Supermarket(10)

“Hello, I’m sorry; may I use your phone?”

I called my mother to pick me up.

“What the fuck, Flynn? What happened?” my mom said when she arrived.

I sat quietly in her car, motionless, my head erupting with a fever.

“See, Flynn, this is what happens when you go running in the winter! Who the hell does something like this?” she said in a judgmental yet loving way. She continued to lecture, but the words began to fade, like hearing music from the outside of a nightclub, muffled and dark.

“Lola broke up with me,” I said.

“Oh, Flynn, no, I’m so sorry,” she replied.

My mind snapped back to reality and I finally thought about what had just happened.

That’s when it hit me.

Everything Lola had said was true.

She’d always told me I worked too much, that all I cared about was work, but since I never finished my work it was in vain. She even tried to justify my actions, saying that if I had ignored her for a cause, if I had put our love aside for something greater than myself, it would be one thing—but I was living in a loop. My creative pursuits were all I had that brought me any joy, and I became fanatically devoted to my craft. It was my way of feeling complete. I would hole myself up for days on end. Wake up, coffee, cereal, write, lunch, write, dinner, write, sleep. Manuscripts piled up, littering my room. I would write, stream of consciousness, uninterrupted for hours, ignoring the world outside. It was a kind of mania. If I wasn’t writing I was lost and depressed. I would talk out loud to my fictional characters, figuring out dialogue. She believed that I was detaching myself from the real world through my stories. That I was spending more time with my characters than with her. She’d go on to say that the stories I wrote never ended, and because of this it would never stop. She said every story needs an end, and that if there is no The End, then you cannot begin the next chapter.

That’s why I’m so determined to finish my novel this time. That’s why it’s going to be my best work. That’s why I’m so damn happy to have met Frank, the perfect candidate to base my protagonist on. If I can’t finish this, it’s game over. I’m finally feeling ready. Inspired. Ambitious. Focused.

Before we get to that, let me explain the dark months that followed the breakup.

The night of the breakup, after my mom brought me home, I lay in bed burning up, experiencing fever dreams and bizarre hallucinations: phantom visions of Lola next to me, caressing my hair, then evaporating.

My mother would periodically check in to make sure my fever wasn’t what she would call “ER worthy.” Two days later, the fever had passed, but my depression hadn’t.

You know in the movies how they do that cool time lapse where hours on a clock spin by like seconds? Yeah, well, I want you to imagine that . . . but imagine each day feels like a second.

I was disgusting. I barely left my bed. The lights never came on. I would hardly move, maybe to go to the bathroom, but even that felt like an impossible task. I showered once a week if my mother managed to make me. I would sleep for sixteen hours a day. Then I wouldn’t sleep for three days. I couldn’t tell you if it was day or night, let alone the day of the week. I felt hopeless. Not even sad. Just nothing. I couldn’t even cry. The thought of writing was an unimaginable feat. It was a depression so low and flat that I couldn’t even envision suicide as a solution.

I felt like a fucking cartoon character because every time I saw myself I was wearing the same goddamn outfit: boxers, a white undershirt, and a burgundy robe. Plates of half-eaten sandwiches lingered on the floor, encircling my bed, piling high, and finally being taken away in the blink of an eye, just like those time-lapse montages in movies.

Along with the sandwiches, the mail piled up. I had more mail than I had ever cared to receive. Every once in a while, my mother would barge in to express that I had received another letter from a publishing company. She would tell me to open it, but quite honestly, I didn’t care. I knew what it was and I could hear Lola taunting me in my head—another rejection letter.

She was so sweet when we were together. Was I truly the failure she depicted me as?

The clock spun, the montage continued. Winter turned into spring. Then one day, it came to a halt.

“Flynn!” my mom yelled. “Today is the day you are going to shower, shave, put on some clothes, read this letter, and rejoin society or, I’m sorry to say, I’ll have to throw out your things.”

My mother had never spoken to me this way.

I couldn’t tell if she despised me or loved me so much she felt compelled to make such grave threats—threats she was prepared to act on, given her tone. I don’t know why I got up, but I did. I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I pissed and turned on the sink and shower. I opened the door and emerged a fresh, clean-shaven man.

I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize what I saw—a handsome, functioning member of society. But I wiped my eyes because I felt quite the opposite.

“Eggs are getting cold!” Mom yelled.

I clunked down the stairs and took a seat in the kitchen, my eyes squinting from the bright sun shining through the window.

“There’s my boy!” my mom said. “I can see your face, Flynn. I love that face.” She had a big smile. I grabbed one of the many identical letters from our little mail area next to the rotary phone by my mom’s recliner.