Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
him, see him, chat with him—I could forget all this crap. Forget that he was blowing guys while I was at work or home feeding the cats or watching a loved one die in another city. For this moment, he was the person I liked being with more than anyone in the world.
“I don’t know if this will happen, but it would be nice if, maybe, somewhere down the line … we could be friends,” I say.
“Like Will and Grace,” he laughs. When the joke falls like lead, his eyes well up and he nods. “It’s so brave and healthy of you to be here saying this to me.”
“Or stupid.”
We share a subway ride like we had thousands of times before. We hold hands like we used to. We call it the “Bizarro World”: something so familiar, and yet so starkly strange.
When my stop comes, I turn and kiss him goodbye.
By the morning, I’ve stopped feeling so magnanimous.
I wake up around 6 A.M., as I have every day since the breakup, my mind racing. I leave Aaron a message on his cell, which I know he’ll have turned off. It’s become a habit, an easy way of spewing to him without it turning into a dialogue.
“I just want to say that you would come home with some guy’s sperm on your breath and kiss me. I never even saw you brush your teeth. That’s just gross. And, you know, at the end of the day, when the orgasm is over and the spark begins to fade, you’re left with a human being whom you have to figure out if you can live with, trust, believe in, respect, have stuff in common with, talk to, listen to, and love being with. We had all that. You know how hard that is to find? Look at all our friends in their thirties who are single and have been for years. Everyone wants what we had. I just hope when we’re old and alone, we don’t look back and say this was a fucking huge mistake.”
Well, I hoped I wouldn’t look back and say it was a fucking huge mistake. I didn’t wish the same for him.
Day 9 Paul, the married editor, and I go out for a drink. There’s the familiar electric current between us, but I’m too depressed to play with it. He looks slightly wary. Maybe he thinks I’m going to hit on him. Maybe he’s worried he’ll hit on me. Maybe it’s none of the above and I can’t read people for shit anymore, if I ever could.
He tells me how he and his wife have an “understanding,” that sometimes “shit happens” and if it’s a “one-off,” it’s not a big deal. The shock of what an illusory moral world I’d been living in—apparently alone—hit me again.
After two drinks, he decides to make a beeline for the train. “My wife wouldn’t want me hanging out with you for too long.”
I look at him quickly. “What do you mean?”
He backtracks. “I mean she wouldn’t want me to hang out too long. I like to get home and cook dinner.”
He leaves and I contemplate my new status as The Woman Who Wives Will Not Want Their Husbands Hanging Out with for Too Long.
Here I am: tipsy, pathetic, and alone. I guess I’d have to get used to it—but not tonight. I make some drunk-dials to friends, but none of them pick up. I call Aaron. He answers and I sound like a fool, telling him I’m drunk and lonely. Why shouldn’t I tell him? He’s the one who made me this way.
“I’d say let’s go out, but I have rehearsal with Amber.”
Amber. The girl I’d been jealous of just a few weeks ago.
It doesn’t matter. Two nights in a row with Aaron would be too weird. I hang up and decide to call Rahil. It’s purely to hear another human being’s voice.
He picks up and I babble that I’m drunk and pathetic and apologize for calling.
“Why are you apologizing?” he trills. “I thought we had discussed this. We are just having fun!”
There’s something comforting about a guy with his head in the clouds when the earth under your feet has buckled and caved in. The connection drops and I can’t reach him again. I feel so desperate calling guys. I’m the opposite of desperate: I don’t give a fuck about anyone or anything. But they don’t know that.
On the walk home, the reality of my new life begins to settle on me. I hadn’t been lonely for ten years. I’d forgotten how it felt, how deep it cut, what one did to alleviate it. I let my mind slip into those darkest of dark thoughts. I don’t want to feel this way forever. But I will feel this way forever. I need to stop how I feel.
But how could I kill myself? I had no idea how to get a gun. I had some pain pills left over from a recent tooth extraction, but only enough to barely warrant a stomach pump.
It takes me two phone calls to crawl back up the side of the dark, slimy well. A friend I’ve known since college talks me down with her therapist-speak: “Just one day at a time, Kiri. Just get through this night.”
As for my mother, because she is so devastated, I spend most of the conversation trying to convince her how this is actually a good thing. Subsequently, I almost convince myself.
My mother is certain that Aaron will see the error of his ways. “He’s going to regret this. I know he will.”
“Mom, what does it matter? Am I going to wait around to find out if he regrets it one day?”
I neglect to add that I could never again live with a guy who might not only pick up some groceries on the way home from work, but a blowjob from a dude on Craigslist.
Rahil calls and apologizes for the dropped signal. Damned technology. I’d refused him my number, but because I’d called him, his phone trapped it. Things were a lot different from a decade ago, when I was last single. You could actually call a guy and hang up without him knowing it was you.
We chat for a little bit and then I come around to the point, my first attempt ever to set up some kind of booty call.
“We could, uh, meet at Loki. Maybe. And, ah, play some pool.”
“Sure, sounds great.”
“Well, um, I could, um, call you Sunday afternoon and maybe you’re free or maybe not and we could meet up or not meet up, it really doesn’t matter.” Smooth.
Again, he’s unflappable. “Kiri, let’s just make plans to meet up. People do make plans you know.”
“But plans are so … adult.” I want nothing to do with the real world.
“Okay, then let’s not. Maybe I’ll see you sometime.”
“Wait, are we meeting Sunday or not?”
He laughs. “You just said you didn’t want to make plans.”
I’m going to say a lot of things. A lot of fucked up things that make no sense. We agree to call each other Sunday. What I don’t tell him is that I can’t handle any rejection right now. Not even from a booty call.
“I’m sorry I’m being so crazy,” I say.
“You’re not crazy. You’re just having a tough time. If I thought you were crazy, I’d run five miles.”
In the morning, I fantasize about heavy petting with him. That scares me. I’d been with one man, one body, for so long. I wasn’t up for any strange surprises.
Aaron comes over to pick up some of his stuff. I’d thought the sight of him packing up his things and taking them out of our life together would send me over the edge—but when the day comes, I’m too hung over to get weepy about it.
He brings cat food and litter and coffee, as