Blank Pages

by Alice Darlington

  Hillary must have noticed my breathing change. I swore she could smell my uncertainty the way a hungry animal can smell fear, like she knew where to stick the knife, the bullseye of my insecurities.

  “He doesn’t love you.” She barked out a laugh, looking around the circle of onlookers like she was on stage and we weren’t talking about my deeply personal feelings.

  I couldn’t speak. Mostly I was trying to control the urge to pull out all of her fake blonde hair. When had I ever thought I was a nice person?

  I wished I had some witty retort to put her in her place. I didn’t, though. Perhaps later on when I replayed this conversation over and over in bed, I’d be able to think of something clever to insult her with.

  “Do you really think you’re good enough for him? Did you really think he’d fall in love? With you?” The last word was said in disgust, as if I slaughtered innocent kittens dressed only in leotards and bathed in tomato juice.

  I would have loved to be able to say it didn’t get to me, but I was human, and it did. It fueled her fire, and her white, perfectly straight smile mocked me.

  Her smile was short-lived, though. I was a word enthusiast, and words can accomplish a lot, but sometimes I didn’t have any words. This was one of those times. She had barely finished her sentence before my fist collided with her nose and her fake blonde head shot back. I was ready for another punch. I was ready to attack, but she just backed away, clutching her nose, blood oozing between her fingers.

  As it turned out, I really wasn’t a nice person.

  I walked away, too, forgetting that I was supposed to be waiting for Ben, forgetting that I was supposed to be an adult, forgetting that I actually didn’t know how to throw a punch. Jules kept stride with me, never uttering a word. When we made it to the parking lot, out of sight, she linked her arm with mine, and we walked home like that.

  Twenty minutes later, I heard Jules let Ben into the apartment. No doubt he’d heard the news, at least some variation of the story after it being altered through various sources.

  “So what happened?” he asked after greeting her. Jules retold the story, probably a little more overdramatically than I would have, but she hit all the necessary details: disagreement, fist to face, blood everywhere.

  “Hey, baby.” He came in with a plastic bag full of ice. He reached for my hand under the covers and pulled it out to examine it, wincing before placing the makeshift ice pack on my bruised knuckles. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Jules already told you what happened.”

  “I want to hear it from you,” he said simply, like my story was somehow going to provide insight into what I was feeling.

  “Basically, she thinks you’ll tire of me, like all the other girls.” I watched him physically flinch at the mention of his past. If there was any doubt about his reputation being false, it died right then.

  I felt like a part of me did, too.

  “I’m here with you. I want you.” His words felt good, and it helped temporarily, like a balm that soothes but doesn’t actually heal.

  “For how long?” It wasn’t a question I expected him to have an answer to, and thank goodness, because his blank face told me he didn’t. “If your reputation precedes you correctly, maybe all we have is a couple more months.” Hearing the life expectancy of his relationships laid out like that had my internal organs cringing.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been with other girls, Lex. I can’t take that back.”

  “I know.” I wasn’t trying to guilt him for things he’d done before we were together, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Honestly, unashamedly, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

  “I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around things.” And that was the truth. There was a throbbing at my left temple that felt like hundreds of tiny jackhammers trying to pave a way to my brain. “I don’t know how to not be scared.”

  Ben was a notorious player with a long line of former girlfriends and an even longer line of willing future girlfriends. I couldn’t help but feel like one day when I least expected it, the rug was going to be yanked out from under me, and I was just going to be lying there with my feet over my head wondering why I’d believed he really wanted me. That probably said more about my issues than his, but I couldn’t stop this enormous fear I had of being the brunt of a really bad joke and everyone saying, “I told you so.” I swear, those are the worst words in the world to hear, right after: We need to talk and I’m sorry, your card’s been declined.

  “I can’t give you a clean slate, Lex, but that doesn’t mean I’m not giving you everything I have to give, every part of me.”

  “Why does my everything have to feel like so much more than yours?”

  Those words hurt him. The light in his eyes dimmed, and his breathing slowed, like he had to work to get air in and out. Knowing it was me causing that pain made me feel like my own lungs had shriveled up and died.

  “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you’re just going to get bored with me, too,” I whispered, hating the words as they fell off my tongue. Even if some part of me believed them, feeling them pass through my lips felt like the worst kind of poison, the kind that would cause a slow, drawn-out, agonizing death.

  “She’s wrong. She’s so wrong. Why are you doubting what we have?” That hurt a little. You know, like a knife in your side hurts a little, or a sledgehammer to your kneecap, or just the slow, unmedicated removal of your heart.

  CHAPTER 35

  I’D STUDIED A lot of words on my journey of higher education. I couldn’t wrap my head around heartbreak, though. Why did the word limit the damage to your heart when it felt like your whole being had shattered into tiny pieces?

  And still I kept talking, sticking the knife in deeper, prolonging the pain.

  “I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know how to let you touch me and not wonder if that touch is going to break me.”

  “Baby,” he started, but I cut him off. I couldn’t hear his sad voice. I couldn’t look into those wounded eyes. If I allowed myself to feel his pain, I’d be begging him to pretend I’d never said anything.

  “No. I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am, but I can’t do it. I can’t be in a relationship with an expiration date, Ben.”

  “That’s not what this is,” he pleaded.

  I shook my head. “How do I know that?” He didn’t answer, prompting me to clarify. “How do you know that?” He didn’t. That was the point. No one knows. Granted, that’s the reality for every relationship, but a relationship with Ben was statistically more likely to end sooner.

  “I’m scared. When I’m with you, it eclipses everything else. All I can do is be with you. What happens to me if that’s gone?” That was the painful truth, because I really did love him.

  I wouldn’t tell him, though, not like this. Those words shouldn’t be tainted with goodbye.

  And he hadn’t said them either, had he? That hurt more than anything. Questions I wanted to ask played on a continual loop in my brain.

  How many girls have you said that to?

  How many times did you mean it?

  Most importantly, Why was I not good enough for you to say it to me?

  Over the years, I’d come to terms with my insecurities. My eyebrows were a little thick. My need to read bordered on antisocial, and without caffeine, I definitely couldn’t be labeled as a morning person. I was also a firm believer that every single girl is insecure about something. It’s in our nature. Maybe our height, our teeth, bra size—whatever. Everyone’s got one. If a girl doesn’t have insecurities, I just don’t think she has a soul. She probably traded it in for confidence. And that’s the thing—I knew I was great. I knew I was a freaking catch, and if he couldn’t appreciate that, if he couldn’t love me, then he wasn’t the one. But here’s what sucked: I could tell myself that over and over until I was blue in the face, but I wanted to be his one. I want to be his catch. So, even if it was his loss, even if I believed it when I
repeated it to myself, it didn’t make it hurt any less.

  Those thoughts made my heart break. My heart was fragile. Like any muscle that hadn’t been exercised, it was weak from lack of use. I’d fiercely protected it for years. Protecting your heart guarantees loneliness, but it’s a hard habit to break.

  His eyes were clouded with confusion when he asked me, “Why are you only trying to say goodbye?”

  He was sitting so close to me I could feel his leg against mine, and yet I ached for him as if he were in another state, another country, on another continent, another planet.

  If I’d had any doubts that I loved Benjamin Reed, I knew now. I was one hundred percent certain I was in love with him. It ate away at me in the best possible way. I hadn’t even known the depth of it until now. It was only at the point of breaking that I realized how irrevocable it was. How do you know what love really is until you figure out what it isn’t? Love means something different to everyone. Mine was the six-foot-two, dark-haired, green-eyed, hard-working, intelligent, funny man sitting next to me, breaking.

  And you know how I knew it was really love? If I could have gone back, I’d have done it all again. Because heartbreak, it sucked, but I’d have fallen again. I’d have broken again. Knowing I’d get to love him in the meantime would be worth every agony this lifetime could show me. I would knowingly ask to shatter into a million tiny fragments of my former self if it meant I got to wrap myself around his heart. You could break me; I would beg for it. Burn me alive, turn me to smoke or ash—as long as I got to love him.

  That didn’t mean I was willing to prolong the breaking. It was better to end it now, when I still had some grip on reality and hadn’t wasted years of my life making happy memories that would continue to haunt me.

  Looking at him now, I saw his eyes were heavy with emotion, mine swimming in tears. I didn’t know how he was ever going to fade into a memory. I didn’t know how I was ever going to forget the way his eyes searched mine when he was trying to figure out insight to my odd thoughts, or the way his laughter fell across my face when I tickled him, or the way his body molded to mine in his sleep, or basically everything that was Benjamin Jacobs.

  “I think this is goodbye,” I told him, wiping a tear that escaped down my cheek.

  “Baby, don’t do this.” It was his last protest. I could hear the defeat in his voice, but I didn’t have any words to comfort him.

  So this is how it ends, I thought. Not with raised voices and an intense argument, but with a scared little girl who was afraid of giving too much of herself away.

  CHAPTER 36

  THESE BLANK PAGES I filled with nothing. Day after day, I turned the page without having touched the sheet at all. With Ben, my pages had just been normal days, but they had been wrapped in love. Somehow that had made them better. Fuller. Complete.

  Raindrops trickled down the window, and I followed them to the bottom of the windowsill. Time was passing so slowly without Ben. Time with him had been on steroids, adrenaline-rushed minutes filled with feeling. Now, I just felt numb with no relief in sight.

  Daylight broke my spirit. It had probably been broken before I went to bed, but I was blaming it on the morning. I missed Ben—a lot, like someone had taken one of those spiked balls and punched it right through my chest.

  First I did the coffee. That awakened me enough to shower. Then, I did something productive. Well, that was how my life usually worked. This week, the only thing I was really doing was the coffee, and it didn’t happen until around noon, in yoga pants with days’ worth of stains. They weren’t really considered dirty if I hadn’t taken them off yet, right?

  It had been four days since the breakup, four days without Ben. No calls. No texts. No communication at all. I hadn’t realized my life was so empty. How did his absence feel so heavy? Shouldn’t I have been lighter without the weight of him? My silent phone mocked me. If it hadn’t been for the weather app, it wouldn’t have made a noise all day. It was funny how the update of the pollen count was the only thing keeping me sane.

  My heart was shattered inside my chest, like I had given it away, all of it, and now I was trying to force it back into my ribcage and make it forget that it had found a new home, trying to make it forget what it was like to be Ben’s. I couldn’t piece the fragments back together when it felt like he’d taken all of them with him. How can you make something whole again if you’re missing half of the pieces?

  On day five, when we ran out of food and I’d already ordered everything in a five-mile radius, I decided to rejoin society. It was a hard choice, mostly because I really didn’t want to see anyone I knew. The tee-shirt I’d scrounged up from the bottom of my drawer was clean, but the yoga pants I’d been wearing for three days were bordering on dirty. My sunglasses covered the dark circles under my eyes, and I had no intention of taking them off. I wasn’t planning on socializing.

  I wanted to go where no one knew my name. Cheers to that. I was the definition of pathetic. I found a corner booth at some corner bar, and I sat there for over four hours. Who even knew it opened at one in the afternoon? There was no lunch rush, more of a lingering desperation. When the bored hostess/bartender asked how many, I had the urge to roll my eyes. Does anyone come to a bar in the middle of the day except those seeking solitude? Nope, it was just me. Desperate, party of one, and I’d like to sit close to the taps. I didn’t tell her that, but I was sure she picked up on it. I reeked of desperation.

  I was planning on healing my broken heart through food. Fried pickles. Fried cheese sticks. Fried chicken bites. Basically, that was what my post-breakup diet consisted of: anything breaded and fried with dipping sauce.

  When five o’clock hit and the bar started to fill up, I decided there was too much laughter in the air. I had no intention of having fun. Downtown was busy as I walked the couple blocks back to my car. I was almost there when I decided to do a little shopping, which usually made me feel better. Some retail therapy to cleanse the soul.

  When I walked into the boutique, I knew I was at home. The lady behind the counter had a cat face on her sweater and a mug that read Quiet, I’m reading. Basically, she was me in forty years.

  I browsed for half an hour before I found anything I wanted, and when I finally did, the girl in front of me grabbed the last one in my size. She tossed it over her arm and continued moving through the store, stopping at different sections to investigate. I stalked behind her, trying to telepathically convince her to put it back. She had her blonde hair pulled back in a sleek pony, jeans with holes in all the right places, and a well-fitting shirt with no stains. Why she needed a workout top that said ‘Taco Addict’ was beyond me. Probably to actually work out. Total waste.

  CHAPTER 37

  I’D SPENT MOST of my post-Ben time in bed. After three more days of no communication with the outside world apart from the small talk I made at various drive-through establishments, Jules had had enough of my moping.

  I had spent hours scouring the internet looking for humor in my humorless life. She found this to be a bit excessive and forced me to talk about my feelings. I really needed some dude friends.

  Typically, when forced to share, I used sarcasm as a defense, and an offense…and an overall life strategy. Usually, my playful demeanor let me get away with it, unless you were my mother. Or Jules, apparently.

  “Enough with the sarcasm, okay? We’re having a real conversation, whether you like it or not.” I stuck my tongue out at her, and she rolled her eyes. Our apartment was the epitome of maturity.

  “I miss him,” I told her honestly, refusing to meet her eyes and see the ‘I told you so’ written there.

  “Tell him.” Yeah, that doesn’t seem like an option.

  “No. I miss him, but not in a good way. I miss him so much that I know it was getting too serious. If I miss him this much now, imagine how much I’d miss him when I move.” Oh yeah, in my post-Ben haze of angry music and ice cream, I’d decided to take the internship…kind of. As in, I kept tellin
g myself I was taking it but had yet to actually confirm it with an acceptance email.

  “So you’re for sure taking the internship? For sure?” I didn’t know. I had thought taking Ben out of the equation would make the decision simpler, but nothing had changed. I still didn’t know what to do.

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t see your point. It’s invalid.” I could tell she was working hard at not rolling her eyes.

  “I don’t want to base my decisions off Ben.”

  The breath that came out of her nose was long and strained. “Then don’t,” she said simply. “Lex, this is your life. You are the one who has to live with the decisions you make. If that’s staying here, great. If that’s moving away, that’s fine, too. I know you’re afraid of wasting time, but the time’s going to pass whether you’re happy or not. The only thing you can do is try your best to ensure your own happiness.”

  I blinked at her. When she put it like that, it seemed stupid. I told her so.

  She sighed. “You’re so sad about this breakup when it shouldn’t really be a breakup, because you should just call him and cancel the whole breakup.”

  “I can’t cancel a breakup.”

  “You can when it’s stupid.”

  She was my best friend. I loved her. Also, I was going to punch her in the face. “It’s not stupid.”

  “You’re going to have to use your wealth of vocabulary and explain this to your nutrition-major best friend.”

  “This is just first love. It’s not… I don’t know.” How did I admit I was too afraid of being broken to keep loving him?

  “You’re the one who told him you wanted a future, and now you’re backing out when the future is here.” She paused, I supposed to let that sink in. “There’s no guarantee first loves can’t be last loves. They can be final. In fact, I’m pretty sure there are numerous movies depicting exactly that.” Her encouragement made me smile, only for a second, but considering the permanent frown I’d had on my face the last few days, it was a milestone.