Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  I was twenty-six. We broke up a few months later, at the end of August, just before our five-year anniversary. She claimed to have had no idea how unhappy I was, and saying the words felt like having to amputate my own arm. It was the only thing left to do in order to save myself, and I knew in time I’d heal, but it was so painful. We decided to share custody of Kimberly, loosely agreeing to trade her off every few weeks. On top of breaking up with her, I wasn’t about to take her dog away from her, too.

  Avery moved out first while I sat in the park with two friends, drinking bodega beer. I picked at the grass, felt its dampness through my jeans.

  “I need to be single for the rest of my twenties,” I told them, while they rolled their eyes. Later, when the park was spinning, my friend Christina downloaded Tinder on my phone and we looked at cute girls while I marveled at how many people had been out there all along.

  “Maybe actually I need to fuck all of them,” I said, a slurred change of heart.

  “That’s more like it,” Christina replied approvingly. I was nearly seeing double from the beer and the heat.

  When I started seeing Avery, dating apps didn’t exist. We’d met in person, at work, and I still had a flip phone. By the end of our relationship I’d been having a recurring dream about using Tinder for months. That night I swiped madly from my bed, falling asleep with my phone in my hand. During the breakup I had been convinced that I wanted to be alone, but suddenly all I could think about was meeting someone. It wasn’t really solitude I’d been craving; in a lot of ways, I’d had that. I spent the first half of my twenties feeling rejected by the person I was in love with, and even though I was angry at her for it, I was mostly directing that anger inward, convinced that there was something unlovable about me. What I wanted was to be proven wrong by a successful relationship; I wanted real connection, and physical intimacy, and someone who had similar goals to mine who could challenge me in new ways and also cherish me at the end of my long, brutally stressful workdays. I woke up to several matches; the first was a girl who I’d known in high school. We went on a drinks date that week and then a second date that weekend to a party, after which she came home with me and spent the night. She was a (also, the aforementioned) Scorpio, a fact she told me while rolling her eyes. She was funny and tall, with short, floppy brown hair and doll-like blue eyes, and I could feel how much she liked me, but I had a phone full of potential and half a decade of unresolved feelings to wade through. I tried to let her down honestly with a text about how it was too close to my breakup for me to consider anything serious.

  I went back to my Tinder deep dive. A few days later I swiped and swiped until I landed on a profile with blurry but artful photos. Her bio was a line from a poem. I thought, This person is a red flag. We matched immediately.

  She messaged me quickly: “Can I borrow that jacket?” I said no. A day of anxious banter and then I asked her out, to which she said, “Please.”

  We met at a dark, trendy bar. She said her coworkers had told her she was dressed like Justin Timberlake, and she was: shiny black blazer over a T-shirt; short, curly bleached-blonde hair; slouchy pants rolled up at the ankle, sneakers. Over cocktails she told me she was a double Gemini and said, “Sorry in advance,” with a dangerous smirk. Hours later, making out on the sidewalk at two a.m., she pushed me into a fence, thumbs carving into my ribs, and I felt like I was twenty again, or at least like my body was, or at least like if I was my skinniest self maybe I could make up for all the years I spent feeling like someone’s creepy roommate instead of someone’s girlfriend. Finally I untangled myself and took a cab home, crawling into bed around five a.m. and sleeping until noon. I awoke to a text from her, and from that moment on we were rarely out of contact.

  I moved out of the house in Queens about a week later, packing my delicate things in canvas tote bags and the rest of my stuff in black garbage bags. Avery and I had lived together in a quiet, family-oriented neighborhood, but I had dreams of noisy, bustling Brooklyn, where life seemed more vibrant, more filled with possibility. Mimi, who I’d met as an intern at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in college, lived in Bed-Stuy, and for years I’d drive or take the bus to her brownstone-lined street. I was so envious of her cool Brooklyn babe life—friends within walking distance, dimly lit restaurants and bars, cute queer people of all kinds holding hands—and for a long time I didn’t think I’d get to have something similar. But her partner, Rae, was opening a coffee shop two blocks from their home, and she put me in touch with the shop’s landlord, who happened to have a studio apartment open in the same building. I was aching to live alone, but also scared, and living near my friends while also in my own space was the ideal situation. I felt that I couldn’t fully grow up until I had my own little world to retreat to, that I was solely responsible for.

  I didn’t have a lot of belongings besides clothes and beauty products, which was for the best, since the studio I was moving into had enough room for my bed, a dresser, and a small couch; there was no closet, and only a tiny kitchenette. I ordered two clothing racks on Amazon and set them up in the corner of the living room / bedroom, and then overloaded them with clothes to the point where the racks were permanently leaning to one side. A few times they totally collapsed on me while I got dressed for work.

  The studio was on the second floor, overlooking a busy street, with wide-set window ledges that I could sit in and look out at the community garden, which had a huge weeping willow tree next to a permanently parked, burnt-out orange car. I could hear music from the barbershop below, birds from the tree across the street, and the regular rumble of the G train beneath the building. I’d frequently see my friends walking by and could talk to them from my window. I’d never felt so proud.

  I had a very specific vision for my first solo apartment, and it involved shining white walls, midcentury modern furniture with cozy gray accents, and a few well-placed, thriving succulents. Maybe a blush-pink throw would be draped just so over a Scandinavian sofa, and natural light would spill across the room, creating an elegant, ever-changing pattern that would dance across the hardwood floors. I’d purge my closet and reorganize it by color (black and white). Everything West Elm, nothing IKEA. My bed would always be made with sheets that were always clean. I wouldn’t necessarily go full Marie Kondo, but I somehow wouldn’t have to—my taste, when not compromised by roommates or a live-in partner—would lend itself to pristine minimalism.

  Enter the actual things I filled said apartment with: two mismatched moody-red Persian rugs from Craigslist, an antique brass standing lamp with a rose stained-glass lampshade, a dresser hand-painted with flowers my mom got at a flea market twenty years ago, mismatched cups, five throw blankets of vastly different patterns and materials, an art collection that included a vintage painting of a poodle wearing sunglasses as well as an illustrated portrait of Hillary Clinton, and so, so many books about feminism and also aliens. The one thing I bought from West Elm was not the simple wooden coffee table of my daydreams but a very large, dark-blue velvet tufted couch, on which I placed a sheepskin. It sat surrounded by crystals, more lamps, several different things to smoke out of, a vintage wooden coffee table that I painted matte black, and a sculptural side table made of dark mirrors.

  The farther into the corners of the space my crap went, the more it felt like mine. And there’s a special thing that happens when you’re surrounded only by your own belongings: your emotional stuff surrounds you, too, without distraction. There was suddenly nowhere to hide from my own self.

  I invited the Gemini to come over the night I moved in. She showed up with a bottle of prosecco. I wish I could have let myself have that night alone; in hindsight, it would have been so important to know that I could be okay by myself. But I wasn’t thinking about myself like that; I was just excited to see her.

  Perhaps because I still had never actually been on my own, it was easy to quickly start spending most nights of the week together. My friends regarded the situation with skepticism. Eyebrows
rose at me as I gushed about her. No one wanted to say the word “rebound,” but I could basically hear them thinking it.

  Time spent with her was never predictable. She wanted to look at the full-moon eclipse on my roof, drinking champagne from the bottle. She wanted to order takeout in our pajamas on Saturday nights, and in the middle of the week she convinced me to get out of bed at midnight to meet all her friends at a bar. She managed to sidestep confirming whether or not she was dating other people but always wanted to hold my hand in public. She checked a lot of superficial boxes: She was successful in a creative field that overlapped with mine. She had a beautiful apartment and stylish clothes. She loved to read books and go shopping. I was a nervous wreck.

  It’s so easy to think someone cares about you because she wants you—especially if you’re not used to that kind of attention. But in the weeks and then months that followed, we never talked about love or tried to define our situation, though we’d frequently, teasingly ask each other, “So what are you looking for?” and take turns avoiding actually answering. I didn’t think I could tell her that I wanted her to be my girlfriend—those words seemed so far away. It was hard to picture a formal commitment from her even though we were spending all our free time together. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted that; everything during that time felt so raw and painful, like I was walking around inside out, experiencing the world for the first time, and it was hard to parse out what I thought I wanted from what I truly needed. When we weren’t together, I was so anxious about what we were doing or not doing that food was just a memory of something I used to want. I got thinner and thinner. My breakup weight became my dating weight. But what I was hungry for shifted.

  Meanwhile, I was navigating an every-other-week custody schedule with Avery and our poor old pup. It was a bumpy process, complicated further by the fact that we had broken up without fully working through our feelings together. There was still so much residual anger between us that little things like timing misunderstandings sparked heated conflict where we’d both yell. I also made the poor decision to write an article about my new single life (“The Newly Single Girl’s Guide to Beauty,” about trying to make time for aesthetic self-care when you’re suddenly busy dating for the first time in a while—it was a bit of an exaggeration, since I was only dating one person), which turned out to be one of the most popular things I’d ever written—and she’d read it. The next time we spoke, after a miscommunication about when she was supposed to pick Kimberly up, she screamed into the phone, “Go back to your dates and your makeup,” and hung up.

  One morning in November, after three months of dating, I woke up in the Gemini’s bed freezing. Her heat was broken. It turned off in the night, and as long as I knew her it never fully came back.

  My clothes were in a frigid tangle on the floor, and even once I was fully dressed I was still cold. I was about to walk a chilly mile home to Bed-Stuy so I could get ready for work in my own apartment. I grabbed the first warm thing I saw from her permanent pile of unfolded clothes: a hoodie. I perched on the edge of her bed and said, “It’s so cold. Can I wear this home?”

  “Please,” she said.

  Her hoodie was thick and black and very expensive. I wore it under my leather jacket, touched the edges of the sleeves with my ice-cold fingertips as I floated home, marveling at the changing leaves like I’d never seen autumn before.

  I didn’t give it back, not yet. It was so warm, and when we were apart, something was starting to feel so cold. Once, it took her a full day to text me back, so I wore it around my apartment while I paced. In hindsight, this dynamic was probably exactly what I needed: I absolutely was not ready for a relationship, and all the signs were there that she didn’t want one. But having never dated as an adult was a handicap; my only references other than my very recent serious relationship were from college. The pace was stressful and foreign.

  A few weeks later I asked if I could take her hoodie with me on a business trip to Minnesota. “Of course,” she said. “It’s great for airplanes.” She traveled a lot, too, and it turned out we were going to be gone for the same period of time. We saw each other the night we both returned. I burst into her apartment and tackled her onto her couch. We ordered Chinese food and ate it on the floor. But she fell asleep with all her clothes on, on top of the covers, and the next time she left the city she didn’t tell me when she got back.

  “She just has this vibe like she could break my heart at any second,” I told a work friend, trying to describe the baseline anxiety I’d started to feel. “If you feel like that now, she already has,” he replied.

  And sure enough, in December, she stopped wanting to be around me. After we suddenly went a whole week without seeing each other, I tried to talk to her about it and did a terrible job; she said she felt like I was just comparing her to Avery instead of listening. In turn, I felt like she was withdrawing because I’d started to need more from her, the antithesis to how I’d originally presented myself. As for how quickly she’d gone from texting me all day and trying to see me almost every night to radio silence, she said, abruptly, “I’m not trying to dive into a relationship with someone who just got out of one.”

  “I didn’t realize you were holding that against me,” I said, trying not to cry.

  She folded her arms over her chest, becoming a tiny, defiant ball in the corner of my couch, and said nothing.

  * * *

  Throughout that fall, the Scorpio had never really given up on me, despite how clearly I’d rejected her. We’d seen each other for dinner every few weeks, texting occasionally, but I’d kept her at arm’s length, afraid of how serious I sensed she wanted to be. When the Gemini turned from hot to cold, though, and wouldn’t have a real conversation with me about it, I went on a few dates with someone a friend had set me up with, and then I started seeing the Scorpio regularly. Her persistence and patience had become very attractive.

  As I processed the situation with my sister Miriam, she said, “You know, how someone treats you is the most important thing about them.” My mind was blown. It hadn’t even occurred to me that how someone treated me could factor into my assessment of them at all.

  And, as much as I’d yearned for it, I couldn’t stand to be alone in my apartment. I’d get stuck staring in the mirror, zeroing in on the way my stomach stuck out, overcome with shame. So I made sure I was never alone. It was like Avery had cursed me: “Don’t you think it’s problematic that you need sex to feel good about yourself?” she’d said. And it was.

  Right in the middle of all of this, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She called me at work to tell me; I took the call in the hallway because I didn’t have anywhere else to be alone. I sat on the floor and cried into the phone. When we hung up, I texted Leila to come out and talk to me, but we both knew there was nothing she could say to make me feel better, so I decided to go home. On the subway I texted the Gemini, who didn’t respond. She called me later that night, and we made plans to get breakfast before I headed out to Long Island to be with my family for the weekend; but in the morning she cancelled, saying a work situation had come up.

  During my final text exchange with the Gemini, I was in the hospital waiting room with my sisters and my dad while my mom had surgery. Without any closure she suddenly just stopped writing me back. My heart felt like it was breaking, but I wasn’t sure what or who it was breaking for. Myself, I guess.

  Meanwhile, my mom made a full recovery. That was the good news—the best and most important news ever, really. The bad news was that the reality of being on my own was finally starting to sink in, and I realized I had no idea how to be an adult. I’d never felt so alone or so incompetent. And then, in January, when I was in Utah for Sundance, my maternal grandfather died, the third of my grandparents to pass away in just a few short years. He and I had had a special bond, and when my mom called to tell me, I sunk into the Airbnb bed in sobs, cancelling my celebrity interviews for the rest of the week.

  It felt like li
fe was spinning out of control, but the more I spun out, the gentler the Scorpio was to me. Despite how many times I initially pushed her away, we ended up being together for just over a year. During that time I was promoted to digital director at Nylon and started making real money, most of which I spent with her: we ate out all the time, greasy comfort food like burgers and tacos; we’d drink beer and tequila and spend entire weekends in bed. I had a gushy short essay published in Dope Girls, a zine for women who enjoy cannabis, and it began, “In the tender, anxious space between the ease of I like you and the terrifying plunge of I love you we start to smoke weed together.” I’d never laughed so much with anyone in my life.

  Eventually, the skinniness that symbolized the unhappiness of the first half of my twenties dissolved, and I gained weight—a good amount. Enough to need new clothes. But I hadn’t done any real emotional work around my relationship to my body. I had barely acknowledged it was an issue. So when suddenly my clothes didn’t fit me, I was not at all ready to be okay with it.

  As soon as I realized it was happening, I went into overdrive trying to course correct. It’s never been hard for me to lose weight if I want to—what’s hard is doing it moderately or slowly. I shed the pounds quickly but became depressed and anxious, always exhausted, needing to go to bed early. I developed dark circles under my eyes, and my hair thinned out. I stopped seeing my friends. Instead I started going to barre classes daily and became addicted to the endorphins; it was the only time of day I’d feel at peace. Eventually I got a bad cold, and it didn’t go away. Every day I felt sicker and sicker but didn’t connect it to how poorly I was taking care of myself. I stopped getting along with my family, which made everyone rightfully furious with me, and I had no explanation. I felt like the absolute worst person on earth.