Heartbreaker

When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.

– Fiona Apple

It had been two nights with hardly any sleep. I sipped my coffee slowly. I was at work. There was an event. I had to put on my best professional facade. That cruel voice inside of me kept telling me, “it’s over.” I felt like throwing up. On the second day, I did not follow the Work Bestie around anymore. I did what was required of me until I started to cry again, then I’d go back to the chair in our room that was just my room now. 

I had lost the lid of my water bottle, so I took one of the bottled waters I bought for the Work Bestie. He loses them half-empty, whether they are reusable or not. I try to make sure there is always bottled water at work for him. Tried. I don’t think it’s my job to take care of him now. 

When the crying stopped, I went back to work. When the crying started again, I went back to my chair. I sat with my legs pulled up like the whole world was lava and the chair was the only safe place left. I didn’t get much work done, but it was enough. I accomplished what absolutely had to be accomplished, but not all the extras and improvements that I had so recently been excited about. 

The Work Bestie is very smart. He is also an idiot. I was rarely jealous when it seemed like all of our students who were attracted to men would flock around him after he taught. I knew that at the end of the day he was all mine. It amused me, watching girls give him ojitos as they asked him to explain simple concepts again, and he would so patiently explain things, never seeming to grasp that that wasn’t what they wanted from him. He is a good teacher but so often a clueless man. 

He told me he prefers to keep his work life and his personal life separate, so we kept things on the DL at work. I’m not sure how effective a strategy sharing a bedroom but not public displays of affection is. I accepted it, though. 

Usually, I chose not to go to the firepit after hours. I always thought how much nicer it would be to cuddle by the fire, and I knew I’d get salty spending too much time pretending like we weren’t a thing. So I’d do admin work, or school work, or whatever, and wait for him to come back from the firepit, and then I’d ask him all about it. I liked talking about our observations of the group, who had the best backstory, who was hitting it off, and who was getting on each other’s nerves. 

It was the July workshop a year earlier when he told me that one of the women had asked him if he was single. I asked him what he told her. He told me he answered yes. I hated everything about that. Why was I even there, then? Why was he telling me this? He tried to make it better by letting me know that when she asked for his phone number, he gave her his business card, which needed to be replaced because he doesn’t have that cell phone number anymore. I think I was supposed to be happy because he hadn’t given her a real phone number. I wasn’t. 

First of all, even if he doesn’t want people to know he’s involved with a colleague, he could at least say that he’s seeing someone and then decline to give further information. Second of all, that poor girl. She didn’t know we were involved. I had no ill will against her. He said he was single. What goes through that man’s head?

I could picture her sometime later with his card, nervously working up the courage to call him, going over what she was going to say in her head. She’d finally dial, only to get a disconnected or wrong number. He had good intentions, but he’d hurt two women in one careless blow. We hadn’t done anything to deserve this. 

His sense of humor is malicious sometimes. He likes to set people up to be mad at him and then flip the situation so that we’re foolish instead. Except this flip didn’t work. He was still telling people he was single, and that wasn’t fair to the girls who got their hopes up or to me. A year later and not much had changed. 

A recently graduated long-term apprentice had a crush on him this time. She was part of how Saturday night had run well past midnight, her and I each waiting to be the last woman standing so that we could have some time alone with him after everyone else had gone to bed. Why shouldn’t she shoot her shot? She had graduated, only coming back as a volunteer. He was still keeping his love life separate from his work life. She had no way of knowing he was in a relationship.

On Sunday night, I was holed up in my room fairly early, crying in my chair while they all socialized in the living room. I heard the Work Bestie looking for me, presumably to say goodbye before the long drive back to San Diego for the week. I thought about hiding from him, but I didn’t. That would feel dishonest and honesty is important to me, to us. If there even was an us anymore, I thought honesty, at least with each other, had been an important part of our relationship. I called out, letting him know where I was. He came in and seemed surprised to see me crying. 

I told him that I’d figured it out the night before that he was dumping me. I’d spent a good deal of time wondering if it was someone else. Was she beautiful? What was it about her? Why did he choose her over me? Then it occurred to me that there didn’t have to be anybody else. I could be not good enough without it being anyone else. Maybe it’s not about how great someone else is. I’m just not good enough. 

He hugged me. He tried to tell me he wasn’t abandoning me; we would stay friends and stay in each other’s lives. He told me he wasn’t involved with anyone in the living room. I figured he meant the recently graduated apprentice with the obvious crush. It was a weirdly specific piece of non-information.

I don’t remember everything we said, but I cried. A lot. Then I sent him away. It wasn’t going to get better in a night, and I didn’t want him too tired when he drove. I told him to let me know when he got home so I’d know he’d made it safe.

He left through the living room, through the crowd. I think the poor girl tried to shoot her shot; if I’m right, she had the worst timing in the world. The Work Bestie is generally very sweet and patient, but I think in his eagerness to shake off the emotional intensity of our exchange and get on the road, he was probably brusk with her. 

Her friends were all comforting her when I went through the living room a little later to get my laptop from the office. I heard one of the men telling her, “he’s like that with everyone; that’s just how he is; he really listens to people.” He was trying to explain that even though the Work Bestie made her feel special, that’s just his way.

“That’s how he is with everyone.”

Under different circumstances, I would have made a batch of Breakup Brownies for the girl and her friends. As the campus mom, I’ve nursed more than one apprentice’s broken heart over the years. Not that night. Not when my own heart was breaking.

You can feel it physically when a heart really breaks. I had to walk through that room where everyone was comforting another girl who had expected something more from him. I had to hold my own chin up with a core-collapse supernova imploding in my chest. The weight of all my love that nobody wanted was crushing me from the inside. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t let any of it show on the outside. 

So, I went back to my chair and cried some more. In movies, even the toughest bad guys will call for their mothers when they are dying. It’s kinda funny, really, the name on my lips when I’m scared, when I’m in pain, when I need comfort, is still his. I’d forgotten how to get through the bad days without him in my corner. With the isolation of the pandemic and then moving across the state, he’d become my whole world. How do I get through this without him? How do I get through so much pain alone?

A hand for each hand was planned for the world

Why don’t my fingers reach?

A million grains of sand in the world

Why such a lonely beach?

Where is a voice to answer mine back?

Where are two shoes that click to my clack?

I’m all alone in the world

– Mr. Magoo’s A Christmas Carol

Alone in the World