by Roan Parrish
“Well, that’s how it feels. It feels like my own boyfriend would rather spend time watching TV with a random dude than being with me!”
“I’m not doing this because I want to spend time with him.”
“Then why the hell are you doing it? Because it seems like you spend your whole life doing shit you don’t like. Grocery shopping every other day when you hate crowds. Going to the gym where you hate people asking you about your routine, when you have weights at home. Working in the bar, when you barely even like speaking to strangers. Living at the mercy of your phone because it might alert you to another person you have to go save.”
He was as still as a statue, one hand pressed to his stomach, eyes on the floor. But every insecurity, every resentment, was pouring out of me, even if he didn’t react—especially because he didn’t react.
“Do you like anything? Do you even like me? Or am I one more obligation you took on just to—to punish yourself? To shift the cosmic balance in your favor?”
He didn’t respond, and something tiny and hopeful still inside me died.
“You know, you—you—you pack every day full, with all your habits and routines and obligations. But it doesn’t leave you any time to have a fucking life!”
He flinched.
“I want a life, Dane!” I shouted, tears coming hot and fast. “I don’t want you to be with me ’cuz you think you have to. I don’t wanna be a th-thing on your to-do list. I want a life with you, but you’re too stuck in all this shit to have anything left over. No space, no time, no room for me! No room for us.”
I wiped at my tears with the heels of my hands. Through them, Dane was a stone-still blur, a sphinx.
“I don’t know what else I can do,” I sobbed. “I’ve been throwing myself at you, w-waiting for you to l-l—to care about me like I c-care about you. But you keep leaving and you won’t talk to me.”
I was snotty and disgusting and my heart was breaking and Dane still didn’t move a muscle. I snorted out a miserable, tear-clogged laugh at how pathetic I must look to him.
“It’s like you live a-a diorama life. Come on over, ladies and gentlemen, and see the perfectly organized non-life of Dane Hughes! Look, you can see in from every direction.”
He winced again.
“Say something!” I yelled.
His jaw was set and his eyes were fixed on the wall over my shoulder. His voice was rough and cold when he spoke.
“Not having this conversation with you right now. I need to go.”
“Dane!” My voice broke. “Dane!”
He turned his back on me, squared his shoulders, and walked out the door.
It slammed behind him and I threw myself on the couch, sobbing into the pillow that smelled like him. I took a minuscule amount of pleasure in how uncharacteristically dramatic it was to sob on a boyfriend’s couch after he walked out on you. Then I curled up in a ball and went back to feeling terrible.
When my tears dried up, I felt floaty and light-headed. I drank a glass of water and told myself to go home, but as pathetic as it was, I still felt better for being in Dane’s space, as if by staying here I was staking a claim, saying: This isn’t over yet—we still have more to say to each other.
Yeah, like Dane ever said much to me anyway.
The most horrible feeling was creeping in. It was frightening and twisted, and its logic was something like this: Have I attributed deep significance to Dane’s reticence when all the while he simply…didn’t care? Have I ascribed deep feeling to his silences when he actually doesn’t feel much at all?
Had I taken the building blocks of how much I liked Dane and how he seemed to like me better than most strangers, and constructed this entire relationship in my head?
I felt like I was going to throw up.
I opened the kitchen drawers and cabinets, finding only plain white dishes and plain clear glasses and plain silverware and kitchen utensils I couldn’t identify. I opened his bedroom closet and dresser and found only five pairs of the same jeans, plain T-shirts, a few flannel shirts, a few sweatshirts, plain socks and underwear.
In the bathroom, only plain bar soap, shaving cream, and toothpaste.
Nothing that revealed an ounce of personality.
I had looked at Dane and seen sleek, powerful control. Had I misrecognized emptiness?
Manic now, I pulled books off the bookshelves at random, flipping through them in search of some insight into the man I had thrown my tender heart at.
Science fiction, politics, environmentalism, poetry, but none of it told me enough. None of it revealed Dane to me.
I dropped to the floor with a Frank Herbert book in my hand.
Hidden behind the bottom row of books was a stack of notebooks. I pulled one out, heart racing. A journal. Reading someone’s journal was one hundred percent terrible and wrong. An awful intrusion. A breach of trust.
But, fuck me, I was going to read it anyway. Because I was falling in love with Dane. Had fallen in love with him, really. And if he didn’t care about me…if he didn’t love me too, then…I had to know.
I splayed a palm across the cover of the notebook and squeezed my eyes shut, sending up something like a prayer.
“Please, Dane,” I chanted. “Please love me. Please love me, even if it’s just a little. Please care. Please give me a reason to keep trying.”
I opened the journal slowly, as if whatever was inside might snake out and bite me. But no matter how long I stared at the words, they didn’t make sense.
I flipped through the whole journal. Then I flipped through the next one in the stack. The color of ink changed from black to blue to black again. The handwriting was Dane’s. But the words…the words were someone else’s.
In notebook after notebook, Dane had transcribed the books on his shelves. Sometimes the same section went on for twenty pages. Sometimes it was only a paragraph.
But there certainly wasn’t any insight into how Dane felt about me in his journals, because not a single word was his.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, still wrung out and woozy, I was lying facedown on Sofia’s bed when she texted, asking me to find and forward her insurance information from our computer. I sighed, and went to sort through our jumbled files.
Thanks, bro!
Just seeing her face on my phone and knowing she was right there on the other side of it made me feel better.
Hey do you have a sec to talk? I wrote. I had an awful fight w dane :(
Ten minutes later she wrote back, Oh no! Sorry but I can’t now, I have a meet and greet thing before the show. We still on to FaceTime tomorrow pm tho? Can talk abt it then.
Yeah sure.
I slumped back onto her bed.
* * *
—
I called in sick the next day for only the third time ever. I felt vile. Unfit for human company. The idea of providing customer service made me want to scream. I knew the first person who returned their latte because it had too much milk in it would get an education that would get me fired.
But the idea of sitting in my lonely apartment all day held equal appeal. I tried to watch Secaucus Psychic for comfort, but it just made me furious with Dane and miss him all at once.
The memory of his tight shoulders, expressionless face, and cold voice as I yelled at him made me feel sick. The image of all those pages of compulsive transcription worried me. I hadn’t dealt with the situation well. I knew I hadn’t. But could I stand it? Knowing that the person I wanted desperately might leave me at any moment if someone else called? Knowing that things were wrong with him that he wouldn’t talk about?
Unable to sulk in the tiny apartment any longer, I pulled on jeans and an old sweatshirt of Sofia’s and walked uptown in the cool air. I bought
a coffee from the cart on the corner and tried to shake off the poisonous wrongness that had been coursing through me for days…maybe longer.
I ended up in Central Park around midday with the sun bursting through the turning leaves, painting the view in autumn colors that usually made me smile.
Feeling proud of myself for coming to a place I loved, I plunked down five dollars at the counter of the Museum of Natural History and smiled at the elderly man behind the desk.
“The suggested donation is twenty-five dollars,” the man said.
I snapped, “I know that, but this is pay what you can, not what doctors and lawyers can, isn’t it?”
He leaned away from me, chin disappearing into his neck. I felt like a monster, muttering an apology as I slunk away.
I paused beneath the soaring dinosaur skeletons and looked up to the ceiling as I always did. This time, though, instead of contemplating history and other worlds, it just made me miss Dane. How much bigger than me he was. The way I could look up and see the strong cut of his jaw and jut of his chin and know that in his arms, nothing could hurt me.
Except something had.
He had.
And I was pretty sure I’d hurt him right back.
I shoved my earbuds in and listened to my audiobook as I wandered the halls of the museum. Every beautiful, meticulously curated exhibit made my attempts at a diorama seem more pathetic, more laughable.
A little before four I made my way to the entrance, because I was supposed to FaceTime with Sofia at four. Only she didn’t call.
I texted, Hey, you ready? <3
At four fifteen she texted, So sorry can we do 5 instead? <3 <3 <3
Resentment flooded me, and I turned on my heel and strode back into the depths of the museum without responding.
Yeah, sure, Felix has no life and nothing to do, so he can always be flexible enough to accommodate everyone else’s schedules. He’ll just contort himself into a pretzel to fit himself around anything else in people’s lives, no problem! Everything else in their lives if I wanted any time with them.
They never chose me over anything else, and they never thought of changing other things to accommodate me.
Whatever. Screw everyone.
I turned the volume up on my audiobook and stomped off in search of exhibits I didn’t walk through often. I was in the Hall of Human Origins when Sofia’s FaceTime came through at five. I didn’t answer. A couple minutes later she called again, and still I didn’t answer. A few minutes later she sent a text: Are you working late? Then another: Are you okay? Are you mad at me for changing times??? I’m sorryyyy! <3
A tiny, ugly thing inside me was happy that she was concerned. Let her worry just one time for all the hundreds of times over the years, and especially lately, that she’d left me hanging, stayed at Coco’s without telling me, and generally seemed to forget that I existed when it was convenient to do so.
Was there something about me that made me so easy to forget? To push aside? To put last? Was it just selfish and immature to want the people that I put first to put me first too?
I wandered into the Hall of Meteorites and imagined what it would be like to be made of space stuff and then end up hurtling into the Earth’s atmosphere and landing in some field in Kansas. Poor, out-of-place meteorite.
Another text came through from Sofia: Feliiiiixxxx are u ok???
I put my phone on do not disturb and shoved it back in my pocket.
In the Hall of North American Forests, I sank down on a bench in awe before a slice of a 1,400-year-old giant sequoia that stood over three hundred feet tall before lumberjacks felled it in 1891. Tears sprang to my eyes at the idea that someone had cut down something so amazingly beautiful that had stood for so long.
That was where the security guard found me. I startled violently at the sudden movement and pulled my earbuds out, hand to my chest.
“Closing time,” she said. I must not have heard the announcement over my audiobook. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” she quipped, and winked at me.
The idea of going home to my apartment, with no Sofia, no Dane, and nothing to look forward to but another day of slinging bagels, fell around me like a shroud.
To my utter shock and mortification, I began to cry.
The security guard was big and severe-looking, about fifty, with short salt-and-pepper hair and sharp dark brown eyes, but when I started to cry, her face softened and she sat next to me on the bench.
“I can’t even keep a cactus alive,” she said, “but trees this big grow for thousands of years.”
“Yeah, until some lumberjack chops them down,” I sniffled.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, still looking at the tree instead of me. “Love trouble?”
I snorted. “How’d you know?”
She shrugged. “I’m a dedicated observer of the human condition, I suppose. Besides, you’re not the first person I’ve found sulking on a bench alone, and it’s always trouble in love.”
“It is? Why?”
She looked at me, brown eyes flashing.
“Probably because it’s the most important thing. So when love ain’t right, nothing’s right.”
I gaped at her for a moment, then reached out to poke her shoulder with my finger. She tensed and leaned back before I could touch her.
“What was that?”
“Just wanted to make sure you were corporeal. I thought you might be an elaborate hallucination of a wise fairy godmother and I was really just talking to myself.”
“I assure you, I am real. My name’s Sue.”
“Sorry, Sue. I’m Felix.”
“Okay, kiddo, come with me.”
Sofia would think it was pretty hilarious to hear that I got escorted from the museum after hours by a security guard. Then I remembered I was mad at Sofia and sighed.
“I know the way out. I’ll leave, I swear.”
“No, no. Come walk around with me for a bit. You like the museum, I assume? Unless you were just looking for a real dramatic backdrop to your heartache.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I love it here.”
“Well, it’s cooler with nobody in it, if you wanna see. You entertain me with your woes and I’ll give you the after-hours tour.”
“For real!?”
“Yup.”
“Omigod, this is amazing. If this is the part where you show me that the exhibits actually do come to life after dark, I’m super excited.”
She gave me an unamused look. “I swear that movie is the worst thing that’s ever happened to this line of work.”
I held up my hands in peace and hurried after her down the hall.
The museum had an almost funereal sobriety when empty, the exhibits more like tombs housing the dead than celebrations of their lives, and I realized that part of an exhibit’s power was the way people interacted with it. Their engagement helped bring the material to life.
“So, spill it, kiddo,” Sue said.
I sighed.
“I had a fight with my boyfriend yesterday. It was awful. I said really mean things and he stood there like a zombie.”
“True things?”
“Yeah. Well. True-feeling things, anyway.”
She nodded. “What happened?”
As we wended our way through the dim hallways and eerily half-lit exhibits, I told Sue about the fight. Before I knew it, I was babbling about Sofia leaving and not knowing what I was doing with my life. It was so easy to spill my guts to a friendly stranger, to tell her the raw, cringing things I’d seldom said out loud.
Possibly because, even as Sue interrupted from time to time to ask questions or shine her flashlight into a suspicious corner or crack, I didn’t feel completely confident that any of this was r
eal. I was half-convinced that any moment I would wake up, in Sofia’s bed, eyelashes crusty with tears and stomach knotted with heartache, to find this had all been a vivid dream.
“I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, hon,” Sue said when I’d finally run out of steam. She turned to face me, expression kind, but eyes steely. “Here’s what I’m hearing. It sounds like you’re not in your power right now.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Imagine a moment when you’ve felt confident, unstoppable.”
At first I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt that way. But then I remembered how I’d felt the first night Sofia and I stayed in our apartment. For months I’d chased leads on rent we could afford all over the city until we found our place. We’d furnished it nearly for free with things students abandoned on move-out day.
That night we’d bought Pop-Tarts, pretzels, and a four-dollar bottle of wine at the bodega on the corner, and sat, just the two of us, on the floor of our own living room, lit by a floor lamp we’d dragged up from the curb, giddy with freedom. I’d felt satisfied and accomplished, like I’d done this for us—created this possibility to exist in our own little corner of the city with the money I’d worked so hard to save. I’d felt powerful, like I had taken my destiny into my own hands.
I nodded at Sue.
“Yeah. You’re in your power when you know what you want, when you’re working to get it, and when you know that even if you don’t get it, you’ll still be okay.”
We walked into the Hall of Biodiversity, and without the usual crowd of people clustered in front of the wall, the true size of it was breathtaking. Species after species transitioning into one another with a logic that was aesthetic as well as biological. It wasn’t until you realized they were going extinct that it went from beautiful to gutting.
“Right now, you feel lost, uncertain about your place in the world. So every little thing cuts pretty deep and makes you feel worse. Like your boyfriend breaking a date or choosing to go help someone.”
“But he just left! He didn’t even fight with me!”
I could still see that look of frozen remoteness on Dane’s face when I was yelling at him. He seemed to absorb each word like raindrops falling into a puddle, disappearing and making no difference at all.