The Two Of Us — We Just End And End And End Again

Every morning, I wake up and take a pill to make my heart beat slower. My doctor prescribed it to me under strong recommendation that I don’t forget to take it, but I always do.

In the afternoons a truck drives by and drops off big boxes for my neighbor. I wonder what’s in them. Packages come for me too, but it’s mostly vintage dresses. I buy them on Sunday nights when I feel lonesome, which lately has become every Sunday night. I always say that if I could have a man only on Sundays, I would be happy. He’d cuddle with me and eat some eggs and then leave me alone the rest of the week.

In my building, they’ve changed the locks. The keys I gave you don’t work anymore.

We sit opposite each other for hours at the old restaurant we always used to go to and crack mussels and dip our bread into the broth like normal people and then suddenly it all goes off the rails in just a few sentences and I walk home in the dark crying. I text him and tell him that, and I thank him for the ab workout. That was not my first bad decision.

My inhabitable body, his constant crisis.

“We just have bad timing,” he says to placate me. I want to spit in his beer. I hate him so much in that moment. I swore I’d never let him fuck with my heart again, but here we are.

The two of us – we just end and end and end again. I guess we like the sound of a book slamming shut, a door closing, a chapter ending. We like it so much we do it again and again. We say we’re done, and then we kiss and fuck and start the story again. The most beautiful and terrifying sound in the world is a car crash.

An unhappy beginning, I said to him once. We’ll always be that unhappy beginning now.

Sometimes when I’m sad I read the comments on “Humans of New York” and then I feel better. Everyone is so nice there.

My friend Jennifer is cleaning her garage. She drags out three huge wool Turkish rugs, the really expensive kind, and says they’ve been eaten by moths from the basement. She doesn’t want them, even though there are just a few spots where moths have made their mark. The rugs are extravagant gifts from an ex-boyfriend. We spend an hour cleaning them and spraying them with noxious chemicals disguised with a cedar scent, spread them out on the driveway to bake in the sun. It’s a silly project, I know, but it’s something to do with my hands, to divert my attention from catastrophe.

I don’t know why I am so eager to accept these tokens of her failed relationship and bring them into my own home, but I am. I think they look elegant a little bit torn up. That’s how I feel – a little bit torn up. And the worst part is that it’s my own fault.