The Fatal Blow

I tried to make a home out of you, but doors lead to trap doors, a stairway leads to nothing. Unknown women wander the hallways at night. Where do you go when you go quiet? […] The past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a fucking curse.

– Warsan Shire
Intuition, adapted for the visual album, Lemonade, by Beyoncé

That should have been the whole story. It should have ended there, with me looking forward to my senior year. That was a good ending. The problem with nonfiction is that it’s messy in ways a writer can’t clean up.

Our love story should have been written in Sharpie on the walls. Instead, I tattooed every line directly into the flesh of my heart. In contrast, he just made the occasional scribble on a post-it, forgotten in a room he never returned to. We each screwed up in our own way. 

I loved who he was more than I hated how we were. He had made me promise to give him the benefit of the doubt. I did my best to keep that promise. As much as I wanted to sing our love from the mountaintops, we kept it on the down low because he told me he was a very private person. I told myself it wasn’t personal. That’s just his way. His last girlfriend had brought so much drama. It made sense that he would be skittish after all that. I could be patient.

I even felt a little sorry for the new girl. He and I had so much friendship before we became a thing. She hardly knows him. I wasn’t sure how she would cope with the intermittent ghosting, the running hot and cold, and with him telling people he was single long after she was all in. That would be so much more difficult without a solid foundation of friendship. Oof. If he hadn’t cheated on me with her, I think I would have been her biggest ally. 

I had spent most of my relationship with That Man braced for a breakup. At some point, I was going to get fed up with not being able to just introduce him as my boyfriend like a normal person. Or, at some point, he would realize that he would never make an honest woman out of me and set me free. I had asked him to tell me if he ever made up his mind about me. I thought he had when he threatened me with marriage at the end of 2021. Yet, just a few months later we were breaking up instead. 

I’m friends with most of my exes. I know the drill. I thought it would be painful for us both. We’d each have occasional pangs of regret and uncertainty. In weaker moments we might want each other back, but we’d know that would be a dead end. We’d keep our hands to ourselves. Over time, we’d each grieve our relationship separately, and occasionally together, each carrying a piece of that precious time in our hearts forever. We’d stay friends. 

After a period of mourning, we’d each dip our toes in the dating pool and maybe even find someone serious enough to feel like we should tell each other about it. By then, having grown comfortable with our non-romantic friendship, we’d feel something more sweet than bitter at the news. I am totally down to wingman for my exes and almosts. That’s how I expected this to go. 

Instead, I had to process the breakup and the new girl all at once. I was still licking my wounds, too raw to talk to anyone about my loss, when I got a text from my daughter asking about his girlfriend. I knew he had cheated on me, that he was continuing to see the other woman, but I couldn’t imagine anyone was gonna get a label out of that man, at least not in fewer than five years. But sure enough, my Work Bestie had used the word girlfriend, and that’s how my daughter found out about our breakup. 

You see, my daughter had a part-time job doing things I can’t do remotely to support on campus events. That Man who had told me he’s a private person, who acted like I was speaking a foreign language when I broached putting a label on it, suddenly had no problem saying “girlfriend,” at our place of employment, and to my own child. 

We’d broken up in August, and by October he was already bringing his side piece to work? Private person, my aunt Sally. I was not ready to tell people about the breakup. I wanted to get to where I could calmly tell people it was for the best, we’re staying friends, etc., without bawling like a baby about it.

I’m not proud of being cheated on. I was counting on there at least being enough gap between our break up and Side Chick’s debut, for it to give the illusion of no overlap. Surprise!

Suddenly, I had to act like I was okay with this so that my daughter wouldn’t have to bear any of my burdens and her professionalism wouldn’t be compromised. As much as that woman had no business being on my campus I really didn’t want my daughter to be the one to eject her. What the actual fuck?!

As calm as I tried to be outwardly, I think That Man knew I was less than thrilled. It wasn’t long after their visit that he was sending me foolishness. He messaged me screenshots of a picture of me in a crowd shot on our company website, trying to get me to tell him who “that wonderful person” is. I didn’t want to play this game. I didn’t want to fight. All I wanted was to finish the paper I was writing for school before its deadline. I so genuinely did not have the bandwidth for this nonsense. 

He tends to keep pushing if he doesn’t get the reaction he’s going for. He pushed, playful and sweet, but he pushed until I snapped. I reminded him I would have given anything for him to have called me his girlfriend, but I was sympathetic to the trauma of his last relationship’s drama. I respected that he didn’t want to risk his private life making messes in his professional life again.

For years, I sacrificed my emotional comfort for his, because I believed my friend, for all of his flaws, was honest with me. It turns out it was never that. It was never about him being private or skittish. I just took too long to realize that he regarded me as the kind of girl that guys like him will fuck and then deny. I’m the Fat Donna to his Victor Vargas, an embarrassing moment of weakness or boredom or just indiscriminate horniness. 

He tried to explain that it was beyond his control. Naming his girlfriend before me, he went on about how she hadn’t wanted to go to our work. He had to give my daughter a heads-up in case it happened. I asked him to clarify, in case what happened. He told me in case the new girl went with him to the campus. 

That had been our campus together. That is where we met, became friends, fell in love, and ultimately broke up. Before that, it had been my sanctuary, a safe place to hide from my troubles at home. He expected me to understand that he had no choice but to give it all to his side piece just because she wanted it. I would have loved to have seen his day job in San Diego, but he would never have given me a tour there. He told me that he was a private person, that it was important to keep his personal life and his professional life separate, and I had foolishly believed him.

All these things I thought he didn’t give, I suddenly realized he just didn’t give to me. When I was hurt that he was bringing her to our campus, he tried to explain by comparing the situation to the one with his girlfriend before me. He skipped right past me to a completely irrelevant piece of ancient history. I really meant so little to him that he couldn’t even begin to understand what was hurting me. Most of my exes, and even some of my almosts, are still so precious to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could mean so little to this man I’d been anticipating spending my life with. 

I thought we were going through a breakup. It turns out that was impossible. I was going through a breakup. He had never been in the relationship. To quote Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bag Theory, “A breakup would imply she was my girlfriend. She was a girl who was my friend who is now a girl who is not my friend.” I thought he was skittish about labels. I had no idea he could be so cold. This wasn’t a semantic thing, like how he calls the apprentices at our work interns. We weren’t disagreeing about word choice. 

He was acting like our whole relationship had never happened. I guess when he said we’re monogamous all he meant was that he gets to be salty about me kissing someone else goodnight, not that he wouldn’t see other people. When I asked him if his family knew about me and he was all like, of course they do, I thought that meant they knew we were seeing each other, like my family knew we were seeing each other. I guess they just knew that there’s admin staff where we work? When he would text me out of the blue to tell me he loved me, well, I guess that didn’t mean anything at all. Nearly five years together, and it turns out I was just a set of tits and fuckholes. 

I thought I was indestructible, but this broke me. For the next four days, I didn’t shower or change my clothes. My hair and teeth went unbrushed. I didn’t work. I missed classes. I missed assignments. Dutifully, I moved my body from bed to couch in the morning and from couch to bed at night, trying to seem normal for my son. All I could do was lie there and stare, putting all of my energy into not crying, into not curling up in a ball and trying to sleep through the rest of my life. 

During the initial shock of the breakup, I couldn’t stay asleep. After learning that for him there was truly nothing to break up, I found myself with no will to be awake. When he first ended things, he took away a future I had looked so dearly forward to. The future is just a bunch of made up stories though, until it actually happens. Then he took away our entire past.

I wholeheartedly believed in our friendship and that we had, for a time, been in love. I believed that we were precious to each other. It turns out that as far as he’s concerned we never happened. How could he just erase nearly five years together like that? 

In the beginning, I wasn’t ready for a relationship. I had a demanding job, school, and kids to raise. Dating was too much to add to such a full plate. I missed feeling loved, but believed I was unloved simply because I was too busy laying the groundwork for a better life. There just wasn’t room for a relationship yet. I was confident though that I would get the degree, get a great job, the kids would be grown and I’d be a catch for the right partner. 

The Work Bestie came sniffing around and I started to feel like maybe, for the right partner, I was a catch already. Then all at once, I realized that the thought of that had been so far from his mind, when we talked about the future, when he said he loved me, I was supposed to know that he couldn’t mean anything by it. When he talked about putting a ring on it, that was just a joke, so funny, ha ha. 

Only weeks after our breakup, he took Side Chick to our work campus, around my colleagues, my daughter, my daughter-in-law, and my friend’s kid who I’d watched grow up, and he couldn’t even figure out why this might be a problem. I didn’t just feel unloved. This left me feeling unlovable. I was never even in the running to be his leading lady. I was nothing more than a punchline.

Maybe it was my mistake

Could it be that I’m the one to blame?

Broken all the pieces

Why don’t you throw the rest away?

And you cry like a baby

Fly like a bird, I’ll shoot you down

And yet no one can save me

‘Cause I only disappear here

Hybrid,
Disappear Here