Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(53)

I took my bereavement juice box to the family lounge and called Aham in L.A.

“Can you just come?” I sobbed.

“Of course,” he said.

We weren’t back together, but we weren’t not together. We weren’t sleeping together, but he slept in the bed with me and held on to me as much as I needed. He ran errands for my mom, made her laugh, cooked eggs Benedict, booked a piano player for the funeral, figured out how to get a banquet license while I cried in the liquor store. My aunt and uncle came up from Arizona and stayed with us; Aham’s girls would come on the weekends; friends and family dropped by nearly every day. We sat around and drank beer and watched football, all piled together in that little white house. It was a beautiful chaos, the same kind my mom grew up in and loved so much, the kind that I never understood growing up alone. It’s weird to look back at the saddest month of my life and see that little vein of joy.

Aham and I weren’t getting back together—we swore we weren’t, we couldn’t—but when I wasn’t looking, he had become my family anyway.





The Beginning


We went back to L.A. and lived in limbo for a few months. Aham went on tour; I started working at Jezebel. We weren’t “together,” but we were happy in a totally unfamiliar way.

I’m not saying that if your relationship is in trouble you should cross your fingers that your dad dies.* But after my dad’s funeral, I was older. Aham wasn’t the only thing in my world anymore. My pain (and, later, my career) had pushed him aside a little bit, and that space was exactly what he needed. “I am a narcissist,” he jokes, “but I didn’t actually want to date my own reflection.” Aham had come through for me, in that month of emotional triage, with a selflessness that I think surprised us both—not out of some sense of obligation, but because he really wanted to be there, in my mom’s basement, mixing gin and tonics for my auntie Astri.

It was a horrendous period, but somehow we had fun. We worked so hard to make each other laugh. We were just ourselves again. It was like a reset.

When Aham got back from tour, we sat down for a two-day feelings marathon. Even for me, a professional leaking sad-bag, it was a nightmare. There were scheduled breaks. We punched in and out like trudging coal miners. We wrote up a contract specifying how much crying was allowed. (My opening offer was “100 percent of the time”; Aham low-balled with a blank stare.) The details are boring, and some of them are just mine, but at the end of it, we were a couple again. I don’t even think of it as “getting back together,” because it didn’t feel like a reconvening of the old relationship—it was a new one.

“If we’re going to do this,” he told me, giving me his most Intense Face, “we’re really doing it. Don’t change your mind on me.”

It’s hard to talk about, because the realist in me (i.e., my mom) kind of doesn’t believe that “couples getting back together” is a real thing. It’s something I believed in when I was a child, when I understood a relationship as something that happened to you, not something you built, and I thought The Parent Trap was the ultimate love story. But we really did do it, and the only explanation I can offer is that we weren’t the same people in Relationship: Part Deux as we were in Relationship: The Phantom Menace.

Aham still wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage anymore. It was understandable—he’d been divorced twice in the previous six years. I used up some of my tear allotment on that, not because I have any particular attachment to the institution of marriage, but because I just wanted to prove to the world that I was worth marrying. I grew up assuming that I would never get married, because marriage was for thin women, the kind of women who deserved to be collected. How could I be a bride when I was already what men most feared their wives would become? I was the mise en place for a midlife crisis. I was the Ghost of Adultery Future. At least, that’s what I’d been taught. Aham was my shot at vindication. Come on, man. Think of all the fat girls we can inspire with our lifelong legal commitment!

“Okay, what if we still like each other this much in five years?” I bargained, annoyingly persistent but in a charming way, I’m sure. “Can we talk about getting married then?”

“In five years, if we still like each other exactly this much, sure, we can talk about getting married,” Aham said, rolling his eyes. “You are the most annoying person on earth.” That was good enough for me. It was basically a proposal.


We moved back to Seattle a few weeks after that. We rented a house and settled into a routine, our pre-breakup life already distant and foreign, like it happened to someone else. Every day I take his face in my hands and squeeze, because I think he might be a mirage; he declares “Crab Fingers,” his second-favorite game, and pinches me until I fall out of bed. I call him and say gross stuff like, “I want to hug you and kiss you!” and he goes, “Who is this? Jessynthia?” and pretends to have a secret family. We show our love in different ways. But being in love holds its own kind of challenges.

Once, Aham and I were sitting at a bar, holding hands, and a woman recognized me. She was a fan of my writing, so she came up to introduce herself, and we shambled through a few minutes of pleasant chitchat. Sensing the conversation was running out of steam, she asked me one of the questions that people always ask me in those awkward, floundering moments: “So, what’s it like to work from home? Aren’t you lonely?”