#9 Drawing Your Line

I pick you up in my rusty green Honda Civic on a hot Texas September day even though your oil company would pay for a car to drive you home from the airport.

Our home. Soon to be your home.

Within an hour of being with you, I tell you I’m moving out.

You look at me. This is not the reunion you imagined we’d have after your six weeks away working night shifts at a refinery.

You ask me why. I tell you I want space and I’m not sure this relationship is right for me.

I tell you that the fire has burned down but the coals are still there.

You try to understand.

You ask how long you think I’ll move out for.

I don’t know, I say.

You say it’s OK, if I need space, you understand, and the space is with you is there if I feel I want to come back after three or six months or so.

I’m getting a year lease, I say.

The next day we sit on the couch, the heavy one you had reupholstered when you bought this house. We sit at opposite ends facing each other, each of us with our back to an arm. You look at me. Smiling through pain.

You ask about why I want to leave.

You ask me what you can do for me.

I pause. Shake my head slightly. “Nothing,” I say.

You ask again.

Then I tell you the truth. “I slept with someone.”

You look at me with those gentle icy hazel eyes framed with long kind lashes.

“Were you drunk?” you ask softly and curiously.

“No,” I say.

“Why?” you ask, still softly.

“Because it made me feel alive,” I say.

“I don’t make you feel alive?” you ask, still softly. My eyes glance down as my lips press together curling inwards.

“Just once?” you ask.

“No,” I say.

We spend the next day apart. I come home in the evening and you’re on the phone with your mom. I spend time upstairs with my things. I’ve started packing.

I come downstairs later, sit with you on the couch.

You take my two hands in your two hands and tell me how much I mean to you and how much you want to fix things. “Baby, will you go to counseling with me?”

I say nothing, and shake my head.

You don’t want to fix things? You ask.

No, I don’t.

I spend that night in the spare room of a friend’s house a thirty-minute drive away.

The next day, one of your friends flies in, the first to arrive for a planned weekend of reunion revelry with college drinking buddies.

Days ahead of your arrival, I called him and warned him of my plan to part with you. It was my way of giving him a heads up to the situation he’d be flying into, damage control.

After he arrives, I’m pleased to tell both of you that my lease to my new apartment is ready for me to sign. For some reason I expect you to take that well.

The next day, the rest of your drinking buddies arrive. I insist on joining the weekend revelry, claiming them as my drinking buddies too, as we were all drinking together just less than two years ago, that’s how you and I got closer and eventually together.

You don’t say no, but your friends, learning what’s happened, are not happy to see me.

“You can’t do this to him,” they say.

I still don’t let you go for weeks.

My lease is signed but my move-in day is still two weeks away. I alternate between my friend’s spare room and the bed of the one who I said made me feel alive. Occasionally I come by yours in the afternoon, request a cup of coffee and your company while I pack boxes of my belongings.

I invite you to come running with me and two friends, and you do. Afterward, we squeeze in at a bench on the patio of a pub, me squeezed between you and our running buddy, my new bed buddy but you don’t know it’s him.

One night, I ask what you’re up to randomly and if I can join you at the pub with your friends. You don’t say no.

Another day I troll you on instant messenger where your ‘away’ message reads “Dim Sum!” and I ask why you’re at dim sum with your friends when you never went to dim sum with me during our three years together.

Another day my mom calls you and wonders why you decided not to join me and her on the overseas trip we planned for two months from now, the one for which you already paid your plane ticket.

Weeks later you and I take the trip we planned months ago to San Antonio where you signed up to run the marathon and I signed up for the half. You drive your Jaguar and pay for the hotel room, with two beds.

At dinner, you asked me where I was last night.

I name the name, the running buddy.

Is that why you left me? You ask.

I press my lips together pulling them inward.

For some reason that night you’re very irritable and kick the blankets in your bed and turn away from me. I sleep in the other one and we don’t say goodnight.

The next month, I take the overseas trip with my mom. I call you from there, I tell you I’m thinking of you, I wish you were there.

It’s January of the next year when I return to Texas and I let you know.

You invite me out for a glass of wine in a calm wine bar.

I walk in, you already have your pinot and a glass of water — special ‘no ice’ request — waiting for me. I have red wine. You order a pasta salad and charcuterie plate to share.

You tell the waitstaff it’s really good. I find it really bland.

The right pause comes, you look at me and say, “try not to call me.”

You explain, and still looking at me through this dim light, those hazel eyes gloss over with tears that soon seep out the corners of your eyes as the anguish causes knots in your forehead and your nostrils to adjust while you somehow keep speaking to me through steady lips, drawing your line.

—

Day 9 of “Don’t Break the Chain” — a master class with Cole Schafer.

Today’s prompt: write a short, 20-minute essay on a time you fucked up bad.

Don’t try to be good, just try to be honest. Those of us with an hour can use it.