The Way You Look At Me

Happy Thanksgiving — hope you’re doing well.

The air rushes out of me and I’m empty and aching for it. I read his latest text and hate him a little bit more. A pack of stupid little letters making me feel stepped on. My mind sifting through our history for the clues I missed. Letting the corrections to his character, and my own, bubble up. I shake out this new picture of us and feel it creasing my face. I see it now. The crude portrait of someone who doesn’t care if I’m doing well — at all. I hold it in my mind. Cultivating a hate that feels suspiciously like grief and has only just begun to blossom inside me.

I lay in bed with my eyes closed and pull at its petals. Replaying our conversation, still addicted to a ritual in humiliation. A habit I am hoping to one day kick. I watch the smile melt from his face into something less certain as he turns the corner. Feel his eyes wander into my hair and try to understand what I saw play out beneath his face. Pulling the duvet over my head I bunch in on myself from both ends, like a worm, hoping to escape the feeling of it in the coffin of my bedding. It follows me down burrowing into something at the core of me. An anchor to myself I’m not sure I can afford to lose. I let my throat fill with the sob threatening to crawl out of me. Try to crush it into something smaller. Something I can swallow.

Getting out of bed means facing The Others. Family members who individually feel like an insurmountable challenge. There's something in me that makes speaking to them feel like a second language and a part of me that always aches to hear my own instead. A part of me that grew loud while I was alone. I’m filled with a homesickness for my own web of quiet knowing. For shared work and for sameness. A homesickness for a language that means nothing to anyone here. I thought I saw that in Jack too. That quiet need for silence. It turns out it was a little more than that. 

I’m just depressed. It’s that time of year. Excuses for my mood have been easy enough to find. Things are hard right now. Aren’t they for everyone? Any minute now I’ll tell myself to get up for the promise of coffee and nothing else. Let my hatred make me into a liar when I tell everyone I’m fine. Including myself. For weeks I’ve let my notes app fill with things I’ll never say. For weeks my heart has been more than a little broken and I haven’t been very fine at all. Laying on my back, I cross my hands over my chest, willing myself to spontaneously die.

I wait until I hear the front door lock to crawl out in search of caffeine. My oversized sleep clothes playing their role in making me feel like Something Emerging. Birthed from the duvet and the deeply slimy places of the earth. Safe in the knowledge that the villagers have taken their pitchforks with them to work. I open cabinets and gather supplies knowing that I’m not alone in wishing for solitude. Unfamiliar cars are parked in the street outside, bringing families together for Thanksgiving. I stare out of the front window feeling more attached to my cup than anything else. A strung out shadow lurking in the corner of the frame. Watching the grid of little houses all exhale the same feeling. No, I’m not alone. Not ever. And I’m grateful for our shared misery. That gratitude, I think, must be the spirit of the season finally possessing me.

I told Jack I loved him weeks ago.

Happy Thanksgiving — hope you’re doing well.

What an asshole.

I’ve been away from this town for so long that every window in my mother’s house seems to face a place I don’t recognize. I’ve spent the last few weeks wandering, aimless. Trying to remember streets whose names are just out of reach. Searching for landmarks long replaced. I can see why Jack finally abandoned this town. The neighborhoods, still filled with families, have an emptiness to them. Some unnamable glimmer has gone missing from this place, leaving the severe beauty in it to wither. The whole town like a thing I could crush in my palm. Desiccated. Standing here in the middle of it reality bends to fit what already feels unsteady. A reminder that when I said I was coming home, I didn’t mean to this house.

How is it that we could have forgotten each other, this home and I? Maybe it is my belief in that impossibility that’s broken open something unbearably bright inside of me. Reality being more flexible than I was. When I packed up my life three months ago I felt so sure I was meant to be here. Now walking the same patch of floor week over week in a trap of my own making I’ve let that brightness turn on things I kept tucked away under my ribs. Blazing across a gentleness better suited to the cool and dark. Everything I’ve held too close for too long. Searching for the rot I missed in the shadows and casting entirely new ones. My humiliation making me into a small dirty thing, scrabbling at my own insides, trying to claw a way out of myself. Too stupid to see a truth that sat directly across from me for the better part of two decades.

How could I be so stupid? I spent months coming up with The Plan. Picking just the right words. Fine tuning my speech into the correct things to say. All the while a part of me hoped that I would never need it. A part of me hoped that I would see his face and be seized by some fundamental truth I hadn’t yet realized. Standing in front of him, part of me hoped that something would have finally changed. That my eyes would perceive him as different. That I would realize that all those years away were too long and I had finally fallen out of love with him. I press two fingers into the space between my eyebrows, trying to iron the lines from my skin. The unfamiliar self-consciousness I felt standing in front of him echoing around my body.

Jack looked just like he was meant to. Dressed in The Outfit, something he constructed from the correct things to wear at work. The same color blocks he’s picked a self assigned uniform from for the last 20 years. He looked older, but not as much as the fear inside me hoped. My entire plan went wrong right from the start, like a curse waiting to spring into action the minute I stepped into the building. By the time I got off the elevator I felt like I was drowning. For a moment standing there he looked like the only correct thing in the place. An island of relief in the unfamiliar landscape. Still the same Jack he always was.

Maybe we’ve been friends too long and I’ve taken too many pages out of his playbook. Self sabotaged spending months creating a plan I never needed to begin with. He didn’t even seem happy to see me. Looking at me like something that wasn’t meant to be there. I was so busy doing The Plan, I wish I would have stopped to ask about The Face. A thing now front and center when I lay awake rewriting our history. Little griefs burning down the sides of my face and into my pillow. I wish I had stopped to ask why looking at me was suddenly painful. Like I’m pressed against his throat and he hates me for it. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. None of this was supposed to happen. None of this shit was in The fucking Plan.

Oh who can blame you? Being alone will make you crazy. I fit test the uniform my family has pushed on me since I arrived. Eager for me to retake the mantle of The Problem. A paradoxical serpentine thing, always both wrong and right. Their idiot savior, now come home a failure. Something I think suits them just fine. And who can blame them for struggling to love me? Everyone does. I’m starting to think they might have been right. Pacing the living room biting the skin around the nail of my thumb. Counting the hours by the movement of the shadows across my work sitting undone. The panic I haven’t yet labeled backing me into another corner.