The Pisces(5)

Four days went by. I heard nothing. I grew enraged. Eight years and this was all? No inquiry into how I was doing? I could have been dead. On the sixth day he called me. He wanted to see how I was holding up.

“Not great,” I said. “You?”

“Terrible,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

Thank God, I thought.

“I know,” I said. “This is so silly. I think we should stop this. Enough is enough.”

“I need a little more time,” he said.

“Can’t you just come over?” I pleaded.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea right now,” he said. “Maybe in a few weeks?”

“A few weeks?!” I said. “How much longer is this going to go on for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I love you.”

“Fuck you!” I yelled, and hung up the phone.

Then I texted him.



i’m sorry

i’m just hurt and scared

forgive me?

i love you too

He wrote:

let’s just take this time





4.


Then came the obsession. I started reading my weekly horoscopes and his (Sagittarius), parsing every word for a sign that the universe was going to bring us back together. If there was nothing about love I would read a different horoscope. I would read them until I found one that suited me—until it said this was my lucky day or week or month. I consulted a psychic, an old woman in Tempe who worked in the back of a Mediterranean restaurant. She said that I needed to focus on me, do work on myself and my “blocks” and more would be revealed. She suggested a powder made of quartz crystal to put in my bath. She said it would serve as a clearing of negativity. I bought it for $250 and soaked in it. Nothing happened. So I called more psychics.

I realized how much time I had spent with Jamie. Or maybe not how much time I’d spent with him, but how much time I spent alone but knowing, at least, that he was there. It was different now, being totally alone, with no one person in the back of my mind—that little figure, like a cushion. I’d never had many friends in Phoenix to begin with. There was Rochelle, a professor of anthropology, who had introduced me to Jamie.

Rochelle had been married since before I met her. Mid-forties with wiry, pubic-looking hair that she kept cut very short, in a style I secretly called “the Brillo,” she wore no makeup and was deeply okay with herself. I thought it was nice that there was a man on Earth who was happy to fuck her—not only to fuck her but to marry her. I wondered if this was where she got her confidence or if it was her confidence that had drawn her husband to her.



When Rochelle first introduced me to Jamie, I was barely thirty, and had the luxury of time, a cool air about my future, zero apparent desperation. She probably thought I was normal. Through the years we would meet every six months or so at the same Colombian restaurant and make the same jokes about how her husband and Jamie both snored, the way they both acted like babies when they got a cold. There was an affected comfort in these casual insults, as if to say, I know this man is mine. He isn’t going anywhere. I could take him or leave him. I pretended to her that I didn’t want to marry Jamie, didn’t want to move in together, and had more than enough time with him. I was a woman contented with what she had and did not need more of anyone or anything.

But now I became clingy with Rochelle, besieged her with a barrage of compulsive questioning about Jamie’s whereabouts. The questions were coupled with a series of neurotic affirmations on my part that he would be coming back, it was only a matter of when.

Simply being around her in those first weeks made me feel connected to Jamie, though she wouldn’t tell me much. She looked at me like I was a woman who had caught a terrible disease that she never thought either of us would catch. She toyed with her dangling beaded earring and said she hadn’t seen him in a while, didn’t want to get in the middle. Then I saw a picture of them on Facebook, sitting next to each other at a birthday party. They each had glasses of wine and little dishes of flan, so fucking civilized. They were clinking glasses. Rochelle was clearly a traitor.

I felt dissociated from my body, like my head was in a cloud of fog and my limbs were not under my jurisdiction. I started smoking weed around the clock, something I hadn’t done regularly since my early twenties, going to work at the library stoned. I made no progress on my book. I only wanted to lie around and eat sugar and fats: giant chocolaty drinks from Starbucks, bags of Hershey’s minis and gummy candy, tortilla chips with nacho cheese dip. I had always had a small frame and never gained weight easily, except in my hips, which were wide. My choice of clothing made them look deceptively smaller: loose, flowy cotton skirts and dresses, wide linen pants that kept them concealed. The rest of me would be swimming in my clothes, giving me a sort of elfin, pixie look, all thanks to my hips. But now my pants were leaving a tight elastic mark around my waist each time I took them off.



I also began engaging in weird crafts. I craved creative expression, an artistic order, but did not have the lucidity of mind for Sappho. I went to the nearby crafts store and bought a hot-glue gun, beads, tools for needlepoint. I began hot-gluing beads onto empty wine bottles, making “vases.” Eventually I stopped going to the library entirely. I told them that I needed a week’s hiatus to work on my book. The other librarians agreed to cover for me. My apartment looked like a frat house mixed with an arts fair. I stayed up all night beading. Then one week turned into two. Finally I dragged my ass back, but I still wasn’t sleeping. I hid in the university bathrooms on the toilet with my eyes closed.