Really Good, Actually(56)
My heart started beating too quickly, and I did not stop myself from saying, “if you’re so emotionally healthy, why is the first person you dated after your ex an emotionally fucked-up divorcée who cries all the time?” and “I don’t have to be a therapist to see that you have very intense commitment issues,” and “you’d be so scared if I was taking this even a little bit seriously. You’d probably have to run out and cheat on me too.”
After a very long and very awful silence, he said, “this is not an emotionally hygienic conversation,” and I told him he was not better than me because he paid someone to tell him his feelings were valid. He sighed, and I accused him of gaslighting me, and he started to define the word “gaslighting” and I absolutely lost my shit. I told him it was unfair that he could treat his girlfriend that way and have another woman line up right behind her. He asked me to please leave his relationship out of it, and I said, “why should I.”
My intestines twisted in on themselves, and I told him I knew dozens, maybe hundreds, of gorgeous, funny, smart, amazing women, none of whom needed a boyfriend, but none of whom could get a boyfriend, and the fact of that was slowly corroding their belief in themselves from within. “They’re not even allowed to talk about it,” I said. “We’re not allowed to talk about it. Even though the whole world is set up to cater to couples, and it’s more expensive and dangerous to be a woman on your own, and the only thing you’re unequivocally rewarded for is finding someone—a man, preferably—who wants to be with you. And if you can’t, you have to walk around knowing that people are judging you—often out loud, to your face—and blaming you, and finding you wanting, and you have to smile and say something bullshit like ‘I’m never lonely because I love my own company!’ or ‘this tastes JUST like peanut butter, only it’s half the calories!’”
Seeing that we had come back to the peanut powder, Simon grabbed his coat and said he was leaving. I sat on the edge of my bed, and my chest hurt and my head throbbed. I dripped big, stupid tears onto my duvet and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as he took his scarf and the extra toothbrush from my bathroom and said, in a resigned and gentle tone that made me want to rip my hair out, “I hope you have a nice time at the wedding.”
Chapter 14
The mornings were so dark it was almost impossible to get out of bed. Even if you did manage it, and sunlight did appear, it lasted for about three hours total, so if, for example, you went into a drab concrete building at three p.m. to lecture fifty-eight undergraduates about the Long Parliament’s banned plays, you would emerge to the same late-evening blackness you had woken up to, and the urge to never go outside again, or to move to Sweden where they understood how to manage these conditions, or possibly to end it all, was almost overwhelming.
I couldn’t tell if this semester felt so bad because of the weather, or my deteriorating personal life, or my students seeming genuinely dumber and less engaged than usual. I had been a little stern with them, maybe, but they needed discipline! This was a difficult field! The professor who wrote my letter of reference for grad school had attached a sticky note to the envelope warning me, and I quote, “The humanities are a sinking ship, just as you are starting to set sail”!
The students responded to my small acts of tough love by becoming somehow even less dedicated, arriving to class late, ice jangling in their keeper cups, teeth clinking against metal straws as they airily announced that they had not done the reading. There were a few kids who showed up early and read everything, but I didn’t like them either. I gave everyone an extension on their midterm papers and made my office hours appointment-only.
I sat at my desk on a long Wednesday and ate a pot of yogurt that claimed to provide an experience as delicious and indulgent as lime cheesecake. Products like this produced in me a deep melancholy, but also I could not stop buying them, in case one ever made good on its promise. Every time I ate a dessert-themed yogurt, I felt like a stupid little bitch.
I took out my phone and looked at my message history with Simon. After our fight he had been silent for four days, then sent a Long Text saying that although he cared about me and had enjoyed our time together, he did not think he was ready to be seriously involved with someone new, and he hoped I understood. I wrote back, ok. He wrote that he also hoped, after some time apart, that we could try to be friends. I wrote back, lol. He did not write back to that, and now it was over. It was the least fun way I had ever been proved right.
I checked the group chat, which had been quiet since trivia, a deviation from our usual routine (constant messaging all day long in a barely intelligible shared dialect) that set me on edge. Whenever I looked at the chat, a voice in the back of my head said, you are a bad friend and a worse person, and I thought, maybe, yeah, but had no meaningful ideas about how to fix that. I was very, very embarrassed by how difficult I was finding everyday tasks, ashamed of my sudden reversion to teenage-style low self-esteem, the way I poked and prodded at my body in the mirror before work every morning. I didn’t want to inflict this version of myself on anyone, let alone people who were used to the old, normal Maggie. She had been so fun.
Instead of putting out feelers with a screenshot or meme to the group, I input the yogurt into a calorie-tracking app I’d downloaded a few days prior. I had run out of gratis fitness opportunities in my neighborhood, and the app had been free and promised I could lose weight in a swift but sustainable manner, while still eating the foods I loved. Also, I needed something to do when I opened my phone and there were no messages on it. I read a few emails, then slammed another yogurt, which I did not enter into the app.