It’s how you know someone’s talking about you, right?
Things have settled with me. I’ve been in a nice little routine. Eventually, amid all this seeming normalcy there is to be a twinge of suspicion that all is not well in the world of relatively fresh singledom. It’s a near-imperceptible gut “feel” that soon becomes too annoying to ignore and then…
The email came a few minutes before noon. “Food” in the subject line. Thinking about it now, the timing should have been the first thing to tip me off.
I obediently went down to the security desk upon my lunch break and took it off their hands. Ooh. Piece of cake. I was mystified, but then delighted, and ultimately disenchanted once my stomach started rebelling at the thought of digesting it. I gave it away; I knew it wouldn’t sit well with me today.
Something else about it was bothersome but I played it off for hours and chalked it up to “Someone out there likes me”. I even made a post about it on Facebook.
Once I figured it out, I wondered why the realization hadn’t come to me sooner. That particular cake wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I’d had it before. I’d given it before, to only one other.
You.
You really couldn’t leave well enough alone.
My mind harked back to that one night in November, the night I should have thrown up my hands and officially declared “I’m done.” The night my addiction to the mere possibility of seeing you overrode a frightening mental trigger. The night you wrote a truth about yourself:
Cruel. Selfish. “Just as she was”–the one you went back to.
That was the night I still loved you despite knowing my inevitable heartbreak was spelled out in that one sentence. The night you didn’t respond when I had said to you, in text visible on each of our glowing screens, to please not leave me here alone.
I said your name.
“Bri, please.”
——–
For two days, silence. Then, words. After words, flowers. Pink and white, exuberant blooms, brightness that stood out so riotously against the drab office. They brought a radiant blush to my cheeks and made my heartbeat skip; in this they were so much like you–your presence, your laughter. Your hand when it enveloped mine, your gaze when it met mine.
I still have them on my coffee table, the flowers. They are long dead. They look like the world outside my windows. Petals and leaves have fallen off and gone largely unnoticed under my feet, pulverized into dust that I don’t sweep up. I haven’t acknowledged them enough to throw them away.
For a brief time I wondered what you did with yours. I wasn’t there the day you got them. They were supposed to be orchids, all of them–white orchids. They were out of orchids that day, and I lacked patience; I wanted to get it over with so I could more quickly forget what I had done. But even so, I wanted you to have no doubt that it was me they came from and that I was still in love with you and that I just wanted you to know what you were to my mind, what you still could have been if you really wanted, but you didn’t want it because you wanted her and for some time now, that’s been a fine thing by me.
Being with you unlocked a part of me I had kept hidden away, that I didn’t know was able to exist for other people.
In the months we had together, and since, I don’t know what I did for you. You don’t seem to have changed much. And that’s okay. Because fuck you.
Fuck you.
Sept Jours 