Hooked 2 (Hooked #2)(19)

Finally, I arrived at my apartment building. It had started to rain in the cold October air, and I felt the ice-like pellets along my cheek as I opened the great apartment door. I stomped up the steps, two at a time, feeling the anger fuel me all the way to the top. I tore into my apartment, feeling the tears already brimming.

Boomer was stationed at the coffee table, blinking up at me. He meowed in that way; like he knew something was wrong, like he knew the world was ending. I collapsed next to him, allowing him to bounce up on my lap and nuzzle my cheek.

“It’s just you and me, Boomer,” I whispered to him. “It’s just you and me.”

That night, I spent a long and heavy sob-session with myself. I poured wine glass after wine glass; I ate ice cream from the carton. I cried with Meg Ryan as she lost her own, privatized bookshop in New York City because of Tom Hanks’s dumb, large, Fox Books. I hated Tom Hanks, American hero, more in that moment than I hated Drew. Why were the attractive men in the world trying to ruin the dreams and the beautiful lives of American women?


The wine continued to almost pour itself, streaming from the bottle like water. Boomer kept meowing at me, worried. I felt like I was becoming a part of the couch in those moments, and I remembered Kevin, my very first and last boyfriend—the pot smoker from Indiana. He had become a part of the couch, a part of the pot world, because he had felt he didn’t have a place in the regular world anymore. I hadn’t been able to understand it.

Every little thing he did had an element of “I don’t care” to it. When we went to Mexican restaurants, he scarfed down burrito after burrito without even saying a word to me. I patted his back, always, telling him to slow down; but there was a hunger in him that could not be quelled by anything in the world. He had dissatisfaction, and he knew it. So he sought to replace that dissatisfaction with something else.

Every time we had hung out at his apartment, he had wanted only to sit and watch television. I had tried to engage him in anything, like board games or sex. But he had wanted only to rest there, smoking casually from a bowl, and watching whatever was on television.

When he had told me he was dropping out, I had been relieved. This was the perfect time to dump him, to replace my dissatisfaction with our relationship with something else; with more dancing, perhaps, or more studying. He had told me he had wanted to give up for a long time, and he wanted me to tell him he was free.

And so I told him. “Kevin. You’re allowed to do whatever you want. You’re allowed to give up if you want. You shouldn’t; I should add there’s so much the world has to offer you.” I had been so hopeful, so sure of myself.

But now, laying there, drinking my sixth glass of wine, I was no longer so sure of myself. I understood that the world had nothing to offer me. It didn’t want to offer me sex, at least without taking something eternally important away from me. It didn’t want to offer me success. It didn’t want to offer me love.

Instead, it wanted me here—so much like Kevin—engaging with television shows, with a depressive alcoholic substance, and with as many Cheetos as I could find at the local convenience store.

And this was how the loathing commenced the next several days. I wondered; what I could have done wrong, how I could have proceeded differently. But, beyond anything else, I simply wondered how I was going to survive the following few days.



The next day, I left the apartment only once. I took a long, long walk out to the lake, not even bothering to walk through Wicker Park to see what had been done to my beautiful corner.

On the beach I stood in the sunlight, trying to feel hope again. I listened as the lake swarmed up on the rock, then the sand. It was brilliant, the way the sun lit the tops of each wave. But to me, it all felt the same as it ever had been before. Usually, this sameness of nature is a comfort for people. “We live, and we die—and the earth goes on.” That sort of spiel.

However, this time, I understood the sameness of the waves as a sort of knowledge that nothing in this world would ever go well or change for me.

I watched as small children played along the boardwalk, their parents rushing up behind them to capture them in their arms. I watched as old men walked somberly down the boardwalk, making a strange juxtaposition between the fresh-faced boys and girls running this way, then that on the boards.

I tried not to focus on the lovers, both young and old. One lover of my life had given up on the world, had retreated to the darkness of the living room. Another lover of my life had pushed headfirst into everything the world could give him—even taking things that didn’t belong to him.

I didn’t know which was worse. I stood, uncertain, as the waves crashed. Where was the world going to take me next?