Pauline calls late at night, long after I’ve brushed my teeth and put on my pajamas. The background audio of the call is loud; I can hear her roommates talking and cooking, and the faint sirens and cars of New York behind that. “Where have you been?” she says. “How is France? What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I respond. “Have just been busy.” Echoing in my ears is the last time we spoke, my muffled sobs ringing through the room and the memories of my first ‘heartbreak’ crawling up my neck.

“Anyways, I have to go,” I lie. “We’ll talk soon.”

The last time we spoke had been a week earlier, just after I’d gotten off a very different phone call with a very different person. He and I were separated by thousands of miles, but still curiously poised between friends and something a little more. In retrospect, it is apparent that, despite my wishful thinking, this arrangement could never have lasted any longer than it did: our finish, then sudden to me, feels laughable now, inevitable even.

I had gone out that night, after his call, to the café terraces in Aix with my friends, looking for a celebratory finale, an Irish wake for those days of waiting, fettered to both a boy and myself. Upon finding nothing to be different at all, I was devastated. I hoped that this conversation would operate as a mystagogue, and that after my cathartic, painful initiation, I would be among the select few “in-the-know.” What I would know, I couldn’t precisely say, but my fantastical aspirations convey my problem in and of themselves. I envisioned this call as my moment of rebirth, where these grotesquely childish yet completely abstract flaws that limited me would wash away with the scalding and holy water of his words.

This end to our relationship — as we knew it — was foreshadowed by a text of his: “I think it’s worth discussing if how much we talk makes sense.” 

I agreed, asking if we could call later. He had hit a nerve: much of my nascent adult life has been defined by my sense of romantic otherness, this notion that I have somehow done something gravely wrong and ultimately rendered myself unappealing to the entire male species. This ideology, so ingrained into the whole of my thoughts, reactions, and perceptions of the world, eventually transcended into an axiom of my entire being, fundamental to and inextricable from my identity. And yet, the agony of waiting for this call promised respite: I sat in anticipation of some preordained closure.

In the aftermath of the call, the world back in America became completely illusory, a hazy world of baseball and hot dogs and also many things — really just one — I wanted to avoid. Here in France, with pétanque and baguettes, I could get away with unanswered messages and unfulfilled promises to call and assurances that, Yes, I really am fine. I could read a book and actually wash my hair and claim it to be self-love. However, behind my chest-thumping bravado and my snarling, reactive solipsism, it was apparent that I had reached a nadir: consumed by my own suffering and all of my ineffectual attempts to “better” myself, I had begun to lose fundamental parts of myself.

Yet I stayed obstinate in my ways, spinning an intricate belief system, praying and chanting that only when I loved myself would others love me. So I did as this belief system prescribed and held it tight like a talisman: I went on my walks and deleted TikTok. When that was unsuccessful, it was journaling, then meditation, and soon I had worked my way up to sun-salutations. Unfortunately this was simply the postponement of the inevitable; I still found myself remarkably alone at the bar, my body anchored firmly on that cushioned stool, waiting for life to grant me the change I desperately wanted. 

I was seeking some form of narrative fulfillment. So addicted I was to this illusionary idea of change that I had begun to impose plot points, my own twists in the story that would induce character growth. I held truths that I expected life to disrupt. In the absence of disruption, they grew attached to me, my knuckles pale against my familiar and destructive “convictions.”

It seems obvious to me now that I was furiously attempting to assign symbolism to these events to escape the truth — the truth being that if this call was not a catalyst in and of itself, then it was simply just painful. Even further was that I would have to break out of my comforting, familiar self-pity — if I could no longer rely on exterior changes, I was going to have to create them myself. 

In this narrativization of my life, I lost any and all sense of agency. The problem with narrativization is that it is addictive: it is far too easy to fall prey to divine plots than to force change from your own actions. To do this kind of self-storytelling is to be the metaphorical dog on the porch: unable to go in and yet tied to the house, and thus, left waiting, frozen in the cold.