force majeure

I’m not sorry I’m a hurricane. Not sorry that I took two edibles and left my purse in my Lyft. Not sorry for making plans every night of the week, for cooking and being loath to wash the dishes after, for hiring someone to clean my apartment, for flirting with strangers at bars.   

I don’t want to hurt you by saying any of this outloud but you were never comfortable with the gaze of people you perceived to be strangers on any part of me. And my friends are in my head telling me it’s not my job to protect your feelings from my feelings but there was a time when I put my protagonism ahead of yours and you guilted me into dropping a quarter in that emotional swear jar every single day of our relationship. I shielded you from me for so long that I lost myself. 

After we broke up you apologized to me for doing just enough good things that I was able to look past all the bad ones. We had a lot of tough conversations over the years but that might have been the one that cut me the deepest. Even after you, I find myself granting chances that were never earned because I can’t bring myself to give up on people. 

I could write millions of words for men who meant less but made me feel like they understood me more. I loved the house you built in my head and you loved the idea of me who lived there. Now I allow myself to love the apartment I bought for myself and the me that lives here. I don’t need to make mental space on my walls for your art that I hated. My brother helps me hang the posters I bought on the birthday trip I took to Mexico City with my friends that I started planning when we were together knowing that even if we were together you wouldn’t want to go. I talk to my therapist about if I’ll ever find someone who loves me more than the idea of me and she says that the universe gives you back the energy that you put out. 

My friends tell me that they’re impressed with how well I handled the whimper of our breakup. I don’t tell them it’s because as soon as you were gone so was the me who bought into our relationship. I don’t tell them that I walk through the places I went with you and fail to recognize our ghosts.

Towards the end, you asked me if we would have still been together if not for COVID and I told you yes of course this was always what I wanted. You asked me to answer honestly then. I still can’t answer honestly now. 

What I do know is this: I’ve never felt emotionally safer than I did that first night in Paris, when I fell asleep in your arms fully clothed and woke up with the metallic taste in my mouth, drunk on timezone changes and the howl of the November wind outside our window. When we spent 40 euro on a single truffle ravioli and declared it the best thing we’d ever tasted. When you booked two trips to Versailles so it didn’t matter that I needed to sleep in and oversleep the first one. 

You wiped away my tears when I woke up from my second egg retrieval. You made me delicious breakfasts and Saturday morning was my favorite time until you stopped cooking eggs. You were and maybe still are kind and generous and prideful and insecure and thoughtful and stubborn and withholding and funny and genuine. 

I get drinks with your cousin in Paris and she asks me how I feel about the breakup and I say that I think you’re a great person but we’re not right for each other. This feels mostly true. I don’t usually talk badly about you anywhere other than with my therapist or with my friends or within my own head while I’m walking through Fort Greene on a gray day listening to the playlist I made myself after we broke up. I can’t bring myself to hate you and I won’t let anyone else hate you either. 

But the truth is that I don’t know if we would have been together if not for COVID, and I think I lied and I think you knew I was lying. I loved you and you loved me but you also sort of hated me and I sort of hated you for it. So here’s my best answer, two years later: I have never wanted more for myself than to be perceived as a force of nature.