Alone

by Michelle Parise

  So I tell him I’m exhausted, even though that’s never once stopped me before, and if he finds that strange he doesn’t betray it. Instead of having sex we just fall asleep together, my mind swirling with how much life can fit into one unexpected day.

  Best Man and I text a little after that, but not much. He doesn’t want to have a long-distance relationship and neither do I. It could never work anyway, I have a kid and an ex-husband and a career so I can never leave Toronto, and he has his career and besides, he doesn’t even have a passport, he’s so super-American. But we stay in touch. We like each other’s Instagram photos a lot. Every few weeks one of us will send a short email and the other will respond, but there is no trace of the romance. We write like two kids who met and became best friends at camp but don’t know what to say now that they’re back in their regular lives.

  CIRCLES

  Summer 2015. White Shirt suddenly turns the awesomeness dial up to 95 percent, showing up with flowers and calling me all the time and making plans, and we spend three or four days a week together. It feels like something is different, like we’re trying, but it’s hard to say for sure. It’s just a lot of the same circles, the feeling he might change his mind, the disappointment when he doesn’t. The things he says to me that give me hope. False hope.

  Feelings can be misleading, according to my new psychologist. And that’s what I have to remember every time White Shirt tells me he loves me. Or buys me perfect little gifts. Or helps me with Birdie and home repairs. The things that make it feel like he’s my boyfriend, my partner. The things he says and does that only a person in love would say or do.

  I’m really not sure if this is how love is supposed to feel. This circle we keep tracing. It’s the world’s biggest loop, and we are in it and we both know it. But why we are in it, well, that’s another thing altogether. And it’s misleading, yes, to think that the very act of going round and round means we’re headed somewhere.

  “Just let life be!” a semi-crazy guy shouts at me. It’s midnight and I’m standing outside on the street while White Shirt is in a convenience store. I smile politely, because semi-crazy guy looks the worse for wear but also harmless. He has a kind face.

  “No, really,” he says to me, coming closer and shouting less. “Your man is strong.” He gestures toward White Shirt in the store. “Just let Mother Nature take its course! Let it go, you know?”

  “I do know,” I say to him, because duh.

  “So you do,” he says, satisfied. And then, “If you can let it all go and let nature take its course, it’s all going to be okay for you two!” He says this last part with a flourish, like he’s pretty fucking happy to have shared his insider knowledge about love with me. “What’s going on?” White Shirt says playfully to us as he comes out of the store. “Just respecting Mother Nature, you know,” I say all casual-like, and semi-crazy guy laughs and winks at me, because we’ve got this shared secret now.

  “So long!” he calls out and shuffles off down the street. White Shirt loops his arm in mine and takes me home with him. I try to let it go. I try to just let life be. Let nature take its course. I wait, and hope, in case semi-crazy guy is actually right.

  WANDERLUST

  And so, now, I spend a lot of time thinking about wanderlust. The roaming spirit. The desire to move from one place — or person — to the next. To never sit still, settle down.

  “Why do you always love these baby birds?” my friend The Bright One asks. “When you’re a tree with your roots dug in? You know those birds are just going to keep flying away, then come back to sit on your branches a bit before flying off again when a warmer breeze comes by.”

  I laugh at her poetry but she shakes her head at me. She knows my deal. She knows I like to have my roots so deep you can’t dig them out. Roots so big they start to squeeze out sewage systems, burst through pipes.

  And yet I fall for men made of wanderlust. Men that live so far into the unknown future they can’t enjoy what’s right in front of them. Men with roaming, roving hearts. Meanwhile, my own expansive heart just keeps on expanding until it’s the size of the world. So big I can keep them with me, wherever they go.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN REVERSE

  THE OPPOSITE OF DESTROYING

  If I could lose the memory of the bitter cold, that night of The Bomb, the way the trees scratched the sky, The Husband’s eyes wild and the air like a sheet of ice hung between us, oh I would.

  If I could. I would take that memory and crumple it up like a piece of paper with a bad poem on it. I’d toss it into the little plastic wastebasket of a hotel I’ll never go back to.

  If I could, I’d take it into the woods and set it on fire, then bury the ashes in a hand-dug latrine. I’d cover it with a thousand rocks, the bigger the better, then add some fallen tree trunks for good measure.

  If I could, I’d take the memory of that horrible night and feed it to a bunch of carpenter ants, who’d devour it slowly but completely. The Queen would get the best part of course, the snow and the cemetery gates and how different he suddenly looked. Fearful.

  I would take that memory, so precise in its pain, so profound in its damage, and I’d put it in a capsule, heavy and secure, and throw it into the sea. I’d watch it sail out in an arc of momentary beauty before it suddenly pitched hard downward, falling toward the water, sharp as a dart.

  It would sink to the bottom and land there, deep in the muddy darkness, where the absence of everything folds around it until it’s nothing to me anymore. So far down I can’t hear it. I can’t feel it. I’ve destroyed it, and I’m free.

  If I could have, I would have. Instead, I didn’t destroy the memory of that horrible night at all. I wrote it down. I whispered it into a microphone.

  I gave it life so it wouldn’t only be mine to forget.

  DAY TO DAY

  I’m rushing to Birdie’s after-school daycare, again. The Single-Parent Dash. I run in at exactly 6:01 p.m., but I’m met by the disapproving looks of the women who work there. Birdie is, as always, the last child waiting to be picked up. I’m sweating, exhausted, guilty. So guilty — for having to leave work “early,” for deigning to work at all, based on the daycare ladies’ faces. Guilty when Birdie says, “I’m starving! What’s for dinner?” I have no idea what’s for dinner or even if there’s anything in the fridge.

  We walk home together, from her school, past The Ex-husband’s apartment building, across the major city intersection and through the little park to my building. She chats the whole way about warrior cats, and I half-listen, going over my favourite fantasy instead, the one where I’m a man in the 1950s: After my long day at work, I come home to a clean apartment, the smell of a delicious meal in the air, a martini waiting. After dinner while my wife washes the dishes, I relax and read the newspaper as my child plays happily but quietly on the floor.

  I would give anything to be a man, and especially a white, middle-class man in the fifties. Those guys had it made. Instead I’m a white lady in 2015. A single lady. A single mom. I will not get to sit down and relax until ten o’clock tonight.

  At seven I’m cooking pasta, when Birdie calls out from the bathroom. “Uh … Mom? Mom! You need to come in here nowwww!” The toilet is overflowing. A lot. I grab a plunger and start madly to work, plunging, sweating, plunging, so much sweating. How does this work? It isn’t working. I flush, plunge, sweat. Brown, stinky water goes all over the floor and my shoes, which of course I haven’t taken off yet since I went straight to the kitchen to make dinner the second we walked in. My shoes covered in disgusting sludge, hot tears starting, and then Birdie from the kitchen, “The pot is overflowing!”

  I run, tracking brown toilet water with me and the pasta water is a geyser all over the stove. I grab it … and burn my hand. My toilet-water hand. “FUUUUCK!” I shout, and Birdie doesn’t flinch, she just says quietly, “Mom?” and I shout, “I CAN’T DO ANY OF THIS! IT’S TOO MUCH!”

  She’s looking at me with her big blue e
yes, not with fear but with a compassion that calms me. I say, “It’s too much,” again, but this time in a resigned whisper because it is, sometimes. Sometimes, being a single mom is too much.

  I know, I’m not a real single mom. They do this 24/7. I’m a part-time mom. A “co-parent.” So it’s definitely different. But I still suck at it sometimes. There are still these moments. There are still no Mother’s Day gifts or Christmas gifts, and no gifts of sleeping in and breakfast in bed. No one to stop the pasta water from overflowing while I stop the toilet water from overflowing.

  “Check this out, Mom!” Birdie says, and makes a series of hilarious faces at me. I’m crying and feeling sorry for myself while the real gift, this kid of mine, is saying, “Mom, this is a lot of stuff happening at once!”

  I laugh. I hug her and agree, it is a lot of stuff. Together we put towels down on the bathroom floor. I show her how to pee in the bathtub. Then I just shut the bathroom door and put on a new pot of pasta.

  PICK A DIRECTION

  On what I believe will be the last time The Man with the White Shirt is ever in my bed, I say to myself He’s just a guy. He’s just a guy. He’s just a guy. We have fought (again) and cried (again) and reached the conclusion (again) that this has to end, it has to, God, this has to be the end. We want to stay friends. We can’t imagine our lives without each other. He wants to see Birdie, he loves her, he loves me, and God do I love him, but we don’t know how any of that works. All we know is we can’t keep running in circles. We need to pick a direction.

  There’s no more denying it — we want different things. He doesn’t want a monogamous, committed relationship. I want exactly that. You can’t get past this, I finally, somehow, finally realize. He’s a Jet and I’m a Shark. One of us is Palestine and the other is Israel. Or oil and water … anything that can come together, and wants to come together, and feels good together, but always, always, ends up apart. Wanting to make it work isn’t enough.

  And so, after the fighting and crying, the talking and dismantling, we inevitably fall together. Sex is our truce, our ceasefire. We sign a peace accord on each other’s skin. But it’s also where the heartbreak climbs. It starts to take over, nullifying the truce and sending me back to the front lines. I forget all about Jets and Sharks or oil and water and think, OhmygodIloveyouwhycan’twemakethiswork! I think, Ican’tnothavethisIhavetohavethiswhatwillIdowithoutyou?

  And then, for some reason, I hold my breath. Just for a bit. Our eyes are locked and then, just as he cries out, I let all the air out and think, He’s just a guy.

  He’s just a guy.

  He’sjustaguy. He’sjustaguy. He’sjustaguy. He is.

  Just.

  A.

  Guy.

  I remove the specialness of it. The we-are-meant-to-be. I throw the rich madness of us out, and in that moment we’re just two people who have had a couple of orgasms.

  But when it’s time for him to go, I can’t take it. There’s still the discarded wife inside of me that can’t take any goodbyes, let alone one with a ring of finality to it. Every goodbye from The Man with the White Shirt is like The Husband all over again. Every time, every goodbye, alone alone alone.

  “Just leave once I fall asleep,” I say and he sighs, lies down in his clothes, me naked beside him. Four hours later I wake up to go to work and he’s still lying there in his jeans and jacket. We look at each other, bathed in the blue light of early winter morning. He’s just a guy. He’s just a guy. He’s just a guy.

  I cry, and it isn’t so much about White Shirt leaving as it is about me being left behind. It’s me as a young teenager, pretending not to care that my parents were breaking up. It’s me in the emergency room alone, not knowing what was wrong with my eyes. It’s me the night my husband didn’t come home for the first time in twelve years. It’s me left behind. Always left, never leaving.

  And so when the door clicks shut behind White Shirt, I cry all of that. I cry so hard I’m sure they can hear me right through the concrete walls and out onto the street four storeys below. I feel like I’ve collapsed, like I’ve folded in on myself. He suddenly bursts back in, fast, and pulls me into him hard, his arms tight around me. He wipes away my tears and I say, “Go, go.” And he does, for real this time, he goes.

  I unfold myself. I feed the cat. I stop crying and put makeup on and fix my hair. I’m relieved that he’s gone, and surprised by that feeling. I stare long and hard at myself in the mirror. I’m forty-one years old and I’ve cried every day for the past two weeks. I’ve cried for four years. I’ve had everything and then nothing but, look! I’m still here, I’m still strong. I stare longer in the mirror. I think, I look pretty good considering my age and the lack of sleep and the non-stop heartbreak.

  Goddamn it, I’m tired of going round in circles with him. I’m tired of the way we keep doing this same dance, just with variations on a theme. We’ve gotten so good at it, we can do all the steps with our eyes closed. And I’ve craved the dance, because at least it’s something. To him, it’s not enough. It shouldn’t be enough for me either — I know I want a love that’s consistent, less intermittent.

  For him it’s the opposite. He needs my love like people need a vacation— just every once in a while. Just enough to get the sun on his face and salt in his hair before heading back home, well-rested. I’m like a really nice postcard stuck on his refrigerator door. A memory of a place he went once that he has great stories about. It’s just not anywhere he’d want to actually stay for very long.

  But Here’s the Thing

  Love is strange and wonderful and you cannot choose it. You can choose to not see it or feel it when it’s there with you, but you can’t choose it out of existence.

  Love floods you like a high beam on a dark country road.

  Love is a defender that sometimes gets in your way.

  Love shoots you up in the sky like a corner-store firework, cheap but exciting.

  Love sticks to you like gum on the bottom of your shoe or parsley in your teeth.

  Love is a flood that cannot be stopped no matter how many sandbags you put out.

  You can’t prepare. You can only act. Action is the antidote to anxiety. Certainty is a myth.

  So you may as well let that light flow right into you, right through you, and experience it now, even if it’s only temporary.

  Even if it’s just in knowing that there’s no real way of knowing.

  Love is at ease with itself, man. It doesn’t look before it leaps, it just leaps.

  It

  just

  does.

  CAREFUL

  The Ex-husband stands in my doorway. He seems so big in the small space, here between two doors, my apartment behind one and his freedom behind the other. Birdie’s on the floor between us, playing with the cat. She’s nine now, long and lean like him but with a big bold heart like mine.

  I say something to him in our own language, that way we communicate with phrases and expressions and smirks only we can understand. It excludes the rest of the world, including Birdie, who tilts her head quizzically, like we really are speaking a different language.

  The Ex-husband smiles at me, boyishly, almost shy, and I can’t get over how much I suddenly want to kiss him. How much I just want to put my hand on the side of his face. I will not do these things. Not anymore. Not here, between two doors. Not anywhere. Our bodies have made no contact for more than a year.

  For some reason we linger on this August day. We have nothing to discuss, so there’s no reason for him to still be standing here, but he is still standing here, and I don’t make any move to suggest he shouldn’t be. So we linger, making the smallest of talk, having the smallest of laughs, silently acknowledging the energy that still exists between us.

  He should probably go. Yes. And so he hugs Birdie goodbye, saying, “See you in eight days,” as cheerily as he can muster, even though it’s so hard, for both of us, to ever be apart from her for very long. “Bye Dad!” she says and takes off to her room.
His face as she disappears. My heart falls a little with it.

  We stand there alone together, awkwardly. Our arms slightly touch and we hug, a thing we don’t do anymore. My hand flies up to his face on autopilot. I feel his skin against mine for the first time in a very, very long time. We look at each other fast, with the same shiny eyes and flushed cheeks we had when we first touched, way back then when we were twenty-five.

  “Be careful,” I say to him, I don’t even know why, but he smiles as if he understands, saying, “Okay, I will.” And slower than the tide, we pull our bodies apart.

  I love you. Is what I mean, but don’t say.

  I don’t say, Your love split my heart open like an axe, but all that did was make more room inside it.

  This Love is Not Simple

  Between his third and fourth snore, I whisper, “I love you.”

  I always wait the same amount of time, there between the third and fourth snore, as if it matters if he hears me or not. As if it matters, since he knows it. Everyone knows it. And yet I work hard to contain it, contain I love you, saving it only for the times when wine or weed help it to just slide right out of my mouth. Those times when it rushes out of me too fast for me to catch it, my defences down as I look at him looking at me and then all bets are off and out it comes, “I love you I love you I love you,” like a burst pipe on a summer street, beautiful and tragic, all short-term happiness but so much waste.