by J. R. Rogue
I'd convinced myself fairytales were shit, honestly. I would hang art in my trailer, in the places I had saved on the wall, and in my heart, for beautiful photos of our ghost children, our make-believe wedding day. If you despair, turn to art. It is constant, likes the waves. Always changing but salty and never one to fade away. Never to fade away like my feelings for Connor. I felt resentment. I was a shell of the woman I was, or the woman thought I would become.
In my last week at the house, Connor changed. He started to reject the decision I thought we had mutually agreed upon.
"Maybe we can work this out. Maybe you can go to therapy?"
I was kneeling over a box, placing books inside. "I need to go to therapy now?"
"You don't think it would help?"
"Of course, that's the answer, right? Send me to therapy. Because you're perfect. Always so perfect." My voice was not raised. I spoke into the box, to the faces of the books, not to Connor's face. I couldn't look at it anymore. It was breaking me.
"You've been depressed, for, I don't even know how long." His voice was sad and I didn’t know what to do with that, after years of no life in it.
I cut him off. "I have been. And you left me alone." Alone to fall for someone else.
"I didn't know what to say to you."
"So you said nothing? Babe," I stopped. I didn't know how to say his name. The endearment fell out. "I'm sorry. I just, I didn't mean to call you that."
"It's okay."
I breathed in. "Connor, you left me alone too much. Please don't make me say things to hurt you." I pushed up from the floor, turned to him. He was standing in the kitchen doorway. I had boxes stacked everywhere in the dining room.
"What could you possibly say that would hurt me more than you leaving me?"
"I don't want to have kids anymore. It’s not just a doubt anymore, it’s a truth.” I started to cry, and it was an ugly sound. His body leaned forward, pulled like a magnet to my pain, when for years, it pushed. "Don't," I said, putting my right palm up. "Don't hug me. Don't do those things now, when you couldn't do them when we were together." I saw his lip trembling, the shaking of his fist, he tapped it against his thigh. "I'm not who I was when we got together. I don't want to get married anymore. I don't want to have kids. I don't want any of it. It all died inside of me. I don't know how to get it back out, but I know one thing for sure, and that's that I can't do it here. I can't be with someone I don't love anymore. I mean, I love you, I always fucking will, Connor, but I am not in love with you anymore. And I will not take away your chance to have a child. It's not your fault that I am this way now. I just want to be left alone in this. Okay? Can you just let me go? Let me be alone?"
"I don't know."
"You don't have a choice. I am not staying. I am saving both of us."
"You're killing me."
"No, I am setting you free to be with someone who will make you happy. Because honestly, you cannot convince me that these past few years have been happy. They haven't. We were roommates, not even friends."
"I know." He cannot argue, he cannot reach for me. He stared at the ceiling, instead, and let out an inhuman sound.
"You'll see it," I said, when the echo of his ache stopped reverberating off the walls. "I'm saving you."
Part IV
56
Crime Scene
“So you left Connor for Logan?”
“No.” It wasn’t that simple. “Other people assumed that, and no, I don’t blame them. It looked that way. I had an emotional affair. Sure, I didn’t meet Logan in person until I was single, living on my own, but the things we said, it was bad. I was ashamed of myself. It wasn’t sexual, sexting and texting and all that. It was this emotional connection, I’d never experienced anything like it. He woke me up. How can you thank someone for that? I had been living my life in shades of grey, dull.”
“Did he change you?”
“He made me feel alive again. Made me realize what I was doing to myself. I felt like I had lost the ability to sacrifice. I'd done it too often. I'd been a willing sacrifice for as long as I could remember."
"In what ways?"
"When I was a teenager, I guarded my virginity fiercely. Then I gave my sex away with a straight face and a twisted heart. I didn't want to do things the way other women did. I saw their faces and I wondered what they gave up. What their lives would be worth when they died. Would everything they gave up for others be worth it? I wanted a new leaf. I wanted to run away. But Connor was rooted there in Missouri. I resented him. He resented me. He says he didn't, but I knew he did. Or he would one day. It broke me to tell him the main reason I left him."
“And what was that?"
My chest feels like heavy bricks, a hot burning fire. I pull my hand to my throat, grace my collar bone with my pinky. “I didn't want to have a child anymore. I'd lost it, that wanting. My father stole it from me. Who would feed the baby when I was in the dark? On the days when I couldn't pull myself from our bed? He says it's as simple as just getting up and doing what needs to be done. But that's such an oversimplification of it."
"You said he couldn't relate to you. But he wanted you to be happy, right? Do you think that, deep down?"
"He wanted to seek his own happiness, through me. He never felt the cement, the quicksand. His veins were not filled with tar, like mine. He was made of good breeding, good intentions. He would be a good father, but what would they say of me? I was not his sister. I was not his mother. I was not kind and soft."
"Are you soft now?"
"Do I look soft?" We laugh. I push the hair from my face and lean on my forearms. "No, I am made of sharp edges. Would my child, our child, break herself on them? It was too much of a risk. That's what I told myself."
"What we feel isn't always the truth."
"Maybe, but it was my truth then. I saw all these people having child after child with no care in the world. No money to feed them. Why couldn't I worry a little less? For a while, I thought adoption would be the answer."
"Why did you change your mind then?"
"Just because I didn't have the child naturally doesn't mean he or she would be safe from me. I didn't worry I would physically hurt the child. I just worried I would be so cold, they would lack for warmth. And, would I resent the child? Would I regret the child?"
"It's hard to know until you're in it."
"Then it's too late, right? I am so vain." I look down at my hands, at the wrinkles in my knuckles. I don't look like the twenty-five-year-old girl from the beginning of this story, from ten years ago. "Would I look at my body like a crime scene?" I pause. "But then, I already do, don't I?”
57
Like Legit In Love?
No one wants to talk about the women who are scared of commitment. It took me years to realize that I was one of them. I never wanted to get tangled in something I couldn't find my way out of. Marriage didn't scare me because you could always get a divorce. But having a child? You can't walk away from that kind of commitment. And what business did I have bringing life into this world when most days I didn’t want to be alive myself? It's one of the many reasons I left Connor. It's one of the many reasons I've fallen for Logan. He doesn't ask me for anything I can't give. And he is just as broken as me.
The six weeks following my breakup with Connor leading up to the first time I met Logan were some of the longest days of my life.
Connor insisted on helping me move. He bought brand new locks for all the doors of the abandoned trailer I returned to. He was worried about someone breaking in.
I found my old home in shambles. The yard was overrun. The long grass was spilling over like waves. I ignored it, no one wanted to get a lawnmower out in February.
The interior was covered in dust, the air was stale.
I brought too much back with me, the boxes were stacked above my head in the living room.
I had spent countless hours handpicking the items that decorated my home with Connor. I went to antique malls, swap mee
ts, garage sales. I wanted everything to be unique. I wanted each piece to have had a life before coming into our home.
I couldn't leave it behind and I couldn't unpack it.
Every piece reminded me of my life with Connor, all the hope I once had in my heart, my aching ribs. I couldn't leave it either.
Connor's pain radiated off of him, pulsing. I didn't want to be near him. It hurt to see him that way. I was hoping for something easier.
When I broke up with him, he agreed with me, that it was the best thing to do. Then the next morning he woke up changed, desperate to have me back. He followed me from room to room. He didn't touch me, but his stare choked me.
I told him I was going back to my trailer and he argued. He said I should stay in the guest room until I found a more suitable place. My trailer was never suitable for him. I was never suitable for him. He wanted me as I retreated, ignored me when I was right in front of him.
I declined the offer, took up more hours at work, and tried to ignore the sound of him sobbing in our bedroom. Though my trailer was dingy, shambled, it was a relief to go back. To lie in bed with nothing but the sound of my cat walking around, the soft sound of my dog breathing. No sound of a heart breaking apart.
My own heart was a war zone. I felt both freedom and a deep seeded hate for myself. Connor didn't know, yet, that I was talking to Logan. I hated the phrase. Talking to. It was more than that.
“I don’t want to have kids.” Logan’s truth came out on the phone one night. It made my heart bubble up, ache, hiss.
“I don’t want them either. Not anymore.” He was the first person I’d said it to, before I used it as a weapon on Connor. I sobbed into the phone and he was silent. When I stopped, he shifted, I could hear his clothing rustling.
“Am I the first person you’ve told that to?”
“Yes. I don’t know when I changed my mind. I don’t know when it left me, the desire. But I can’t tell anyone. Because what would I say? They say I can’t let him win. That just because I was touched as a little girl, that doesn’t mean I can't be a good mom. But what do they know? I have this hole inside of my chest and there is nothing to fill it. It gets bigger every day and I am drowning. The only way to make the hurt go away is to write. And no one understands that either. We are just sharing to a stupid app on a phone, right? That’s what they’ll say. It can’t fill the hole a child could, but they don’t have to live with it. This blackness. This stain.”
We were feeling each other out, exploring the possibilities. He lived in Seattle, half a country away.
He sent me pictures of himself by the sea, reading novels I'd never heard of, writing words I wanted tattooed on my skin.
Late at night, he would whisper his desire for me, in English, sometimes in broken French.
I learned, after seeing a screenshot, that after the first night we spoke on the phone, when I belonged to another, he said he was in love with me.
“I’m in love with Gwen,” it said.
“In love? Like legit in love?” my friend replied.
“Both? How is this possible? How can you be in love with someone you’ve never met?” he said.
It scared me to see that. It set me on fire. I told myself it was because he was young. He would change his mind when he met me. The idea of me was so much more enticing than the reality. They always left when they accepted the reality.
I bought a plane ticket. I flew to Seattle to meet him. But not before giving him the chance to betray me. Not before Connor came to my work in the middle of the day and proposed to me.
58
Pity, Not Love
Connor
The first time I proposed, it was a desperate act.
I arrived at her work and asked someone at the front counter of the store to tell her I was there. I could see the pity of Gwen’s coworkers clearly. They all knew she left me. I thanked the lady and walked into the jewelry department, the racks tall and white.
Gwen found me a couple of minutes later. “Hey,” she said, her arms crossed over her chest.
“How are you?” It was a stupid thing to say. I knew how she was. I saw it in the weight she had dropped, I saw it every night when I came home before she moved out. I found a sad comfort in the fact that she hadn’t found a nice new place away from me. I hoped she would change her mind and come back, take me back. I hoped she would say yes to me there, then, let me pull her into my arms. I knew my chances were slim. Her eyes were more grey-blue than the vivid color I was used to when she looked at me. I saw pity, not love, when she turned my way.
What's it like to love a man and feel no love in return from him, only to leave him, and feel it all rush back? Was it too late?
“Same as I was last week,” she said flatly.
I hovered before she moved out. I walked her to her car and I followed her around the house as she got ready. I hated myself for it. I didn’t care if she was in the house before. Then I became desperate for her. I didn't deserve her.
I stepped toward her and she stepped back. I let out a sigh and felt a vise on my heart. Why was I doing this? I was a fucking idiot but I had to try.
“I know you probably hate me right now. And I know you've heard me say all of this before, but I need to say it again. I’m so sorry about everything and I promise you I can change. I can't live without you. Now that you've moved out, I just walk around the house. I feel so lost.”
“Go to work. You'll feel better if you get out of the house.”
“Do you feel better?”
“Somewhat. Why are you here? I have work to do.” She glanced around to see if anyone was watching us.
“I just needed to ask you something.” I fumbled in my jacket. The ring box felt heavy, my stomach rolled. I didn’t look at her when I dropped to my knees. I fell to both of them. I heard her breath come out, then I looked up at her. The tears were hot and sticky on my face. “I know it’s probably too late but I promise you if you say yes, we can make this work. I’ll change. I’ll pay more attention to you. I’ll take you on dates. We will start over.”
“Stand up,” she said, desperate, looking around again.
“No, I can’t until you look at me. Listen to me.”
“You’ve said all of this,” her voice broke. I saw tears threatening to fall at the corner. “We are too far gone. I don’t feel the same. And how could I tell anyone we were engaged with dignity? You finally propose, after all the years of that being the only thing I wanted, just because I left you? Was I not good enough to marry until I was gone? I can’t do that. I deserve better than that. You should have done this years ago.”
“I know. I was just waiting for everything to be perfect. I was too stupid to realize it would never be perfect.” I had ruined it, deliberately, foolishly.
“I can’t accept this proposal. It’s not fair to either of us. I don’t feel the same and I won’t accept it. I won’t.” I heard the anger boiling at the edges. “I can’t believe you came here to do this. Stand up now.”
I stood and closed the ring box, staring at the blue carpet. “I’m sorry. I just can’t lose you. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I feel like I’m going insane.”
“That’s how I felt for years. Never good enough for you. Some of that was in my head, some of that was you. I can’t keep living like that. You shouldn’t have come here, to my work, and done this. Did you really think I would say yes?”
“No. But I had to try. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.” I ran my hand down my face, over my beard. It had started to turn whiter, just as the hair under my ball cap was. I had dropped fifteen pounds in five days. Grief can alter your body rapidly.
Grief had been altering her heart for years and I ignored it.
She was right. She didn't deserve this. And I didn't deserve her.
59
Silent Mourning
“I didn’t tell many people about me and Logan in the beginning. I guarded our relationship fiercely. It seemed absurd, meeting someone thousa
nds of miles away, falling. And I knew it looked bad. Though I was falling further and further for him, I wanted to spare Connor’s feelings.”
“But he found out eventually, right?”
“Yes. Soon.” I think of his frantic texts, his tears. I still can’t forgive myself for being so careless.
“What were you doing with your time before you finally met Logan?”
“I was going out more, finding myself in the company of my old friends again. And I found my trailer to be both a refuge and a terrible reminder of the fact that I was getting nowhere in life. I left the fragile walls of that place at twenty-nine, now I was back at thirty-two. Living in a dingy trailer, similar to the ones I grew up in as a child. The sounds of domestic disputes and bonfire parties in the court no longer lulled me to sleep. It was strange what you could find comfort in. Those sounds ringed of my own failure. I missed my two-story house, my quiet street, but it wasn’t worth the silence and silent mourning I felt there.”
“What made it start to feel like home? Did it ever feel like home again?”
“Connor started to leave plants on my doorstep. He made sure to drop them off early, just before I would leave for work, so the cold wouldn’t kill them. He knew I loved to buy green lush plants. It was March and the stores were starting to get them in stock. I was able to open the windows of my trailer. The plants cleansed me, cleansed the air.”