What’s Left of Us
The best part of us is that we fell in love: you fell in love with her, I fell in love with him. There were only months between our “us” and your “us” and my “us.”
You were desperate to know you could love someone smaller than me. I needed someone to rip my body open and broadcast my name, reaffirming the fundamental fact of me.
By December, when you and I each had an “us,” I texted you, thinking drinks might not break me. July had long since been washed off my body, dyed from my hair, exercised from my hips. I was letting someone else learn to love my soft curves. And it would just be drinks. I had questions I wanted to not ask and silences I needed to feel.
I put on green tights and dressed like a tiny-waisted witch, clomping one booted foot in front of the other down the cold concrete street. I worked so hard to show up looking like you had been a fragment of my imagination, like you were a spell I cast one day.
You picked a bar pretentiously filled with books no one would ever read. I looked up directions 12 hours ahead of time, a small act designed to keep me sane in the face of my hallmark anxiety. By the time I got there the anxiety was bubbling deep in my gut. I forgot all my magic.
You never believed in any spells I cast. To you, my magic was like my politics: nice to believe in, but less practical than a reliably grey-haired white man committed to dismantling the government. My magic was sex you couldn’t enjoy. I swear I’ll never date another libertarian.
On the car ride home I let myself sink deep into the back seat of an anonymous San Francisco prius as I relived time and again the moment when you uttered those unprompted words: I’m seeing someone.
Fuck you. I looked at your page every day. I knew you were seeing someone before you knew you were seeing someone. I knew her name sounded foreign on my tongue and spewed like debris from my mouth. I felt the way water dripped down her throat, quenching a thirst she’d been trying to sate for years, priming her body for a new kind of love. I knew she was coming before you knew.
When you asked if I was dating at all it was no accident that I didn’t ask you back. But you never realized that my silent non-questioning was another spell I cast, a protection designed to fortify my skeleton and keep me from shattering. Or you knew and didn’t care.
And so after I sobbed in the back of a stranger’s car, I marked that moment down in the mental list of reasons we never should have been together in the first place. I watched the pro/con list tumble unalterably to the right. To the hum of the Prius and the tune of staticky Top 40, I stopped having questions to not ask you.
I heard from a friend you two went through a furry phase, which surprises me less than it should. You pride yourself on trying anything once. I pride myself on not being a furry.
And I turned all my effort towards my “us,” my love for him loud and brash and full of magic.
You didn’t hear anything about me from friends, banishing me to a small, dusty compartment in your mind. I know what came next. You didn’t touch the scrapbook I made you, and she’s made you throw it out. You kept the Bill Bryson — never read — on your shelf, but have long since forgotten who gave it to you. And slowly but surely you’ve checked off all the “To Do’s” from the list I sent you in the last weeks of our relationship, my desperate last-ditch effort to convince you that I had enough “To Do’s” in my life that overlapped with yours. You smiled sadly at my efforts and said “Absolutely, let’s do them all,” knowing full well you wanted to love someone smaller than me.
