By the time my phone beeps at 10:00 p.m., I know.
Will is the hole, the puncture, the piece of glass. Something I have done has perforated us like a broken bottle.
All good! Shame you missed it!
Chewing my fingers, I stare at my phone.
No kiss. No missing me. No mention of dinner tomorrow night.
So what do I do now? I can’t really undo anything just yet, because I’m not sure exactly where the mistake was made in the first place. What point would I aim for? Our first date? Second date? Yesterday? I can’t do anything differently yesterday, because it’ll land me in the same predicament again. If I go back to the beginning and start again, everything else I’ve done will be simultaneously unwound. My life might get even worse. I may get stuck. I may get chucked out of time and find myself unable to get back on, like a hamster from a spinning wheel.
Also, I just don’t know if I have the energy to start this all over again.
Call me lazy, but time travel is absolutely exhausting.
Instead, I try to fix the situation with Will like a regular, chronologically inhibited human:
Next time, I hope! How about lunch
tomorrow? X
There’s a long pause.
Far too long, frankly: Will obviously had his phone directly in his hand thirty seconds ago.
Wish I could! But work right now is mad.
:(
I’ve long had the suspicion that being “too busy” means people are just too busy for you, specifically, but this is the first time I’ve ever had hard evidence.
Things were going so well. Which means that there’s a point where things broke between us again, and I just need to work out exactly what and when it was so I can go back and fix it.
Unless...
(“Cassandra tends to overthink everything.”)
Unless I’m just reading things wrong again.
(“Cassandra can be neurotic and obsessive.”)
Unless I’m taking all the clues and piecing them together incorrectly, like a jigsaw rammed together by an impatient child: a nose where an eye should be, a tail on a forehead, a table in the sky. It doesn’t make sense because it’s not supposed to. I’m forcing a connection where there shouldn’t be one; building a picture that isn’t on the front of the box, and then wondering why it doesn’t look right.
Not everyone is like me: that much is painfully clear.
Not everyone places this much emphasis on a four-month relationship, or has no idea how to make a relationship go further than that. Not everyone hits thirty-one years old and has zero serious romantic experience. Not everyone finds love confusing and surreal: mythical and unreachable, like a story told a long time ago about other people.
Not everyone obsesses, analyzes, struggles to let go and move on.
Not everyone holds on to every single social interaction with their fingertips in terror, as if dangling off a cliff edge.
Maybe Will is just busy. He is a real adult with a real, grown-up life—with friends and a family and a job and hobbies and a part-time dog, apparently—whereas I am simply masquerading as one, like one of those spiders who holds its legs up so it looks like an ant and hopes nobody will notice.
There’s a noise—a squeak outside my bedroom, like a mouse opening a door—so I instinctively freeze, phone held in the air.
When it doesn’t happen again, I go back to scrambling:
What are you working on? Competing with another polar bear? ;) x
A beep:
Ha, how did you know about the polar bear?!
Fuck.
You mentioned it at the pub! How about dinner on Friday? x
Now I’m gaslighting the poor bastard on top of everything else and I’m a horrible, selfish person who deserves nothing but Ha texts and solo microwaved chili for the rest of my solitary life.
There’s another squeak outside, and I stiffen.
Beep.
OK! That sounds good! Shall I come to you? Brixton, right? x
And there we have it: I am a neurotic mess. I guess this is what happens when you live with a brain that treats every second of existence as if there’s been an urgent crime that needs to be solved immediately.
Relaxing considerably, I type:
Yes! Brixton! Friday! Can’t wait! x
Then I cautiously climb out of bed. Time to face the squeaking. If that noise is a lurking and drunk Derek again, I swear to God I will do things with my golden peacock that Hera would be appalled at.
“Hello?” I grab my dressing gown and open my door. “What do you—”
The hallway is empty.
With a growing sense of trepidation, I venture nervously into the corridor and pause with my head cocked like a spaniel. The squeak happens again, three times now, so I quietly trace it to Derek and Sal’s bedroom on the other side of the house and promptly decide to leave it alone: it’s almost definitely a weird sex thing, no need for further action.
I’m just creeping away when it happens again and I abruptly recognize it as crying. Now I can feel a dark blue-gray seeping out from under the door. And I’m ashamed to say my immediate reaction is no, thank you. No to crying. No to other people’s strong emotions. They’re too sticky, too dense. They fill me with too many colors until it feels like I’m drowning and I can’t sense any of my own.
But the crying gets louder and something tugs through the middle of me: I step back and knock on the door.
“Hello? Sal? And-stroke-or Derek? Are you okay?”
There’s a short silence—please don’t be Derek, please don’t be Derek, please don’t be—and Sal opens the door, beautiful but puffy-eyed. “Did I wake you up?” She sniffs and gets back into an otherwise empty bed. “Sorry. I’ll try to be quote, unquote ‘worryingly unstable’ with a little bit less volume next time.”
Hesitating in the doorway, I attempt to work out the socially correct next move. I’m guessing society dictates that this is the point where I’m supposed to see her pain, sweep forward, wrap my arms around her and tell her everything is going to be okay, but I don’t think I can physically do it.
(“Cassandra lacks empathy.”)
“You’re sad,” I guess tentatively.
“I am sad,” Sal laughs with a liquidy snort into her wrist. “A bit. But mostly I’m furious and I’m going to have to do something with it. I’ve lined up things that aren’t mine to break, just in case.”
Sal points at a selection of aftershaves, electronic equipment and a bewildering quantity of hair products, all of which are clearly Derek’s. I feel a little jealous. It must be lovely to know exactly how you feel at any given moment.
“Is this about Derek?” I venture in a step. “Are you...fighting?”
“Come in properly, Cassie.” Sal taps the bed next to her. “Don’t just hover in the doorway.” Then her face crumples and she starts crying again. “Are we fighting? I don’t even know. I’m certainly fighting. I don’t know if he is. Derek just seems to think I’m constantly overreacting, and I worry he’s right.”
I hesitate, starting to feel incredibly anxious.
This is perilously close to what happened the first time round. They started arguing a lot, and when I finally accused Derek of hitting on me, he denied it, and somehow—I’m still uncertain how—the entire situation became my fault. One wrong move and it’s going to blow up again. I just don’t know what the right move is, because I still can’t read the situation. What is going on? Is Derek hitting on me? Is he flirting, or being friendly? Is it inappropriate or am I overreacting? Are my social skills lacking again, or are his? How can I tell? And what would I even say to Salini? Your boyfriend has categorically told me he’s not interested in me because he loves you? I’m no lawyer, but that doesn’t seem like solid evidence against him.
Sal is still crying and I don’t know what to do to make her feel better, but I desperately want to at least try.
I tentatively put a rigid finger on her shoulder.
“I’m thirty this year,” Sal offers without prompting. “I’m nearly thirty, Cassie, and I live in a house my dad pays for, with no career and a boyfriend who keeps reluctantly telling me he’s in it for ‘the long haul’ as if our life together is a battered cross-country lorry. I can’t cook. I can’t massage. I was thinking of maybe starting up a YouTube channel, but—”
“Don’t,” I say quickly, thinking of the lipstick video. “Bad idea.”
“You’re right, obviously.” She starts crying again. “What the fuck is wrong with me? Honestly, I thought I’d know what I was doing with my life by my thirties, but I don’t have a single clue. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I don’t want. I don’t know what’s supposed to make me happy. In the meantime, the rest of the world seems to be just getting on with it. I look online and everyone I’ve ever met is having babies and getting engaged and getting promoted and buying a new kitchen. It feels like literally everyone I know is moving forward.”
“I’m not,” I offer helpfully. “I’m just going round and round.”
She laughs. “It feels like that sometimes, right?”