can you believe this shit?” the fate fairies must have said to one another, throwing up their hands.

After we’d been dating several months, I had to leave the country. The British literature program I had enrolled in months earlier was already arranged and paid for, and there was no changing it. Oh, the delicious drama of departure. A long-distance relationship was going to take so much work. It would all hinge on good communication, Oprah said. After some tearful (on my part) farewells by airport pay phone, I boarded my flight to London.

I took the train to Cambridge University, where I moved into a two-hundred-year-old cottage I was to share with eight other young women. I couldn’t bring my blue duvet or many of my things from home, just a suitcase full of cotton clothes insufficient for the cold, damp weather. At a shop in town, I tried on woolly scarves and heavy sweaters, regarding my bundled-up self in a dressing room mirror. I barely had time to think about anyone or anything from home as I hustled from one class to another on the unfamiliar campus and took notes on poems I had never read. Nightly international phone calls were out of the question—too expensive—so I went out and drank dark, chewy beer and met Italian boys who introduced themselves by asking, “Are you Swedish?” It became a joke among my friends that wherever we went, someone would walk up and ask me that question (it was my blond hair, we figured). It got to the point where I thought, hell, I could be Swedish. I could be anybody over here. I could, most certainly, be a girl who doesn’t spend all her time working on her relationship with a poison man.



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When you make poor choices (and when you’ve watched a good deal of TV in your day), you start to feel like you’re living a movie about a person who makes poor choices. Your props and scenery conform to your narrative and become complicit in keeping you in it: The stop sign at the end of your street that you pass every time you drive to see him. Your mailbox. The dresses in your closet. The Rice Krispies in your bowl, crackling their witness. All these things right there in front of you every day cue you to show up as that person, that character, you’ve been. It’s hard to believe you could be anyone else.

This is why you have to change your scenery.

It’s why, for example, you have to move out of your childhood room at some point. It’s why you have to trade your old T-shirt for a blouse. It’s why you have to ditch your flip-flops and get a pair of shoes with soles when you’re going to interview for a job. It’s never really about the room or the blouse or the shoes. It’s about you and which story you’re living.

In my strange new surroundings at Cambridge, not a single stop sign or traffic light or cereal box signaled me to pick up where I had left off back home. My new room looked nothing like my old room. It had different carpet, different furniture, a different closet (with a sink in it!)—and no phone, which meant no answering machine. And so I broke the cycle of checking voice mail every time I came home, heart pounding in anticipation of an angry message from him or, worse, no message at all. I stopped mentally rehashing our past conversations, a habit I’d developed when trying to figure out what I’d done wrong to make him let me down in whatever latest way he had. My head was full of new conversations now, with voices in new accents. I discovered a new favorite food—the Brie-salad sandwich—and as I sat eating with friends on a bridge overlooking the River Cam one sunny afternoon, I realized that I no longer thought of my poisonous relationship in the present tense. I thought of it as a memory, a story that had happened to a person who was then-me but not now-me. Mostly I thought, Damn, I’m so glad that’s over.

It was as if I’d finally harnessed the power of all those moves I’d made as a child. Moving had always put my old world behind me, which seemed unfair when I was a kid and didn’t want to leave the world I was in, but now? To be able to remove myself from one story and put myself somewhere new—to drink and watch and wear new things until my new setting became familiar enough to support a whole new character, a new me? What a miracle. What a relief.