12/20 

The day after

Ribcage still sore from the weight of your body. The dull ache a constant reminder. Nausea headache chest pain. Tires shot, bleeding out, unplugged. My fingertips numb and hands cramped from hitting the keys too hard. I try to let the clicking wash me away. I forget for long enough to submit my essay. In a cubicle in Firestone, I remember again, and my stomach lurches. It doesn’t make sense it doesn’t make sense it doesn’t make sense. I sift through yesterday, trying to untangle your words. How to think and write cogently in free fall, after the thread is pulled loose, seams undone?

In between deadlines I rehearse an angry speech. It has three main arguments, each with two sub-points, designed to lodge in your ribcage. Knowing you’ll be impressed by how deeply I can cut you with a sentence, but it won’t change your decision. I will speak in a cold voice and look you in the eye as I twist the knife. My Google Calendar documents my fifteen minute crying break, my half hour rage walk. You would find this Taylor Swift song funny.   

Three days after
Scab on my wrist still from when I asked you to toss me the scissors and I fumbled, a red pinprick, and I put my hand behind my back because I didn’t want you to over-apologize, put a bandaid on me. 

Three am, two nights before it happened, when my nose started bleeding and wouldn’t stop, you said it’s okay and got dressed and took all the paper towels from the boy’s bathroom and held me until it did, and you said it was a sign and we both laughed. “She left ten ounces of her blood in my trashcan.” The screws were already loose. The screws were loose weeks ago, even when you said you were melting into me, even in New York. (It felt fragile as we walked down Central Park, when you wouldn’t tell me what you were thinking about. Was it then that you realized?)

Yesterday you looked like a ghost, like me, and I couldn’t even wield my carefully chosen words against you. I think about The Idiot, about the difference between pity and love; I dulled when I saw you defeated. Shivering sitting on a bench outside, I didn’t bring a coat because I wanted the outside chill to match me and it did. 

Today at least the food stayed down. Long silence, my roommate sits across from me in the dining hall. My head in my hands, wet face. She’s concerned: I’ve never seen you like this before. I realize my eighth grade self would be disappointed by the puddle I’ve turned into. I read Marcus Aurelius before I set my alarm. The next morning, I sit in Trustee wearing mascara to give myself two reasons not to cry. I keep my eyes on the open books in front of me, my brain filled with Russian.  

Like a week after

Mind empty, erased — an uncanny silence. White blank room. I ran to the swingset after my last exam. Ran so fast my chest burned and I coughed like a consumptive Victorian, eliciting a stare from a toddler in the sandbox. Unbearable lightness, untethered. I see an estranged version of myself laughing at dinner, responding to texts, asking questions in conversations. I ask her: How are you acting so normal?

“You look like a statue.” The first words you said to me one morning sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. My head tilted towards you, my hair a dark halo spilling over your pillow, body covered by a sheet. You did not understand why I was offended. People don’t date statues. I knew it the whole time, knew before you did: that I was a prop in your play. 

You think you’re some Aeneus. I realized this today when I pulled out my copy – falling apart, post-it notes leaking out. I flip to Book IV. This will haunt you. He doesn’t want to leave but he leaves anyway because he has to, because the gods told him to. But you don’t have a Rome to sail to. This is all that matters. Let your cup of coffee warm your hands on a morning walk, stop to watch the street performers in the subway tunnels. Look at the sun pooling under the trees, the glow of the lamplight on the wet concrete, the trace of the city’s silhouette on the milky train window. This is all that matters. This is it. I don’t understand how you don’t understand. (That was the first loose screw; we are as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.) 

My friend laughed at me when I told her: He didn’t know Dido, what a red flag. He likes Kafka, Camus, what a red flag. More Hemingway than Fitzgerald. Hasn’t read Mrs Dalloway or watched The Godfather. I laugh at myself. Clean rage and black flames, bleeding out on the pyre. So dramatic. I roll my eyes.  

What I realized too late: you’re not a debater, you’re a sophist. An actor and a politician.

You were right: I talk about books too much, use too many words that aren’t my own. And you were wrong: I’m not a fucking statue. Statues don’t crumble and then uncrumble through sheer force of will.  

On the car ride home my mom said it’s for the better. Phoebe Bridgers agrees, crooning in the background: I know it’s for the better know it’s for the better for know it’s for the better. My cousin said it’s a cannon event. I said it’s narratively cohesive. My sister was unimpressed. In our last conversation, you laughed: “I’m going in the Nass, aren’t I?” You knew it the whole time, knew it would end like this, with me saying not with a bang but a whimper as I slammed the door behind me. 

Right, I know, so dramatic. You roll your eyes.