abby provenzano
50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER: A GUIDE
The first time he comes to see you again—your old friend from the high school your parents moved you away from, whose letters and messages throughout the years have felt like the only thread left to your home—you let him share your room in the six-person apartment and give him your bed while you curl up in your roommate’s. You fret over clean sheets and adequate blanket count and waking him up as you grope around in the dark for your toothbrush. You curse the blackout curtain that suffocates the city outside. You curl your toes into the carpet, edge your way to the cold metal of the bed frame, slip under the covers. You lay in the dark and listen to the sound of his breathing. You do this for a long time. You wonder what he thought of you when he saw you again, spoke to you again. How do you compare at nineteen to the you of sixteen? Is it better to be similar, or different? You roll over first to one side, then the other. You ask yourself, what do you think of him? You eventually fall asleep, with him only a few feet away. You don’t get up during the night to cross those few feet; you don’t touch him. He’s only here for the weekend, and his absence will allow you to move on past his presence now with speed, with ease.
You don’t think about what it would be like to be with him; you don’t fail in this moving on.He goes home, to Boston. You stay in Michigan. He lives, you live. You keep talking with him. Say over and over how nice the visit had been, how it should have happened a long time ago. How you missed him, and you do. You think of him in your bed each night as you stare at the ceiling, your roommate sighing in her sleep. He who was your past is slipping into your present, and you let the feeling of it wash over you. It’s pleasant, a break in the university loneliness that has been pressing into you. You can allow a bit of pleasant.
You do not, however, buy your own plane ticket.You plan your trip with an eagerness you thought was long lost, the things you’ll do, the things you’ll see. You call your parents and listen while they explain to you how to navigate through an airport, as you’ve never gone by yourself before. You pack your bag, each outfit for the weekend planned in such detail as a work of art.
You don’t lay in bed with your glowing phone pressed close to your glasses-less face at all hours of the night. You don’t say how excited you are to go, how you’re looking forward to it.You don’t board the plane to Boston.
You board the plane to Boston and contemplate the sky as you plunge into it. You’re just there for a friendly visit, you reason with the enveloping clouds. You haven’t been to the city since you were a little girl, and he’s good company. A tour guide, even. And you’re so close to your old home that you ache with it. But that’s all. He takes you to historical sites and gift shops and an art museum. You gush about Paul Revere while he smirks. You crunch into cannolis dripping with chocolate and slurp plates of noodles and laugh.
At night, he shifts his weight from side to side, crosses his arms, clears his throat. He’s nervous, and he only has one bed.
He doesn’t ask for you to share it with him. He sleeps on the floor.You each stay on your side of his tiny twin bed—it is, of course, just wide enough for that. You huddle into yourself, drawing your knees up.
He doesn’t put his arms around you. You don’t feel the warmth of his breath on the back of your neck; this doesn’t make you shiver. You don’t twist around when the light begins to soften outside to see what he looks like when he’s asleep. You don’t trace your thumb over his face.An elderly couple at the symphony asks you how long you’ve been together. You both splutter and stumble over your words to correct them. Later, you laugh about it while lying in bed. You listen to the rain pounding against the window and take this as a sign and/or a warning, close your eyes. You imagine the city and its people weaving around you, all the intertwining paths.
You don’t discuss it further. You don’t clasp hands and decide that you want to be together, despite the distance. You don’t decide that the both of you could make it work.He takes you to the top of a tall building on your last day, up and up and up, and you don’t wish that he would kiss you as you squint at distant boat-silhouettes in the harbor. You just go home, back to Michigan.
Somewhere along the way you decide that the distance is too much, that it is foolish to plan your future around him and getting to him, his physical location. You convince yourself of this. You have always been convincing, if the scribbles of your professors in the margins of your papers can be believed.
You stop buying plane tickets.
You tell him to stop buying plane tickets. The totals next to the dollar signs are too high, the eventual reward too small to stand. You no longer want to see him, to count the days down for the next weekend visit. You delete the countdown app on your phone, the pictures you have of him.
Your life is now broken into two parts: visits with him in Boston or Michigan, and the spaces in between. Black and ivory keys on a piano he plays with too much force and not enough delicate artistry. In the summer, time stretches out like ropes of saltwater taffy. Drunk on Shakespeare, you walk in the arboretum after an outdoor performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream as the colors of the flowers and the day fade away. He kisses you and you’re dizzy with it. He doesn’t listen when you warn him of the coming dark, the ticks. He rambles and ambles, at his own pace. Always his own pace.
A dissonant chord twinges in you, and you don’t ignore it.He loves making plans, itineraries, down to the goddamn minute for things to do when you visit. He makes sure you rise early, makes sure you’re always rushing so that you never miss anything, never have any time to put on makeup or do your hair as you like. You avoid your reflection all day, but it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re sticking to the plan. He loves making plan after plan after plan. He does this with great enthusiasm, like Jefferson gripping the freedom pen. With the same enthusiasm, the same effort, he refuses to make any plans for the future, for graduate school, for getting geographical togetherness. He refuses to sit still. He soothes you with empty words and a dismissive wave of his hand. You let the conversation slide to other things; you figure you have time to figure out the details.
You’re sick when you come to him for a week; you cough and cough through the nights. The first night you’re afraid to keep him up—he’s the only college student you’ve ever met with a strict bedtime—so you curl up at the bottom of the bed like a miserable cat and don’t sleep at all. He’s well-rested; he doesn’t notice. Later he sticks to the exact itinerary he has already made. You pause for breath and relief at benches across the city. You wish for a day in bed; you contemplate an early flight home with a lack of his enthusiasm.
You don’t not question his method of caring for you. You don’t figure that he’s just excited for what he’s planned, for all there is to see. You don’t grace him with the first of many instances of putting him before yourself while he is oblivious to it all.You don’t ignore his arrogance, his perpetual steering of conversation to himself while remaining unaware of the fact that he is doing this. When you curl up together to watch TV, you don’t allow him to always be the one with his head in your lap, your hand in his hair, getting all the attention.
You don’t wait in eagerness for phone calls from him that span hours. He’s the first person you’ve met in a long time that you can just talk and talk and talk with and listen and listen and listen to.
You don’t tell yourself over and over that this is the happiest you’ve ever been, smiling as you think of him, his recycled words, his face.
Back in chilly Michigan, around Halloween, you don’t allow him to see, to touch, more of your body than ever before. You don’t lean into his caress, the warmth of his hand, suspend the moment above you like you’re spinning glass.
You don’t let him complain quite so much, win his way.
You don’t, during yet another visit, venture out with him at midnight to the arch with the campus myth that a kiss under it will portend a marriage in the future. He doesn’t sit you down on a park bench and tell you that he loves you when your skin is still cold.
He tells you that he loves you, but you don’t say it back.
You love him, you tell him, but you don’t leave your guard down. Being cautious is one of your finest, oldest, most used qualities. You don’t forget yourself while you’re with him, descend into a dream.
He says a lot of things, believes some of them, plagiarism from a Hallmark card—he can’t wait for a future with you, to be with you all the time. He loves how close he feels to you. You’re his person. You’re the most important thing in his life. You’re everything he’s been waiting for. Everything will be perfect when the two of you are together, finally, and that’s all that he wants. That’s all he needs to be happy and content. All he needs is you.
You don’t accept these with blindness, eagerness—you take everything he says with a grain of salt and use them all to preserve his words in jars stored on skeptical shelves in your mind.You meet his parents for dinner during one visit, and they are lovely even as you are nervous and over-polite and quiet. You feel like you don’t fit in with them yet. He talks over you and makes jokes you’re too much of an outsider to understand and tells you on the train ride home that it was perfect, even though it wasn’t. Even though it’ll take some time to get there.
It’s been one year. A year; enter a montage of visits back and forth and a million texts and heaps of mailed letters and a slew of phone calls. You start to notice his flaws and don’t hate yourself for it, don’t replace these observations with the positive qualities you love about him that you wrote into a book of cards as a Valentine’s Day gift, 52 Reasons Why I Love You. Pros and cons are not a cancelling out kind of variable, of currency. He is arrogant, he is selfish; he steers your lives back to himself and his achievements like an expert with a sail, enjoying the wind in his hair and the crash of the waves and the ride. He eats away at your nerves. He has a pig puppet he bought once at a thrift store in Japan that he carries around with the two of you for photo shoots even though any quirkiness or amusement gleaned from the matted and synthetic pink fur has long since worn off. He’s more annoying than in the beginning—in the beginning there was—or maybe you just had more patience, a bigger blind spot. It’s still easy, fun, to talk to him each day and care and lament the distance. It’ll be better when we close the distance, you tell yourself. You knew going into this that it would be tough.
Regardless, you still start to notice his flaws and don’t hate yourself for it, don’t pretend they don’t exist.He comes home for Christmas, to your parents’ home, and he arrives from the airport to meet your parents for the first time in too-short pajama pants. You hide your blush by talking, talking, talking. He eats and eats, is loud, too much. He climbs into your bed with a smirk even when your parents cleared their throats and brought his things to the guest room in the basement. You are swept up with the holiday and his proximity, are merry and bright.
In front of the fireplace, you focus on a hanging stocking instead of his face and whisper that you’ve been struggling with your mental health. You’re sometimes anxious, sometimes sad, sometimes overwhelmed. It’s almost time for your college graduation and you have a lot to figure out still. He looks at you for a long time and says he never really has had to think of his own mental health. Incredible. Then he grins—how can you be anything but happy when you’re with me? You take his hand and agree.
You don’t agree; you don’t.He kisses you as you ring in the New Year and you don’t resolve to make things work, to continue to love him, to close the distance between the two of you, to make this your best year yet.
You apply to graduate schools close to home and close to him. You’re going to be a writer. You’ve really always known. You used to sit in your dad’s plaid armchair with your composition book and read your stories to your parents and sisters on Saturday evenings. You had decided to get a creative writing minor from your university on a whim and didn’t look back. In all your stories, you’ve never been able to write about him. You don’t forget about this, let another detail of your hectic last year of college slip between the cracks.
He misses your college graduation—he’s studying abroad instead. And this is fine, except that when he calls you, he forgets to be as excited about your accomplishment as he is about his trip, his other travels, so many other things. He forgets to say that he’s sorry, truly sorry, that he missed the pomp and circumstance. That he wishes he could’ve come.
You mention this, call him out on it. You don’t brush it away as you check your inbox over and over and filter through rejection letters from graduate schools, hoping for success.Your choices for graduate school come down to one in New York City, two in Boston. The choice between your New England future with him and your family in the Midwest is made much easier in its non-existence. You are excited, elated even. The start of your new life.
The rest of the summer is a flurry of packing and kneading down anxiety. He isn’t present, not so much, but then, he is always busy.
You let this bother you.
You stand in your hollowed out bedroom, surveying the stacks of boxes, the vacuum-packed clothes and T.J. Maxx comforter, the new diploma framed by your parents on the wall. You survey the course of your life up to this moment, recognize you stand on the other side after the summit of the two biggest, most important things in your life thus far—your graduation, your getting into graduate school.
You call him and ask why he disregarded this summit, didn’t acknowledge its beauty or grandeur as he should, the hard work and effort your hike up towards it had been. You ask him why he almost let you pass over its significance. Why so much has happened, and he hasn’t cared. These are the two most important things happening to the both of you at this time, you say, and it didn’t and doesn’t feel like that at all. He mentions his job, his studies, his interviews for scholarships, his travels abroad, his preoccupations. He loves you, of course. You tell him sure, sure, but that those other things aren’t as important; can’t he see that?
You don’t believe that he can.You realize he didn’t help you look for an apartment, even though he’s the one in Boston. You realize he doesn’t seem to notice your painstaking planning with your realtor to be both near him and near your college. Twenty-five or so minutes to each. You don’t allow yourself to be caught up in the idea of him staying over as often as you’d like. Domestic bliss, and hasn’t that been what you’ve (singular) been fighting for all this time? You don’t not realize the implications of this information.
You’ve never been good at swimming, even though your mother signed you up for lessons on three separate occasions. You’ve never been good at swimming, but he’s become an expert at treading water. Staying in place. Not moving forward, and what does that mean? You had always thought the both of you wanted a real relationship, a future, but the more he pumps his arms and legs in the water while staying put, the harder this is to believe.
You are beginning to despise him like the slow rot of a tree trunk, and you embrace it rather than push past it.Move-in day approaches and you call him again and again, try to cling to his voice. You beg him for a moment of gratitude and excitement for all that you’ve done to ensure your togetherness. An oh my God, we don’t have to do long distance anymore, thank you, thank you, I love you so much. If someone did this for you, you reason late at night, you’d be delirious, awestruck, unable to believe it.
You tell yourself with a firmness you can’t ignore that you’re unable to believe that would ever come from him.Your last day at home, and you don’t want to leave. You do, and you don’t. You’ve enjoyed the transition state before the leap to adulthood and want to savor it a little longer, as long as you can.
It’s easier to write out—you are a writer, after all, or at least you’re going to school to learn how to be one—so you compose a text the night before the fourteen hour car ride. I knew I’d be sad, you say in so many typed words. I knew it’d be sad to leave my parents and my family, the only people I cared about during my lonely time in undergrad. But I thought there’d be a nice balance of joy and excitement. Plans for our future. I thought we’d be counting down the days until my arrival, like we used to when we visited each other, and it’s not. It’s just happening. It’s just the sad.
I feel alone, you say, and feel the truth of it sitting heavy on your chest. I feel alone, which isn’t what I was hoping for.
You study the illuminated letters from the phone in your hand, and you don’t delete them.You don’t delete another written explanation, and another, and another.
You leave him, words, or no.
You don’t leave Michigan.
You leave Michigan, but it’s only for your dream of graduate school. You leave Michigan, heading for Boston, and you leave him. You don’t iron out another second chance and watch it flap in the breeze outside your car window, another Icarus heading for the sun.
You make it to Boston, and everything is a whirlwind—meeting the landlord, lugging box after box up the three flights of stairs, shopping, assembling furniture, walking around the city with your parents, saying goodbye. You promise yourself you won’t cry when they leave but you cry anyway, and perhaps this is comforting to them. You sit in your apartment surrounded by clutter, overwhelmed. He was supposed to help you move in, but the times didn’t work out. He comes later and sits with you amid the turbulence, and you hug him despite the sticky summer heat. You do this for a long time. He doesn’t stay the night, only stays for an hour or so. His bedtime, and all.
Over the next two weeks you get your footing, with directions and graduate school orientation and the thinning out of the overwhelmingness. You are waiting for him to come to you, yet busy enough that he isn’t a necessity. Two weeks go by and you realize he has only made time to see you, the freshly moved-in Boston version of you, three times.
It’s the first time you raise your voice at him, the first time the anger is a true kindred spirit. You’ve just been stacking these days up as leverage, he fires back, not mentioning them as they go by so that the 3/14 fraction looks worse for me. I was just waiting for you to come, to care, you spit back, I was just waiting.
You end up going for a walk together, and later he’s surprised when you know how to navigate the T on your own. He thinks you’re naïve, stupid, incapable; that’s how he makes you feel, anyway. He pouts. I was going to give you the Boston orientation, show you all this, he says. You toe at the platform under your feet, feel the rumble of the coming train. I was waiting, you think, but you didn’t come.
You don’t tighten your lips into a flat line, staying silent, figuring it’s easier to choose other battles. Or smooth everything over, no need for battles at all. You’re too tired to be a warrior. You don’t stay with him and wait for the train, make excuses for him; you stop waiting.He tries to see you more, and you make sure he’s trying. The ground beneath you feels less rocky. He can stay over more often than your old routine weekend visits, which is nice. You made sure you had a full-sized bed. Our bed, he grins at you his first night over, and you roll over on your side and stare at the wall in the dark. He leaves early in the morning for work and you crawl back into the bed, stare at the ceiling. Things don’t feel right, you don’t feel right, or how you expected. You decide that there has to be an adjustment period for everything. You just need time.
You have a careful list of house rules for the apartment, which he carefully and cheerfully forgets about. He climbs into your clean bed with his outside clothes on; he uses the wrong towel; he won’t take his shoes off. Little things, little things that shouldn’t matter. They matter to you, though. There’s the rub.
Get out, you sometimes think as he snores beside you, sprawled out so that you’re smooshed right against the wall. Get out, you’re not who I thought you were, you’re not who I thought you’d be. Get out, get out. You don’t confine this to the audience in your own head and smother it by the morning; you say it out loud.Adjusting to life in the city, a city so far from where you’ve come from, is difficult. You expected this, but that knowledge doesn’t make the adjustment any less difficult. Nevertheless, you love Boston, your classes, the other writers around you, your independence, almost immediately. Nevertheless, there’s still the toll. There are so many people, so much going on. Your anxiety crackles and caramelizes on a hot wood stove, like the kind in your old childhood home. Heat and more heat, and he proves not to be cooling, to not bring any water. He pokes at the embers.
It’s just a lot, you try to explain to him, I’m still in the need-more-time phase. He doesn’t seem to understand. He’s never been one to cradle patience in his arms. Maybe you aren’t what he thought you were, either. Maybe who you’re blossoming into is unexpected and intimidating to him, too much. You are thriving here, you are, and it has nothing to do with him. Does he resent it?
You don’t let him come to your apartment so much anymore.You let him come to your apartment, but he is no longer all you have here. You’ve met some of the best people you’ve ever encountered—a real-life group from Friends—and you are happier in your first month here than you had been in your four years of undergraduate study. You go to bars after class and make weekend plans and sip wine together while watching questionable reality TV. One of you brings the rest leftover chocolates from the shop they work at; one of you brings honeys and teas and macadamia nuts from their homeland as gifts. You’re overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness, the kindness. You listen to these people, your people, talk and laugh over slices of pizza and decaf lattes and cheap burritos. You drink up every detail of their lives and your place in them.
There’s a Friends orange replica couch brought to one of your school’s theaters and the irony tastes sweet in your mouth. The six of you sprawl over it, posing for a snapshot. You’re squeezed between your Phoebe and your Chandler, smiling, smiling, smiling. You take the photo out sometimes just to marvel at it, run your fingers over the glossy surface.
One of you shares a house with others in the program; you find yourself here at what feels like your first real party. You look around and know that finally, finally, you belong.
You’re excited but he doesn’t want to talk much about it. He’s always been uncomfortable with parties. You try to explain that even you didn’t feel much social anxiety—these are your friends, your new friends—and that this wasn’t some wild fraternity night of drinking and weed and regret. It was fun, it was different; just people from your program having a nice time together. He judges you, nonetheless, makes you feel somehow bad for having a good night. He’s still uncomfortable, and maybe this is because you’ve managed to have a fine time without him. He did do his best to stay up and make sure you got home safe, though.
You had thought that he would be where you felt you belonged, but you’ve found this spirit somewhere else, everywhere else. Later when he’ll ask to meet your new friends, you’re vague about some future meet-up.
You know it’s not going to happen, not anytime soon, and you don’t distract yourself from contemplating why.You become a barista at a bookshop to fund your schooling, and the pacing, the hard work, the early hours, even the customer interaction fuels you to excel. It’s weeks in and you’re making yet another caramel macchiato—almond milk, extra caramel drizzle—and you watch a couple waiting in line. She’s teasing him about what kind of Frappuccino he’s getting, and he kisses the top of her head before paying for both of their drinks. Once they’ve gotten their drinks, he lets her eat the extra whipped cream off the top of his Frappuccino. He’s got his hand on her knee and he’s laughing, she’s smiling, they’re happy.
You realize then that—though he’s not far away, thanks to your Google Maps savviness back when you were choosing a neighborhood to live in—he’s never come to see you at work. You wonder what the two of you look like when you go out like this couple; do you look happy?
Are you happy?
You remember once when he took you to a crowded salad shop even though you had a headache, weren’t in the mood, and then whined that you weren’t even acting like you wanted him to be there. Maybe you didn’t.
He’s hurt me, you think to yourself while you toast someone’s bagel. Since things started going south around your graduation, and then after, and then after that, he’s hurt you, even though you haven’t realized how much.
You don’t sit in the employees only area during your break and make small talk with your café assistant manager, your phone silent and tucked away in your locker. You call him and tell him what’s on your mind.You go on dates, and there are some good moments, there are. You love(d) him, and there has to be a reason. Instead of seeing you at work he’ll see you at this smorgasbord of heres, and that’s just as good. There’s Giselle and some walks and a screening of Hamlet and some dinners. After, you study yourself in the pictures you take together and scrutinize each part of your face. What are you showing, what are you telling? There’s still reruns of Seinfeld and movie nights where he plunks his upper body down in your lap. You play with his hair and trace his face and wish you’d get a turn, just once. He drags you to the top of one tall building after the other. You stand at these high points and squint your eyes at the view, the ground, the specks of people bustling about their little lives. What do you think of them? If you traded places with someone else and they hovered above you, what would they think of you?
Sometimes the wind makes you smile. Sometimes the wind is greedy and biting, and you close your eyes. Sometimes you wonder at the largeness before you. Sometimes you imagine what it would feel like to give in to that morbid human instinct, to run, to jump, flailing through the air as you hurled yourself off the top of the building, the precipice.
You don’t study every detail, every thought, with excruciating thoroughness. You don’t remind yourself that love brought you here, and love conquers all. You acknowledge how you feel and what you want much, much quicker.You lay out your feelings like a line of dominoes: you’re hurt, sad, angry at how indifferent, uncaring, nonchalant he’s been throughout everything. It’s been hard to move past what has happened, what has still been happening.
He tells you that you make him feel guilty (shouldn’t he?).
Why aren’t you happy? he asks, even though you’ve told him what he’s done to you and how the transition from your family and from your home to graduate school and to here has not been easy.
Why aren’t you happy, and easy and fun to be around, like you used to be? he asks, as if the domestic dissonance in Boston is your fault. He glimpses your face and the old you on the staircase of your apartment building before you harden up at the door when you greet him, he says. He wants that version of you again.
Besides, he says, he’s been busy, busy thinking about his own future and his own next steps. He’ll be applying to graduate school himself for next year, soon, and he tells you that he’s finally trying to come up with his own plan, after you’ve asked him to do so and talk to you about it since you first got together.
Ah, you think, this is finally an offering of a truce, a fix. The start to a remodel, a rebuild.
He says he only wants to apply to the best schools, the places he’ll be able to get a lot out of and still get to travel. He’s always been about travel—you think of the times you should have asked if he ever considered spending a holiday, a school break, with you instead. Or taking a trip with you, instead.
His list, though small, contains only one school in Boston.
You stare at him as he shrugs, gesturing around as he speaks to his career, his plans, his need to still travel, have fun, do as he pleases. I’m not ready to give up this mentality, he says.
You see for a second your whole future together spread before you, one where you’re not a priority. This will be your whole life.
You understand he has never once thought about anything with a team perspective, thought of the two of you as a team. Thought of your opinion on any of these decisions and choices. He has never once, you’re convinced, thought about you when making any kind of plans. His world is from a first-person, I Me Mine, POV, and he’s just living in it.
You’ve always liked that last album from The Beatles, but this is a world you know you should slip out of. You admit this, take action.You have the same fight, the same conversation, between dates that are mimicries of normalcy. You each state the same side in different words—a master Thesaurus—and you’re getting nowhere. He wants to brush the issues away, confident that the two of you will figure it out. There’s still a future, there, after he does everything he wants.
You don’t allow the cycle, the selfishness, to continue; you tell him instead that what you have figured out is that you want out, the shattering of your already wobbly domino tower. You relish the sound of the destruction, the dominoes crashing to the floor.At the park lining the Esplanade, you sit next to him on a bench that makes you think of the one in Michigan long ago and the first whispered love. You knot pieces of grass to give your hands something to do. You rub the grass between your fingers, the scent sharp and earthy.
I just want you to want to be with me, where I am, you say. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
You remember your parents’ stuffed car making its way to Boston, and you cannot believe that he wants to leave here as soon as you got here. He still doesn’t see any error or problem in this. My program will just be two years, he says for the hundredth time, it’s not a big deal for you to just wait.
That day is the same as the others, but it also is not. As clear as the sun on your tilted up face, you know that you won’t, no longer want to, wait for him.
You can’t support him and his plans if it hurts you to do so.
You don’t keep this to yourself, take it back. You say it, then again, your voice strong and nestled under the sun with the blades of grass.You can only take so much. You like to sit on the fire escape at night and look at this city’s version of the stars: the glowing Sheraton hotel sign, the blinking of late-night headlights, phone screens winking close from people going out together. It’s been almost two months since your arrival here, and you try to take this time like a lump of clay and shape it into something understandable, recognizable.
You remember all the worries you had coming here—would you like school, would you find a job, would you be able to integrate into Boston, would you make friends. And with them all, the one sure thing: him. How funny that the sureness was flipped on its head.
It’s been a little over a year and a half with him. You don’t decide to keep trying, keep going, for the sake of renovating sureness. You don’t whisper to yourself, what if he does stay in Boston? What if everything turns out all right?The autumn is not dry or hot as the desert the camel wanders, but your final straw comes anyway. You smooth down your new dress and prepare for a night at the opera—you hate the opera, all that noise and exploding emotion, but he loves it. He waits until you’re standing outside the theatre together before he tells you he’s applying for three international graduate programs. Hong Kong, Dublin, London. As far from Boston as he can get.
It’s more of a slip-up then a planned telling, you can see that in his face. He didn’t even mean to tell you, then. He’s been planning these applications since last spring.
He looks forward to your unconditional and unwavering support, of course.
Besides, he says, he might not even get into these programs. He might still stay here if he has to. But you want to go, you say back, voice small. And you applied, and if you get in, you’ll go. He shrugs, takes your hand.
You don’t sit, numb, through Pagliacci, the sad clown, while he obnoxiously conducts along. You don’t applaud along with the others. You don’t wait for the fall of the curtain, as the curtain has already been drawn.You don’t love him. You haven’t in a while. You can admit this to yourself now while you shimmy out of your dress and stare at your shivering body in the full length mirror.
You admit this to him, too.Somewhere there’s a paper doll house with a handle like the one you had as a child. And there’s two paper dolls in there with little paper doll children and a little paper dog who do everything you planned to do with him. Buy an apartment together the next year while you both finished school in the same city, find your place in the world, start a family. And those two paper dolls live out their little paper lives like you thought the two of you would have.
You leave the dolls and promises stuffed in the mailbox at his dormitory, crumpled and torn.Another Halloween, and you tell him to meet you after you close up at work. He watches through the locked windows as you mop the floor. He walks you to his dormitory and you feed him with words he’s not listening to while you break up with him. He still thinks you’re in the wrong, that he is immaculate. You can’t make him see what’s staring him in the face; you give up.
You wish you said more, hurt him more.
You’ll be alright. You know this is true.
You leave him, you leave him.
And soon you’ll forget the smell of his hair, the map of his face, the feel of his heartbeat under your palm, all those little memorized details, him, shedding away like a lizard’s skin. Soon, you’ll be free.
It’s raining on your way back to your apartment, and you tilt your face up, feel the raindrops dampen your cheeks and your hair.
You don’t blame yourself.______
ABBY PROVENZANO IS AN MFA CANDIDATE IN CREATIVE WRITING-FICTION AT EMERSON COLLEGE. SHE IS THE FICTION EDITOR OF REDIVIDER, A WRITER/CONTRIBUTOR AT INTERLOCUTOR MAGAZINE, AN EDITORIAL INTERN AT ART + DECO AGENCY, AND AN AFFILIATED FACULTY MEMBER/INSTRUCTOR IN THE WRITING STUDIES PROGRAM AT EMERSON COLLEGE. HER WORK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN BLIND CORNER LITERARY MAGAZINE, THE FOUNDATIONALIST, THE MICHIGAN DAILY, BLUEPRINT LITERARY MAGAZINE, AND RUNESTONE JOURNAL, AMONG OTHERS.