Stuff I never told you and am sorry about.
I was never just a cocktail waitress. Sorry.
That guy with the beard and the glasses that called all the time, just to talk. He was an ex-thing. Yeah, you met him several times, too, and you thought we were just friends. I never lied to you about it, I just never told you the truth. Oh, and I stopped seeing him for you, when we decided to be exclusive. But I only slept with him .5 times. That’s point-five, as in half. I can’t explain that part to you, though. Sorry.
I think you’re weak. Especially your heart and your immune system. Sorry.
Your vanity exceeds your attractiveness. Sorry.
A friend of a friend once met you and she said behind your back, That guy? Wow, I always thought she could do better. Sorry.
I backslid on my drug-free promise. Just once, but I did backslide. And it was with that guy with the glasses and the beard. You were out of town. The next day, I felt so bad I built you a sideboard with my bare hands as I came out of my coke funk. Sorry.
More than five, less than a hundred. Sorry.
I hated most of your sweaters. Sorry.
Your fucking pretentious book collection was embarrassing and your massive stockpile of vitamins was weird. Sorry.
My friends don’t want to be your friend. Sorry.
I think I loved us more than you loved us. For that, I am so goddamn sorry.
And looking back at these, my greatest sins with you, they are so small and so silly. Many of them are planted the rage and sadness of this aftermath. Fuck, I did right by you, didn’t I?
–
You remind me of my sister. I miss her when I’m around you, she says and I am happy for that. Her sister has been a subject off-limits until now and I embrace the opportunity to speak of her. I never got to meet her sister, but I always felt her around me.
The world lost her a few years ago when she decided to end it all.
As they say in the cemetery: Life’s cares are o’er; she rests.
And although we never met, I felt her often. Her books and fossils and stones, they dotted our apartment; she freckled our love. I know now that the two things I felt there – one was dark and ominous, and one was light and loving. She was the latter. The former, it was something else. A forewarning, perhaps.
I saw her sister once. In the living room, I was on the couch and she stood beside it and looked at me. Her face was dirty and her blonde hair matted. She watched me for a long time and then disappeared.
I never told you that either. Sorry.
–
Lunch is in a pub, crabcakes over a salad. Traditional Sunday roast for her husband. Wine and beers for me and her husband, and she has only water because she’s due in eight weeks. Her belly is big and round and hard and they know nothing about my ghost belly.
I forgot what it’s like to be happy and to have fun. To talk about things other than you and moving to London, and to have people see the purity of me. No one has made me feel that worthwhile since I sat at dinner with Kate and B__, long before I met you, and B__ said, Why are you single? You’re a catch. I don’t get it.
And the way Kate and B__ looked at me, they meant it. They wanted happiness for me (and for everyone). I’ve not felt that way again, like someone really saw my heart beating beneath my chest, since. Not until yesterday.
They make me feel that way. They regale me with stories of their flawed courtship and their happy ending and I know that they know that I’m ingesting every morsel, hoping the same for you and me, but that’s okay, they just keep on with the stories.
They smile and after lunch, the husband insists on ice cream. We take their convertible to get ice cream, and then we walk around Hyde Park and go see paintings by an old woman. When we talk about the art, they listen to me. You never did. You told me what I was seeing and how to perceive it, and stupidly, I trusted you. I never saw the beauty of art with you. I only saw what you saw.
We walk through the fields, not on the sidewalks, and I am hyper-aware of everything. Of the waxy grass under my feet, and this couple who knows me not at all and does not judge me, and ice cream that your weak stomach could never handle. And of me. The me that your weak stomach could never handle.
I forgot what all of this is like.
Tonight, I ran. I put on clean white sneakers and I went for it. I forgot what it’s like to run until I ran. I ran so fast and hard and I hit a dead end and then I turned right around and ran out of it, faster and harder than I’d run into it.
