Really Good, Actually(79)
After he hung up, I looked up the word “decathecting,” then spent twenty minutes trying to compose a tweet listing the events of a decathect-lon—like a decathlon, but for protecting your emotional sanity. I did not even save it to drafts.
I wandered into the kitchen and told my father I was experimenting with interiority. He looked up from the crossword only briefly. “Oh?”
“This sounds very basic,” I said, “but you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.”
“‘Teaspoon,’” he said, filling in 10-down. “That’s lovely, sweetheart. As you know, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”
I told him my discovery had inspired some fruitful experimentation. My options, when I had a thought, experience, or god forbid, a feeling, were to write it down and resist the impulse to text or tweet it, or to mentally note what I was feeling and—and this was the thing that seemed impossible, possibly even fake—let it pass.
“Well,” he said, counting out the letters in the word “petrichor.” “Could have saved us all a lot of trouble by discovering this in high school, but better late than never.”
“I’m serious,” I said, grabbing some milk from the fridge. I told him I’d realized recently that almost nothing had ever happened to me that I had not shared with someone else. This had, after all, been one of the big appeals of marriage: somebody to say all my stupid bullshit to or run my decisions past, someone to listen to me forever. I poured the milk over an enormous bowl of cereal, letting it crackle and hiss before digging my spoon in and taking a bite.
“Of course, the whole point of a relationship is you’ve also got to listen to—pardon my French—their stupid bullshit,” said my dad. “I assume you struggled in this area.”
I ignored this, though he was not wrong.
“I saw Mom yesterday,” I said. “She’s still mad at you.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “I was kind of an asshole.”
I asked what had happened between them, really. He told me he was almost finished with the crossword and would prefer I experimented further with interiority.
“Aside from the fact that it’s none of your business,” he said, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I thought I did, at the time, but the further I get from it the more I see how little I understood what was going on in there. My feelings about it and your mother’s feelings about it are very different. Neither of us is exactly right, but both versions are accurate.”
I said this was disappointing to hear. Distance was supposed to give you more perspective, not less.
“I think it did,” he said. “With time I stopped clinging to my own version of events and accepted that two things can be true, that we might never agree about what exactly went wrong. Though I’m sure she’d agree we should never have had that swingers’ night with the Carlsons.”
I stayed poker-faced and waited for him to say he was kidding. He remained focused on the crossword. I peeped over his shoulder and said, “‘Prolix.’”
He filled in the relevant squares. “You’re telling me.”
I went back to the den and climbed onto the stationary bike. I finished a triathlon in the remaining weeks of April, a laughably modest goal the completion of which felt better than drugs. While running some of my twenty kilometers, I tripped over a root in the sidewalk, falling hard onto the side of my body where a sporty little fanny pack held my keys, phone, and some extra hair ties. I completed a full thirty minutes of running, went home, and got in the shower. Later that night, I went to text the group chat an image of a fish finger that looked like a dick and found the fall had cracked my phone screen. It was still functional, just less pleasant to use, and I worried I might get a glass sliver stuck in my fingertip. Charlie Brooker, I thought, you’ve done it again!
The weeks continued this way: more newspapers, more cereal, more driving to Toronto, more driving back. I felt very fortunate and a little bored. I helped Merris with groceries and minor housekeeping and stayed out of her way at work, though we sometimes had tea when I brought her home from physio. I read a few poems from Amy’s book and hated them a lot, but felt fondness for the person who gave them to me, who was comforted by the idea of a woman whose heart was a house fire. Amirah and I had our green-tea-and-grovel session, and I went with her afterward to a hospital fundraiser/musical revue featuring a bunch of a cappella anesthesiologists. It was completely terrible and so, so fun to be there with her, whispering and giggling at the back of the room. I saw Clive and Lauren and Emotional Lauren in real life, one-on-one situations where I tried to be a good listener and better friend. Sometimes I succeeded. This was quietly satisfying but did not do much to quell the shame that would rise in me every few hours like acid reflux—a reminder that I was a failure, back in the town she grew up in, eating applesauce her dad had paid for.
Still, pleasant moments found ways of sneaking in: finding a solo seat on the bus near a window, having enough coffee left for a perfect top-up, coming home from the grocery store with flowers, to put tomatoes in a different bowl from bananas. In one of our now-weekly sessions, I described these moments to Helen. As I was leaving her office, I caught a glimpse of her notes: “finding joy in the mundanity of life.”