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Oh. It was bad the first time, but it’s no better this time. No, not at all. “You said you did,” and my voice comes out small, and I sound no better than a kid. Hurt, disillusioned—this isn’t the me I want to be.
He’s not saying anything, and for a minute there’s just this awful silence and emptiness, and I know this place. I know this feeling well.
“You wanted me to love you,” he continues. “You wanted something I didn’t have, something… I don’t know… something I just couldn’t give you.”
“So it—we—were just sex?” Not that the sex lasted very long, either.
“And friendship.”
Fuck. You.
I’m seething. Raging. The friendship was obviously lacking, and for your information, the sex wasn’t that good.
“We made a mistake.” Jean-Marc, who never wanted to talk, can’t seem to shut up now. “So we’re fixing it.”
Leaving me is his idea of fixing.
Jean-Marc must have gone to Dad’s class, Abandonment101: Agony for the Whole Family.
“I won’t call again,” I say, but I don’t want to say the words, don’t want to make anything so final, so definitive. Like death, I think.
Or divorce.
But that’s what this is. And the realization slams into me, swift, harsh—divorce.
Finished. Kaput. Over. Dead.
“Take care, Holly.”
Is this it, then? It’s really over, the final tie cut, the relationship truly dead and buried?
I want to say his name; I want him to be kind; I want warmth, but I can’t tell him what I want, can’t humiliate myself again with what I need.
“Be happy,” he adds, and before I can say “Good luck, good-bye,” he’s hung up.
The tears want to rush my eyes. There’s a half-scream hanging in my throat. I can’t bear it when people hang up on me, can’t bear it when people walk away from me, can’t bear feeling so helpless. Feeling so…
Abandoned.
Thanks, Dad.
I leave my apartment to keep from dissolving into the mess I tend to be, and walk, and walk. It’s dark, and the cold bites at me, and I should have brought a coat, but maybe it’s better this way, better to keep me icy and alive than warm and fragmented.
I can’t call him anymore, I think; he’s told me not to call. He’s told me to leave him alone. That’s essentially what he’s saying.
Stay away.
Leave me alone.
I don’t want to deal with you anymore.
And even though I’m chilly, the tears well up and they fall, but I keep walking up Fillmore, and I wipe the tears as they fall, but I don’t stop walking. I just bundle my arms across my chest and stagger up a hill and down a hill and past the big beautiful houses in Pacific Heights, and back down the street toward Japan Town. I’m so full of missing, so full of loneliness and broken dreams, that I don’t know what to do but walk.
And walk.
And walk.
Missing is the hardest thing I know; missing is so much harder than not thinking and not feeling, and now that I’ve started to feel, I’m afraid to be alone with all my emotions.
