Alone

by Michelle Parise

  This time, I stay in my seat. My hands on the wheel. I hear him taking the luggage out, then arranging it just so. In the rear-view mirror, I see him adjust his jacket and tags. And then his face, so sad, through the open passenger window, my name coming quietly out of his lips, an angry horn blast behind us and a string of swears shouted in another language. I turn to look at him.

  “I love you,” he says.

  And I say, “Goodbye,” and drive away.

  I don’t cry on Airport Road. Or Highway 427. Or even the Gardiner Expressway. I don’t listen to music either. I just watch the road. And the cars. And the lake as it comes into view, sparkling in the sunlight as if nothing’s happened. As if everything hasn’t changed. I don’t cry until I reach the elevator in my parking garage. As soon as the doors shut, I’m a firehose of sorrow. At street level, a guy gets in the elevator and looks afraid. “Are you okay?” he barely asks and I say, “No.” He looks at the ground.

  In my apartment I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how this was a thing and now it’s not a thing. I don’t know how I can be back at the beginning. Why did he change his mind? How can he say he loves me but not want to be together?

  After an hour of crying I get a second wind. A new wind. I decide on the spot to swap my bedroom with Birdie’s. Yes, you heard me right, the bedrooms. I work steadily for six hours straight. I dismantle all the furniture in her room and pull it all out into the main part of the apartment. Then I dismantle my furniture and drag it out. I take every piece of clothing out of each closet and swap them. I take down every photo, piece of art, and knick-knack. I make a huge mess and scrape my leg and hit my head and strain every muscle. There are so many holes in all the walls. I make new problems where old problems were. The place is a fucking disaster, but at least it’s stopped me from crying. At least this was something I could control.

  I can’t control that night after night, I drunkenly call him, crying, shouting at him for being immature and callous. Or pleading with him to come back to me. To us. Where I cry about the family trip to Portugal that will never be and get angry about concert tickets I already bought for us, as if that matters. Where I mewl, “The summer, though! We were supposed to have the summer! What about the summer?!” like summer is a thing I’ve never had before, and never will again.

  I’m so fucking dramatic. But it hurts, okay? He says he still loves me. But he doesn’t know shit about love. The Ex-husband and I, that was love. We had nothing in common and we fought, but we fought fair and maturely, knowing that with love comes war sometimes and in that war, there were rules of engagement. We knew that every argument didn’t mean we weren’t right, every bump in the road didn’t mean the end. We fought like anyone else does, because people fight.

  White Shirt doesn’t know what love is, because he’s never really let himself find out. He always retreats. I just wanted to keep going, forward march, because against all odds, he came to me that August night as The Outlier.

  Even though he dropped The Bomb on me and our marriage and family and turned into a huge asshole at the end, The Ex-husband and I were as real and true as it gets. He knew what he wanted. And he knew how to love. At the very least, he knew how, goddamn it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HOME

  The Thing About the Heart

  Here’s the thing about the heart, no matter how full it gets, how weary.

  No matter how many pieces it’s splintered into, again, the glue barely dried. No matter how resolutely it stands before a dead-end sign, or how stubbornly it wears that sign itself.

  It doesn’t matter how many makeshift walls the heart puts up around itself, or how it tries desperately to scramble up the walls of another’s. The heart will do what it always does — surprise, confuse, delight, ache. It will continue to be the trickster, the lovelorn, the protector.

  You can’t stop the heart.

  So lean into it and listen.

  Its whispers are sunlight on blue, blue water, ready to dive into again and again.

  RECOVERY

  I guess I like the ocean in times of crisis. Since we aren’t going to Portugal anymore, I’ve chosen to go as far away from it as my broken heart will allow. For the first time together, Birdie and I go to the Pacific Coast, to British Columbia and my older brother.

  For twelve days we stare at the Pacific. We hike through mountain forests each morning and spend each afternoon at a different beach. It is hot and lovely here, but it’s no Portugal. Still, it’s good to be with my brother and his girlfriend, who feels like a sister to me, as well as her two daughters, my two nephews, and their girlfriends. They’re all one big intermingled family here, in two homes, always texting each other and popping by and everyone hanging out together always, a raucous bunch of young adults and my loud brother and his awesome girlfriend and so much laughter.

  It feels good to be around this much energy and life, to be a witness to the love and madness, so different than the quiet two-person life Birdie and I have back at our apartment in Toronto, so different from this small town on the west coast, where everyone seems to know everyone and deer walk down the street.

  Birdie is having a great time and so am I, but I am also deeply, deeply sad. Not because British Columbia isn’t Portugal, but because I was more in love with The Man with the White Shirt than I even realized. There was a future I’d imagined, and now it would stay that way, lingering as imagination only, never materializing. So I cry a lot. Or stare at the ocean a lot. I talk with my brother a lot. About our crazy family, about heartbreak, about children and relationships and soccer and coffee and what we’re going to eat for the next three meals and how we’re going to cook it. I’m actually relieved to be here, five thousand kilometres from home, here with my big brother, who is gruff sometimes but also really funny and kind and who laughs so hard his blue eyes disappear into tiny slits.

  Those same blue eyes comfort me when we’re both up early each morning, sitting in the kitchen talking. He hands me coffee in a Spider-Man mug I bought him when I was still a teenager. A deer runs through the backyard.

  “The Man with the White Shirt loves Spider-Man,” I say, and my brother rolls his eyes and changes the subject to something funny, which is his way of saying I know, I know it’s hard, and he makes me perfect little pancakes that we eat while planning the next three meals.

  While on this trip, Birdie and I talk a lot about what’s happened between me and The Man with the White Shirt. What it means. She’s very concerned. Well, she mostly has one concern: “Are you guys in an argument? Or can I still see him?” I tell her we’re not in an argument, we love each other and he loves her, but being in a relationship with me just isn’t right for him. I tell her I’m sad (“No kidding, Mom!”) and that’s why I’ve been crying so much (“I thought so”), but I assure her we are still friends and will always be friends.

  “I’m sorry you’re so sad, Mom,” she says, “but I’m really glad I’ll still be able to see him.” I try to imagine what that will be like, how it will work. How now, I will have to further divide my time with her.

  On the last day of our trip, early in the morning, my brother drives us to the ferry that will take us to the airport that will take us back home. He waits with us until the ferry arrives, gives Birdie and me a no-nonsense hug and a quick goodbye and turns to go. My heart sinks a little as I watch him leave. I wish we didn’t live five thousand kilometres apart. I wish we lived close enough for me to walk over to his place and have a coffee in an old Spider-Man cup.

  The salt air whips through our hair as we stand on the deck of the giant ocean ferry watching my brother’s town slowly disappear from view. I drink coffee, and we eat the snacks he packed for us. We laugh and talk and it’s easy to forget she’s a child sometimes, now that she’s ten and almost as tall as me and is cool and easy to travel with.

  “Everything’s going to be okay, Bird,” I say and she says, “Uh, yeah, Mom, obviously. Everything’s going to be great!”

>   GOING HOME

  Everything is great. The kid is right. It’s also really terrible sometimes. News Flash! LIFE! Life, it goes on. It just goes and goes. With or without The Man with the White Shirt, which is to say always with him in some way, because we can’t stay apart. In truth, we are each other’s best friend, the closest person we have on this earth, and that in itself is hard to let go of, let alone the magic and the magical sex and the magical magic. Agh.

  This time around, I don’t date hard. I don’t date at all. I don’t have the heart for it or the time. If something happens, it will happen, but I’m not going to work at it now, not like I used to. I’m not going to try and find someone to replace him, someone to help me get over him. I don’t want to get over him this time. Or at least I don’t want to have to work at getting over him.

  So I focus on my actual work, my career, my writing. And I focus on Birdie. I hang out with my friends, especially women. We go to movies and clothing swaps and for coffee and text each other when we know something important is happening, or something hard. I cultivate these female friendships like I never have before. Birdie tags along a lot. She’s one of the girls, even though she’s decidedly un-girly. I love that about her. I love that she wears only jeans and baggy hoodies and doesn’t know or care about brands or trends. She does her own nerdy thing. She looks more like her dad now than ever before. Same long straight hair he had when I first met him, same facial expressions. But she’s got her mother’s heart.

  This is a new phase of my life, where I’m not concerned about being single again, not concerned about chasing men. Where I can’t be bothered to waste my small amount of free time texting them endlessly even though they never want to make real plans to meet in real life. I’m over it. I’m ready to be chased. I’m ready to be adored. I’m ready to not have to guess. Or haggle. Or hustle for someone’s time and attention. I’m ready to get comfy around someone who feels comfortable to be themselves around me and who thinks that’s a good thing when that happens. I’m ready for someone who will love me and want to be with me. I’m done with part-time affection.

  I’m finally thinking about love as not only a thing I give, but a thing that’s also given to me. Consistently. I want to feel the way it felt with The Husband for most of our twelve years together. It feels amazing, to love and be loved, even when it’s “not right.” To fall asleep talking with your legs touching. To be comfortable with someone and still so attracted to them. To share your life.

  I actually can’t think of a more worthwhile feeling.

  Okay not true. Another worthwhile feeling happens sometime that same year, after White Shirt breaks up with me, and it is this: I want to go home now. I like it. On the few nights I do have free each week, I want nothing more than to go home. I know, right? Finally!

  It’s like my apartment’s been a train station since I moved here after The Bomb. I’ve always thought of it as temporary. I’ve never articulated this, but it’s been here, waaaay down in the basement of my heart’s mind, lurking, tricking me into thinking this wasn’t permanent. I just assumed that I would only live here for a few years, then of course I’d meet someone, we’d fall in love, we’d move in together, and I’d have to sell this place. But that simple thing I thought would be a given may not actually ever happen. So this apartment isn’t temporary. It’s mine. I bought it with my own money and filled it with tiny, eclectic things. And I guess I’m ready to finally see it as it really is — my home, and Birdie’s home. It’s ours.

  You would never know to look at it, that all these years I considered it a waystation. If you know me and have been here, I bet you found that all very surprising. But it’s true. And once I realized that it really was my home, suddenly it was easier to come back to, without trepidation or needing sedation. I just started walking in the door and enjoying it, even when Birdie isn’t here. I start to really look forward to having the time to make music or do sewing projects or write this story for you.

  It took nearly six full years after The Bomb to be okay with being alone in my own home. To want to be alone here. To love it. Not all the time, but at least some of the time.

  And so, I go home. I finally, finally go home. And it’s good.

  Still,

  every time I see two people holding hands as they walk along the street, I wince.

  SHAMBLE

  In October 2017, I meet a boy in a coffee shop, the one that’s in the bottom of my apartment building, actually. He runs it with his brother, a cute little place with his paintings hung beautifully on the walls. He’s made me many a delicious Americano in the past, but I’ve never paid him any attention until now. For some reason today we strike up a real conversation.

  For the next few weeks, every time I come home from work (because I come home now, hooray!), I find him sitting outside the coffee shop having a smoke. He always waves me down and I sit with him and talk for a bit, about love and music and philosophy. He’s very sweet and young and kinda goofy. He’s an Albertan farm boy who’s relatively new to the city, and I like how un-Toronto he is. We become friends. We bond over broken hearts.

  The Farm Boy talks non-stop about The Brazilian Girl, a woman his heart bleeds for, even though they only dated a short time and she did not feel the same. So he understands how my heart beats only for The Man with the White Shirt. He understands the addiction that is another person, how powerful the magic is, how much of a trickster it can be. It’s ninety percent of what we talk about — The Brazilian Girl and The Man with the White Shirt. I even make a joke that they’ve probably slept with each other, and we laugh, then both wince at the same time. Even the thought is like tiny shards of flying glass right into each of our hearts.

  The Farm Boy is an abstract painter; his paintings are so absolutely beautiful I can hardly believe this goofy stoner is the one that painted them. He is supremely talented. I watch his process, the way he pours the paint and resin, the colours he chooses, and how each of the finished canvases seems to be named after The Brazilian Girl or some other ex-girlfriend. I can look at them for hours, staring at the swirls of turquoise and magenta, the flecks of gold, the long straight lines that bisect the madness with an incongruous precision. I even help him with taping the lines of one painting, which he names “Shamble” (after himself this time, not an ex-girlfriend), and later I will buy that painting and hang it in my apartment, a long canvas of complicated beauty, not unlike The Farm Boy himself.

  For the first few months after we meet, we text a lot, just buddies. I feel almost like an older sister to him sometimes. One night, we hang out at my apartment and just talk and talk for hours straight. There is no heat between us. He seems absolutely uninterested in me in a romantic or sexual way and I feel the same. So we smoke a lot of weed and talk about the ones we love who don’t love us back the way we so desperately need them to.

  At the beginning of December, I bring him to a big annual party my friend Pint Size always throws. It’s a huge bash and I figure it will be good for him to meet new people. He’s fun and sweet and a bit shy in the crowd of mostly older and more sophisticated big-city media types. Sometimes he puts his arm around me tentatively. When Pint Size says to him, “Well, aren’t you the most adorable thing! Are the two of you lovers?” he lets out a loud nervous giggle and looks at me, then quickly at the floor. His reaction makes me consider him differently for a moment. The innocence of it all.

  Then at 2:00 a.m. in the kitchen, while the party thins out in the living room, I laugh at something he says and out of nowhere, Farm Boy just leans in and gives me a fantastic kiss. A knock-you-off-your-feet kiss. A time-to-take-this-elsewhere kiss. I haven’t been with anyone but White Shirt in well over a year, but in my bed, everything goes incredibly right with Farm Boy. Everything goes great. I sleep deeply and comfortably beside him all night. In the morning he cooks me the best eggs I’ve ever had.

  At first, I find it all a bit swoony, just to be swept up out of nowhere like that. Just to be around a guy that is
n’t like all the rest of the Toronto guys. I call him Farm Boy and he blushes and calls me Darlin’. Even his texts: Night Darlin’ or Hey, Darlin’ how’s yer day goin’? He always capitalizes Darlin’. It’s charming and even a bit disarming, like maybe it’s okay for me to try to date again.

  Farm Boy helps distract me somewhat from my obsessiveness over White Shirt, and it’s nice, for the first time since The Bomb, to be with someone I was friends with first. But in short enough time it’s clear that although we enjoy each other’s company, it’s not in any kind of serious, long-term romantic way. We are way too different. He’s twenty-seven and lives in near-squalor. I’ve just turned forty-three and live like a full-on adult. He’s intelligent and talented and has plenty of ambition and ideas, but lacks focus or direction or know-how. He’s a happy-go-lucky stoner who smokes all the time. It’s one of the things I find really disagreeable, the so-much-smoking.

  On the plus side, he texts and calls me frequently, and we hang out regularly and have a lot of fun together, but when I look at him I just don’t get the thing inside me, the feeling, not like when I look at The Man with the White Shirt, whose smell and skin and body are the most intoxicating drugs to me. Not like when The Husband used to look at me, and it felt like he was setting fire to me from the inside out. But Farm Boy is cute and sweet, and really, really great in bed. So great. And he is the first and only guy I’ve enjoyed as much as White Shirt when it comes to sex. It’s pretty cool, this being friends and not being obsessed with each other. This having amazing regular sex without all the heartache and drama. All in all, it’s a pretty good thing, this thing that isn’t a thing. This thing between The Farm Boy and me.

  At midnight on New Year’s Eve, he kisses me long and sweet, in my friend The Lawyer’s living room, so close to the spot where just the year before, The Man with the White Shirt kissed me at midnight then said it was the best New Year’s kiss he’d ever had, that it was his happiest New Year’s Eve. And right after, Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun” came on, and we laughed and sang it out loud in each other’s arms and it had always been my least favourite song on that album, I thought it was so cheesy, until that moment when it became my favourite, because now it was a memory and a feeling. The feeling of being someone’s happiest, best New Year’s Eve kiss.