by Jo Watson
I wanted to make sure you are ok? I’m thinking about you. XD
My heart instantly inflated with the greatest joy I’d ever felt, but then immediately deflated when the cold, hard reality set in. I didn’t answer his message for three days. I didn’t know if I should. Eventually I caved in.
We started messaging each other every few days. The messages never escalated into full-blown declarations of love or despair; we were both being cautious. But as much as I was dying to hear from him and know that he was okay, I wasn’t sure if his messages were making me feel better or worse.
Despite the shaky start, my friends continued to rally around me. I tried not to drive them too mad with all the Damien this, Damien that, and Damien the next things I was spouting every few moments. But they listened and never complained. God, I have the best friends in the entire universe.
As usual my family was also supportive; my sister-in-law was still offering to sue Michael, or Damien if I wanted to. It’s her solution to most things in life, and I know it comes from a good place, but it’s rarely the answer. James offered to hook me up with some “awesome dudes” he knew from the gym. Stormy also offered to set me up. She was convinced that a sexy one-night fling would get Damien out of my system. She fully subscribed to the motto “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone new.” But that was the last thing I wanted to do.
Even my mother seemed concerned—well, as concerned as a self-obsessed narcissist can be. And when she could see I was still struggling to cope, she insisted I go to Esmeralda or her new hypno-regression therapist, who she had recently started seeing and who had taken her through her spiritual birthing, or some such crap.
Instead, I decided to take myself to a psychologist. I knew that I needed some extra help getting over this. Friends and family were one thing, but I craved the kind of objectivity that one can only get from a stranger.
I’d never been to a psychologist before. So at four thirty on a Monday afternoon, almost one month after returning home from Thailand, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of one Kevin Stanley, MD. I didn’t really know what to expect.
His waiting room was an interesting place, and if I didn’t know his profession, I would have said anthropologist or archaeologist. The walls were awash with tribal masks. One item in particular caught my attention. It was a disturbing thing with slit eyes and long fang-like teeth carved out of a dark wood.
“It’s a North African voodoo dancing mask,” I heard a voice say.
I looked up to see a man that looked nothing like Indiana Jones, and who I assumed could only be Kevin himself.
“It’s said to be a conduit that allows the spirits to journey into their ritual ceremonies.”
“Mmm, interesting,” I said, not meaning that in the absolute slightest.
“Would you like to come inside, Lilly?” He gestured for me to follow him.
The office was exactly what I imagined: A massive mahogany table dominated the center of the room with a chair in front of it, facing a large, comfortable-looking couch. Next to the couch stood a side table, very well prepared with a bottle of water and a giant box of tissues. But by this stage I had no more tears to cry, unless I wanted to dehydrate and shrivel down to the size of a raisin. Kevin gestured for me to sit.
An awkward silence followed. Was I supposed to talk? I didn’t really know how these things worked.
Finally he saved me from the toe-curling discomfort. “Do you know why I collect masks, Lilly?” he asked in a voice that you would imagine a psychologist to have. Soft, monotone, and purposeful, as if each of his words was deliberately chosen to elicit a certain response in you, which they probably were.
“Um…” I looked at the walls and noticed that they were also covered in masks. “Because you like them?” God only knew why anyone would choose this form of decor—it certainly wasn’t to set his patients at ease, because I was now face-to-face with a gold, grotesque devil bird!
He shook his head slowly and jotted something down in his notepad. I wondered what the hell he’d managed to extrapolate from that single sentence of mine.
“Because my work, Lilly, is all about masks. We all wear them, and it will be our job to find out what Lilly’s mask is and to remove it, so that Lilly no longer needs to hide behind it.” He smiled warmly and jotted something else down. I mentally rolled my eyes, scoffed, and snickered—what the hell had I been thinking? I hated this kind of thing, this wishy-washy stuff that could neither be quantified nor categorized. And I also hated it when people used my name too liberally. What was going to happen next? Was he going to make me lie on the couch and discuss my earliest childhood memory and my sex life—or lack thereof, which was undoubtedly where the problem lay, since I was no longer wrapped up in the arms of Damien.
“What does your mask look like, Lilly? Let’s find out how we can take it off, so that we can reveal the real Lilly. So, please lie back, Lilly, and make Lilly comfortable and tell me, Lilly, about your first childhood memory…Lilly, Lilly, Lilly.”
Needless to say, I never went back.
I walked out of his office that afternoon and didn’t feel like going home, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere else, either, so I just stood on the sidewalk for a while and watched the people go by.
I wondered how they were feeling. Happy? Miserable? Maybe some of them had just left therapists, too? Had some of them had their hearts broken, had some just gotten back from their honeymoons in love? Had some just gotten divorced?
As I watched each and every one of them walk past, some to their parked cars, some to coffee shops, and some to meetings and maybe even home—it struck me that I had to start walking, too. Really walking. I’d been showing up for life every day, but not really living it. It was time for my life to go on. I could do this. I would be okay. I would get over this and move on, even if it was one small step at a time.
So in that moment of clarity, standing there on the street corner, I picked my head up, pulled my shoulders back, and started with one foot in front of the other, albeit rather shakily. I knew what I needed to do to get on with my life. I needed to cut off all contact with Damien, because as long as the two of us were sending each other messages on Facebook and I was looking at his profile every two minutes, the longer it would take to move on. But doing this would prove even harder than leaving Thailand. It was the severing of the last cord that held us together. The messages kept me tied to him. Kept me desperately, hopelessly, and devotedly in love with the guy that was a million miles away and totally out of my reach. So that evening, after a glass of wine (or six) to calm my shaking nerves, I sent him one last message.
Dear Damien,
I hope you’re having fun.
This is really hard for me to say, but I think we need to stop talking to each other. I also don’t think we can be friends on Facebook anymore. So I’m going to block you. I hope you understand.
Look after yourself,
Lilly
I pressed enter and watched the message pop onto the screen with that familiar pinging noise and then I unfriended and blocked him. I sat and stared at my screen in absolute horror. There was no way of taking it back. I momentarily panicked and started pressing buttons frantically in an attempt to undo it all. But I couldn’t. I had actually done it. This was not something that the old Lilly would have done, and underneath the stomach-churning pain, somewhere buried deeply under the emotional mush of my brain, I felt a little twinge of pride. I couldn’t believe I had done this.
* * *
I never heard back from Damien again. Not once. That was it. He was officially out of my life, and now I had to systematically pick up the pieces of my shattered heart—yes, it was that dramatic—and try to glue or tape or sew them back together somehow, even if it was a temporary patch-up job, until I could find something that would fix it more permanently.
So I threw myself into work, I redecorated my apartment, twice, and I even joined a gym and got a personal trainer—a
scary-looking bodybuilder named Leonard who was an evil torturer. I sold my engagement ring and went out with Annie and splurged on an entirely new wardrobe and then spent the rest of the day at the spa getting mud wraps.
I systematically went through all the usual breakup steps; I read self-help books about healing my heart in a matter of minutes, I watched reruns of old romantic movies and sobbed, I went on a bizarre diet of kale and cardboard soup that promised to detoxify all my trapped negativity, and finally, I cut my hair. I really cut it. Pixie cut it.
I cried for the first two days after doing it, wishing I could find a time machine and go back and slap sense into the Lilly that had walked into the hairdresser so brazenly and said, “Cut it all off. And dye it too.”
But after two or three days, I started to like it. It made me feel more energetic, if that makes sense? And with this newfound energy I started doing more and more things on my own. I went to movies a few times and even sat in a restaurant and ate dinner by myself. I also started going on dates again after about six months. Well, at the time I didn’t actually know it was a date, thanks to the underhanded machinations of Val. It was supposed to be a simple dinner.
Brad was his name. And he was perfect. He was a med student, and he was ridiculously good-looking—blond, green eyes, big broad shoulders, a great smile. He should have been exactly my type—but I wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest. And to top it all off, he was polite and funny and really interesting and intelligent. He wasn’t the problem. The problem was that clearly my taste in men had changed.
I was confused. I barely knew what I liked anymore, and I definitely had no idea what I wanted. Six months ago I’d wanted marriage and kids. But now…I wasn’t sure. I went on a few dates with Brad, we ended up kissing a few times, but it was nothing like it had been with Damien. I knew I had to stop comparing, but I simply couldn’t help myself. That’s human nature, though—it’s the way we understand everything around us, by comparing it to what we know and placing it in a little labeled compartment.
After Brad, I went on a few dates with a guy Stormy introduced me to. Maxwell. He was an intense creative type who had directed a short black-and-white film about a lonely computer who fell in love with the telephone on the desk next to him. The whole thing made no sense. He made no sense. We made no sense.
Annie forced me to go on one more date—the third time’s lucky, she’d said. This time it was with her new boyfriend’s best buddy. Annie had recently fallen head over heels for a man named Trev (we all assumed it was short for Trevor, but that was currently still unconfirmed). Trev was rich, successful, had model good looks and the kind of face you wanted to slam into a brick wall. No one liked him, especially Stormy, who had been very vocal about it.
But it was hopeless; no matter what I did, no matter how many dates I went on, how many aerobics classes I attended, how many hours I put in at work, or how many times I cut and dyed my hair (it was now platinum blond thanks to Annie insisting it was the latest color trend), it was still the same—I missed Damien. I missed him so much that it felt like a little piece of myself was gone. We hadn’t spoken for six months, and it had been excruciating.
But if I looked at it holistically, some good had come out of it. I was much more independent now, not as reliant on my friends and family for support. I often went to movies on my own and even went away for the weekend alone once. I was fending for myself in the world for the first time ever, and I wasn’t doing too badly, either.
Christmas came and went and the calendar ticked over into the New Year. I’d heard that Michael had shacked up with someone else, a girl that I had gone to school with. Actually, she had been a mutual acquaintance of ours, which of course sent Stormy straight into conspiratorial mode. She was convinced they’d had a little “thing-thang” during our relationship—but then she was naturally suspicious and believed that the government was filming us and that ancient aliens walked among us. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, though. In fact, I wished him well.
February approached and Valentine’s Day loomed and suddenly I was staring at the one-year anniversary of my failed marriage and painful breakup with Damien. I thought that after a whole year I would be over him, or I’d have at least moved on a bit to the point that I didn’t look up at the moon every night wondering where on earth he was and if he had forgotten all about me.
It was clear now—if ever I was in doubt about it—Damien was true love. He was my one.
And the closer I got to the anniversary, the worse it got, until I was seeing him everywhere: on the street, at work, in restaurants. The last straw was when the prime cut of sirloin steak I had made for myself one evening also looked like him, in the right light. He was everywhere, and I couldn’t stop myself from wondering when he was coming back to South Africa. He’d said a year, and that would mean now.
And then, as if the universe had been reading my mind, I walked into a coffee shop that I’d never been into before and immediately caught sight of someone familiar. Someone I hadn’t seen in a whole year.
Chapter Twenty-Two
My heart jumped into my throat and then into my ears where it started beating so hard and fast that I could no longer hear the clang of spoons against coffee cups and the idle chatter of the people around me. I felt positively nauseous from the panic-ment (excitement and panic) that had just gripped me.
I scanned the room frantically, looking, hoping, praying, wanting to see Damien. But I didn’t. Instead what I saw was Jess, sitting at a coffee table with her blunt bangs and faded pink T-shirt, sipping on a tall latte and eating a giant piece of red velvet cake. How was she so thin? If I ate that, Leonard would have to tie me to a treadmill, weigh me down with ten-pound weights, and beat me for the next week while I ran nonstop without sleep.
Lucky bitch.
I eyed the back of her; she had a cute star tattoo on the base of her neck, and I wanted nothing more than to go over and talk to her, but a part of me was frightened. No, frightened wasn’t the right word. Terrified.
What if she told me that Damien was great? Happy? That he’d settled down with some hot girl and they were going at it like porn stars all night long and spending all their other moments clutching on to each other like lovesick teenagers. I felt sick just thinking about it. I was so wrapped up in this torturous whirlwind of thoughts that I suddenly realized I was standing next to her table with no idea, or vague recollection, of how I got there; my legs must have done the walking on their own accord without consulting with my brain. Crap!
Jess looked up from the red velvet calorie hell and a huge smile lit up her face. She put her spoon down and jumped up immediately.
“Oh my God! Lilly!” She shouted so loudly that I’m sure not only the whole restaurant heard, but the entire block, too. She hugged me hard and then pulled back and looked me up and down.
“You look amazing. Wow.”
I felt slightly self-conscious and instinctively ran my hand through my new, shorter hair. “Thanks, I got my hair cut. And the color is a little weird.”
Jess looked me up and down again and then shook her head. “No, it’s not that at all. It’s something else.” She paused for a moment and I could see she was thinking. “It’s your whole vibe, I can’t explain it, but you just look great. Sit! Sit, babes!”
I sat down with her and realized I’d forgotten how much I liked her. She was probably one of the most straight-talking people I’d ever met. There was no bullshit with her, ever. “So how’ve you been? It’s been a year, right?”
“Um…” I was wringing my hands under the table in a desperate attempt not to bleat out the following:
“So how’s Damien? Is he seeing someone else? Is he in love? Where is he? When is he coming home? Does he know how much I love him and want to have thousands of babies with him and change my surname to his and live happily ever after and have amazing sex all night long and spend the rest of the time cuddling? Huh? Huh? Huh?”
So I mustered all of th
e cool, calm nonchalance I could find and simply said, “I’m fine,” but then straight afterward felt like screaming, “NOT!”
Miraculously, my talented attempts at feigning nonchalance didn’t stop there, “Mmm, great. Yeah. Just…fine. Totally, so fine.” I nodded and tried to smile, but failed dismally when it felt like my face was made of putty and had a mind of its own. God knows what weird expressions it was contorting into right now.
We sat in silence for a second or two, as Jess stared at me with a suspicious look plastered across her face. And then she leaned toward me, slowly and deliberately. “Okay, I’m just going to say it for you then.”
“What?”
“How’s Damien?” The second the words were out of her mouth my sigh of relief was audible and my whole body relaxed.
“So…” All my pseudo nonchalance had left me and I didn’t care. “How is he? How’s he been? What’s he been doing?”
“Honestly…” She hesitated for a moment and I could see she looked very conflicted. Oh God. He’d gotten married. He was lost to me forever. “What the hell, I’m just going to tell you the truth. I’m not going to lie to you or mince my words.”
My poor little heart did some funny acrobatic maneuvering in my chest before it settled into the rhythm of a galloping racehorse.
I didn’t want to hear this.
“He’s terrible,” Jess finally said. “I haven’t seen him for about four months, and truthfully I’m a little bit glad. He’s so fucking miserable, he’s become unbearable to be around!”
It took a second to switch gears in my brain. “Really?” The word came flying out, and I mentally kicked myself for seeming so happy and enthusiastic about his misery. “I mean, really?” I tried to sound casual this time, but the giant smile plastered across my face was not helping to convey that sentiment in the slightest.
