A Million Miles Away
Getting dumped is hard to do
I’m decluttering my apartment….
Well. I’m trying to. In doing so, I found this forgotten piece of writing in a pile. I had printed it out because I read it aloud in a show, March 25, 2018 at Areté Venue and Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
By way of revision, I went into my Google Drive last night, dug it up, changed about ten words and then gave a fake name to the main character. Please enjoy this artifact from the sands of my apartment.
A Million Miles Away
Four years ago I got dumped. Not for the first time, just for one of the times. The time that I’m writing about now. I can’t read to you about all the times that I’ve been dumped, because we haven’t booked out the venue for long enough.
This particular dumping, my ex and I were both awake at 6am, for no particular reason. Well I guess there was a reason. He was awake because he knew he was about to dump me. I was awake because I sensed that he was keyed up about something. I had come home late from a book signing. The author, Sara Barron, had looked me in the eyes, her beautiful red hair cascading around her precious little face. She had scrawled in my copy of her book that she’d see me on Twitter, as we had a friendly thing going on there. She’d handed me the book and I’d turned away in wonder to my friend, Kaitlin, both of us star struck by the encounter. “She totally knows me. We tweet all the time.”
I was itching to tell my soon-to-be-ex, Max about my inspiring night: about watching Sara read aloud from her book, about the tailored pantsuit she wore, about her parents and friends laughing together with her assorted fans, about the free wine. Max and I hadn’t talked much lately and I thought, how fortunate that we should both be awake at 6am, this private, stolen hour when nothing could get in the way of our quality time.
When he suggested, groggily, that we talk, I inhaled excitedly and reached behind me for Sara’s signed book, eager to recount the show-and-tell story I’d wanted to tell him since 2am when I’d rolled in to our bedroom from the Peter Pan Bus, my long trip from NYC to Philly finally complete.
He breathed out before I could and carried by his breath were words about seeing no future for us.
With the smack of his statement, I began to cry. He immediately deflated, “Oh. Please don’t cry,” he sounded alarmed, “because then I’m going to cry.” I looked at him honestly then, probably more honestly than in the past nearly three years of people-pleasing and guessing and hoping to be what he might want. These were the first minutes of being myself in his presence. “You should cry,” I said as my real self. “This is exactly when you should cry.”
The day before, sitting in a BBQ establishment with my friend, Kim, in NYC, I’d answered her question, “How’s it going with Max?” I was matter-of-fact in my unromantic answer. I used the word “roommate” to describe the energy of our living situation and I remember placing my hands out in front of me to depict two parallel lines. I inched them toward her, finding the words as I went: “We are moving forward together, but we don’t really overlap.”
And sitting there in bed the next morning, at 6:04am or so, I remember as if in a dream, watching Max’s hands briefly make the same gesture. “We’re like two parallel lines that never meet,” he said, fighting tears.
“But maybe if we just turned them a little, in any direction,” I said, grasping for purchase in the thinning air and not really sure of my geometry, shocked to hear my own metaphor in my new ex-boyfriend’s mouth. As the conversation wore on, and as snot fell more and more heavily on my very absorbent bathrobe, a sense of relief began to wash over me.
Hadn’t I just had this breakup conversation, in practice, with my friend over BBQ the day before? Shocked as I was at the timing, I could not convincingly make the argument to myself that I didn’t also want this. I did. I had just thought I’d stay in this Philadelphia nest of a condo, 15 flights above the city street, with our fat black cat and his crooked ear for another few years or so and then, maybe then, I’d have the courage to do what Max was doing that day.
The early morning slid quickly past from that point onward. My eyes were puffy and my bathrobe soaked as I brushed my teeth, the clichéd image of a dumped girlfriend. Max, on the other hand, passing behind me and in the periphery of my vision, moved brusquely through the apartment, pulling his pants on, tossing his T-shirt into the hamper, finding his wallet, sweeping up cat hair. He moved with the lightness of a person who has just done a very hard thing and triumphed.
He suggested that we get breakfast at the diner in Reading Terminal. The idea seemed both totally reasonable and totally macabre. I put on a tight shirt and began to apply mascara. “What are you doing?” he laughed nervously, “It’s just me.” It occurred to both of us in that moment that neither of us had any idea who I was. I replied in some sort of Bebe Neuwirth character voice that might as well be my own as of today, “I’m single now. I have to look good. Who knows where I’ll meet someone?”
I wasn’t joking, but I was only half-conscious, with grief sitting so heavily on my mind, like a blinding tumor. Max and I had stopped having sex some time ago, so I’d taken to instead running 6 to 8 miles a day. I tugged at my tight shirt, looked at the 28-year-old stranger in the mirror, wondered if she was even attractive to other men, and we headed off to the diner.
Max pulled his bike alongside us as we made our way there. He couldn’t hide his giddiness and it sickened me. The bike, too, and the helmet, the dread of him literally riding off as soon as breakfast was over.
It reminded me of a prescient dream I’d had a few months earlier. In the dream, Max and I stood in a parking lot facing each other. I had nothing. He had a motorcycle. He clasped his helmet and looked at me with a casual sort of expression. “I’m leaving,” he said, just for my information and not with any malice. “Where are you going?” I asked, from my parking spot with no car. “I’m going a million miles away,” he answered. In the dream it was not hyperbole. I understood a million miles to be a measured and chosen distance that he would indeed travel on his motorcycle. He put his helmet on to go and then I woke up.
7:20am and we sit at the diner, next to each other. I watch the waitress: a young, generically attractive somebody. She could be Max’s girlfriend now. I imagine him thinking the same thing, but I don’t know what he is thinking.
I don’t recall what we talked about in that diner for the length of time that it took to eat eggs. I remember walls of emotional tone falling like colored panes of glass.
I guess I wouldn’t be much use as a witness in a murder.
We parted ways outside. We said gibberish words that I knew to be English. As he walked his bike away, his body had an electricity pulsating through it that I had not seen in maybe a year, or more. I had no electricity. I had nothing. I looked around at Philadelphia where I no longer lived, even though my stuff lived there. I touched the stomach of my runner’s body, foreign even to me, and went back into Reading Terminal to call my mom and deliver the news to someone outside of myself.