Page 3 of Kiss Slay Replay

“I’m kidding. I love you. Have I mentioned that?”

“No. Never. Not once.”

“I actually do have to run. Luke just got home with the kid. He says hi. Luke, not Theo. Theo doesn’t…Is that—what is that? Luke, what is that? Right there, on his head! Willa, I’ll call you back in like an hour, if that works?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I will. In the meantime, enjoy the hellfire hot tub.”

“It’s supremely unpleasant.”

“Great! Bye!”

“Bye, Cass.”

I’m too afraid to check the time, to see how many minutes ticked away during that phone conversation. To see just how much day is left ahead of me.

Scientists should study the phenomenon of breakup time. Why aren’t there dedicated resources? I’m certain heartache bends the laws of physics. Isn’t that worth looking into?

Per Cassie’s suggestion, I put on an episode of some crime series about people who survive plane crashes and attempted murders. Their perseverance should be inspiring, but instead it just makes me feel inadequate. I’m barely surviving this breakup, fumbling my intended fresh start. I’m subsisting on noodles and muffins because they’re the only things I can stomach. I’m spending more on THC gummies than groceries. My hair is falling out in clumps due to stress or vitamin deficiencies. Both. And it was ultimately my call. I was the one who decided that the issues between us were irresolvable, that the life we’d been planning to live together wasn’t right for either of us.

Now I get to wonder if it was a big mistake. The kind of mistake I can’t come back from. The kind that’s going to leave me with a strain of parasitic regret that will destroy me, eventually.

It’s a waste not to wonder.

I go through it all in my head every single day. Several times a day. On fucking repeat. Flash back to those early years—the spark between us sun bright, everything easy. Moving in together, the simple joy of falling asleep and waking up in the same bed. I construct a timeline of domestic disagreements—dishes in the sink, unfolded laundry, hair left to clog the drain. I make mental evidence boards of recurring arguments—my lack of communication, his lack of communication, my desire to go out, his desire to stay in, my love of the city, his longing to return to his suburban hometown in Northern Virginia. When exactly did these cracks start to show? When he applied to his dream job in DC—behind my back, because he thought it was a shot in the dark? When he accepted the job? When he asked me to come with and to marry him in the same breath? When I said yes with happy tears in my eyes and a knife at my back?

When was the shift? When I quit my dream job to follow him home? When I left my beloved Manhattan and began to work freelance, feeling isolated and unfulfilled, subconsciously reluctant to settle somewhere I didn’t want to be? When he started working late and coming home irritable? When we stopped fucking? When his father got sick? When the thought of losing his dad prompted a change of heart about having kids, and he asked me if I’d reconsider becoming a parent? When I said no, it wasn’t something I wanted, and he assured me it was okay, but I couldn’t shake the guilt or the suspicion he thought I still might change my mind?

When did it get away from us? The nights we spent sleeping with our backs to each other, when I would cry into my pillow, wondering how I could love someone so much and not know how to talk to them anymore. A year like this. A year trying to ignore it, to reassure myself it was just a phase, that we would figure it out, because love conquers all. Until it doesn’t. Until I was hyperventilating three weeks before our wedding, breaking down in the kitchen telling him I couldn’t go through with it.

We were holding each other hostage in a relationship that wasn’t working anymore, and I felt like I was underwater, like I was drowning, like I was screaming but no one could hear me. I would sit around and fantasize about another life, one free of that feeling.

But now here I am in that life, hurting, just in a different way, on the floor of this studio apartment, with time standing still.

—

The dress I got for the wedding no longer fits. It hangs off me. I need a full-length mirror to properly examine, but I don’t have one. I have nothing. When I met Ravi, he had the stuff. Mirrors. Silverware. Plates. Lamps. An ironing board. Two sets of sheets. His own place. An IRA. He was responsible, twenty-four going on forty. I was a twenty-three-year-old party girl, a perpetually hungover barista at the coffee shop around the corner from his office, where he’d get a small black coffee every morning. He asked me out, and that was that. I never learned how to be an adult. I deferred to him, so I never acquired the skills, the adult stuff. Linens. Tools. Do I need tools? Like, a hammer? Is that something I should own?

I don’t fucking know. I’m thirty-one and making ramen for dinner, about to eat it out of a plastic bowl while watching a movie on my laptop in bed, my bed being a mattress on the floor. I slip the straps off my shoulders and let the dress fall to my feet. I pick it up and hang it in the closet, on one of the six plastic hangers I went out and bought after realizing I didn’t have any. Ravi had the hangers. Nice ones. Velvet. Why didn’t I buy myself nicer hangers? Now I regret not investing in the velvet ones.

Now I regret everything.

I can hear Cassie sighing inside my head. She lives up there, too, apparently.

“Go figure.”

A soft grunt emanates from the bathroom, where my cat is wedged between the toilet and the wall. “Archimedes. The reason you can live here, rent free, and that I feed you, scoop your litter, and take such good care of you, is so that you reciprocate with love and affection.”

Another grunt.

“Fine. I knew I should have gotten a dog.”

This gets him. He emerges from the bathroom to scowl at me. He crosses the apartment to the closet, where he hides behind a tower of boxes.

“Why are all my relationships so dysfunctional?” I ask him. “Is it me?”

I reach behind the boxes, attempt to pick him up, and he scratches me.