Loved - A Novel Read online

  Eventually, he told me he had met someone. He didn’t expect it, he said. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he was just taking advantage of the opportunity to see someone else so that he could be sure that I was the one. He was seeing someone else. To be more sure. That I was the one.

  I knew it wasn’t right, but I had committed myself to this man and I didn’t know how to detach myself. I was trying to be sympathetic, understanding and courageous but I was sympathetic, understanding and courageous with our best interest in mind. Not my own. I couldn’t bear to think of myself that way. One single person. Without him.

  So I waited.

  I wrote to myself as if I was writing to Chad.

  I wish I could call you. You would sleepily say “Heeeey,” and I’d say, “Hi,” and you’d say “What’s wrong?” “I can’t sleep.” I woke up and I can’t stop thinking about you and my heart’s pounding too fast for me to fall back asleep. It’s like...You know how I tell you that you make my heart swell? Well, without you it’s too tiny and has to work extra hard to pump blood through my body. It’s been hammering away for an hour, and I feel so cold. I can’t stop shaking.

  I listened to Lori McKenna. “Well I never told you to love me, that’s your sort of greed.” I listened to Patty Griffin. “Let’s take a walk on the bridge, right over this mess.” I listened to everyone tell me it would be all right and I pretended to believe them. I listened to everyone but myself.

  In the past, knowing that Chase was still out there would have been a comfort to me. Maybe our paths would cross again. Maybe we were meant to be together and had just been apart for a while—for some greater purpose. But Chase wasn’t there anymore and the what-ifs began pouring in. What if I had fought harder for Chase when I had the chance? Would he still be here? Would we be together and happy and I wouldn’t be hurting and broken and sick and he wouldn’t be gone? If Chad wasn’t the one and Chase was gone, what would become of me?

  February, 2006.

  Sophie, Lacey and I began planning weekly girls’ nights. Sometimes it was hard for me to do anything but focus on holding back my tears for one evening, but on other nights the girls really helped me escape from my nightmare.

  One night, while on my way, Lacey called me from where we were supposed to be meeting.

  “Kim, I went in to the sushi place next door to use the bathroom and Chad is there. I just wanted you to know.”

  I had always hated their sushi.

  “Well, I’m a block away so I’m coming,” I said. “I doubt they’ll come over to the bar.”

  “Okay,” Lacey replied.

  When it came to break-ups, I generally thought ignorance was bliss, especially with how sick this was making me. I made it a life-saving point not to look on his Myspace page for fear of what I might or might not find. I didn’t want to know her name or anything about her. However, on this particular night, I had a moment of weakness.

  Lacey told me that they were visible through the window of the restaurant. She said that if I was absolutely sure that I wanted to see them, she would walk with me and show me where they were sitting. We walked towards the restaurant and then I stopped short. I stood there for a moment looking at the street. He didn’t love me anymore. He was on a date with another girl. He wasn’t mine. I wasn’t his. The thoughts were so strange. I knew that I needed to see it to believe it.

  “Okay, where?” I asked, turning towards the window.

  They were at the sushi bar and I could see the back of their heads. I saw his dark hair covered by a brown ball cap. I saw that he was wearing a shirt that I bought him.

  I saw her curly red ponytail.

  I swear it was the train that kept me alive those months. I would go to bed so early—beyond exhausted from working hard just to breathe in and out all day, from the effort that it took to get through one hour without dissolving into tears. I was in bed by eight o’clock, sometimes seven. I would lie in bed awake, feeling like I was on the ocean floor, waiting for sleep to wash over me like a wave. But the tide just wouldn’t take me.

  Alone in the silence, no longer having the distractions of work to do or the voices of loved ones on the phone pumping me with encouragement, I would be overtaken by hysteria and cry until I physically ached. Then, at 10:00pm, between whimpers, I would hear the train. In the cold darkness, my friend whistled, wanting so badly to be heard by anyone who would listen. The train was lonely too. I wasn’t alone. Only then, each night, did a wave of relief wash over me, bringing sleep at last.

  Still, come morning, my eyes would fly open at dawn, hot tears pouring from them. My heart would race faster than I believed was possible and the adrenaline would make me nauseous. Over and over again. I couldn’t understand how my heart could beat so fast if I was lying completely still and if I had been asleep just moments before. It was as if I was running from the hurt in my dreams. Trying to control my heart, I concentrated on each breath. In slowly. Out slowly. Still, I felt so sick that I would rush to the bathroom and dry heave into the toilet, saliva and tears falling into the waiting water. I never could get anything to come out of my empty stomach, as I was only able to eat every three days or so.

  Sophie, precious Sophie, never once made me feel at fault for being so sick. It had to be horrible for her to wake up every day to the sound of me in the bathroom. I felt so guilty that I never purposely woke her to talk or ask her to sit with me. I gave her as much silence and space as I could manage. If my distance would keep her kind, I would give her that.

  It was hard for me too, being able to see in her eyes that she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t recognize myself either, and that was difficult enough to bear. It wasn’t that loving Chad had changed me, it was losing him, and it changed me so completely that it was as if my entire DNA had been reconstructed.

  March, 2006.

  Finally, I went to a doctor. Emotionally, I had good days and bad days, but physically I was so ill that I was rapidly losing weight, unable to eat or sleep and still having panic attacks in the morning.

  “My boyfriend and I broke up or are on a break or something, so I thought I was just upset about that, but it’s been two months,” I told the doctor.

  The doctor ran heart tests, blood tests and asked me all kinds of questions about my many symptoms. I went from just being below my highest weight ever, 140 pounds, to less than 120 pounds in two months. It wasn’t that I was choosing not to eat, rather, it was that I was either flat out not hungry or I would be so sick in the mornings that anything I had eaten came back up. I was rail thin. Sophie called me a bobble-head because my head looked too big for my skin-and-bones body.

  The doctor called with the results. I had hyperthyroidism, he said, which accounted for the anxiety attacks, low appetite and high metabolism. He explained that my thyroid regulated all of these things and its over-activity from stress had me all out of whack. Instead of putting me on a medication to regulate the thyroid itself, the doctor put me on anti-anxiety medication. “Hyperthyroidism is common among divorced women,” he told me. “This kind of severe emotional stress can cause the thyroid to overwork.” If my anxiety levels are regulated, he said, my thyroid should fix itself.

  The Lexapro would take two weeks to work into my system, but little by little I started to function like a regular member of society again.

  Still, work was too much for me to handle. I couldn’t focus. I needed a change of environment where I wasn’t in a still, dim office all day, and where I could be around more people and be under less pressure. So I left a job that I loved and went back to work in retail.

  Chad was destroying me in every way possible.

  April, 2006.

  Chad was still hot and cold, telling me that I would be his wife one day or that he was “almost” ready to get back together, and then acting like I had made it up the next day. He was a stranger to me on the phone. We hadn’t even seen each other in person in months.

  Some nights he would tell me that he might stop by and surprise me.
I would sit up waiting, listening to every creek in the screen door, but there was never a knock.

  I made friends at the boutique where I was working and I would sometimes go out with them dancing or to local fashion shows. I excelled in sales, and despite my daily crying sessions in the stock room, my boss, Taryn, was patient with me.

  One of my customers was a guy who worked for Sony Records. He would come in to bring us CDs to play in the store and we would always end up chatting about music. His name was Ben Moren. I was surprised to learn that he was a year younger; he gave off an air of mature confidence. Ben was short and fair with dirty blonde hair and beard, and freckled arms. One day he brought me a copy of a live Counting Crows CD that I didn’t have yet. I must have mentioned that they were my favorite band. I gave him my phone number even though I knew I wasn’t ready.

  Chad was still seeing the girl. That’s what I called her, the girl. Dripping with disgust, to him, to my parents and to my friends, I would call her, the girl. One day, she wandered into the store, probably by mistake, and I had to excuse myself to the back room. She must have seen me because it wasn’t long before she left. Chad told me once that she was afraid of me because she knew how much he loved me. He told me that we were actually very much alike. I liked that she was afraid. I refused to believe that we were alike.

  One night I was out for pizza with a friend, waiting for a table. Chad and the girl walked in and spotted me, looking suddenly unsure of their next move. It was too late for us to ignore each other. Chad shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, we’ll leave.” I was too upset to stay so my friend and I left also. I was driving home when Chad called.

  I answered.

  “I’m so sorry about that! Listen, she’s crazy and jealous and she told me she never wanted to fucking see me again and I’m relieved. I’m going back to meet up with some friends. Will you come? It’s over with her and I want you. She’s so crazy.”

  I went. We kissed and laughed, and there was magic in the air. This is what I had been waiting for. Even his friends kept telling me how glad they were that we were back together; they didn’t like her much at all. Knowing that I didn’t want to know her name, they used a code name, Jay, whenever they talked about her.

  The next morning, Chad and I were on the phone talking sweetly to each other when there was a knock at the door. I had on a t-shirt with a hole in the armpit. I hadn’t brushed my teeth or put in my contacts but there he was and it was exactly like I’d hoped. He took me to lunch and he kissed me goodbye. He said that he felt like he was coming home.

  Then things went right back to the way they were, hot and cold. Four calls in one day then four days without a call. A week went by, then two.

  I took myself to a museum to see an exhibit of French impressionist paintings: Van Gogh, Renoir and Monet. My favorites were a LaTour and one called “Wildflowers” by Redon. I went to the movies, where I ate peanut M&Ms and checked my phone a few times even though I’d promised myself I’d turn it off. I watched Law and Order. I wrote—wrote all the things that I couldn’t say to him. I wrote about how much I believed in us. I wrote about how much I trusted God. I wrote that I was praying for him. I wrote down all the jokes that I could remember, which weren’t many.

  I met a guy at work who was very attractive and my type: tall, dark-haired, stylish and most likely a musician. He had fingernails painted black and he kept smiling at me. He exuded confidence in the way he slipped into different jackets and checked himself out in the mirror. The way he tried on a hat, I could tell he didn’t need me to tell him that it looked great on him. He wasn’t cocky, just confident. He asked me to put the hat on hold and told me that his name was Quinn. It was so good that I had to repeat it. He turned to ask me my name before walking out the door.

  I wrote my phone number on the hold tag with the hat. He had mentioned that he was from Vancouver so I knew that while proving to myself that I wasn’t living for Chad anymore, I was still safe from stepping into a situation that would require me to move on. There was no way I would actually begin to date Quinn.

  I loved the idea of this guy, though. We would have long talks on the phone about cities that he had visited, and we would be very open and very deep, sharing with each other our passions and our dreams. Perhaps he would write me song lyrics and email them to me. We’d get trapped in each other’s minds. Chad and I would get trapped in one of our apartments together, but we were never in each other’s minds that way.

  Is that really true? I wondered after the new thought crossed my mind. Were we not perfect for each other after all?

  Was I starting to let go?

  May, 2006.

  I began dreaming of fighting with Chad every night, and the dreams began to include other girls. My nights were filled with hatred. My days were heavy with his phone calls, or the lack of phone calls—heavy either way. I was a yo-yo, just a little toy in his hands. I never knew anyone could make me hurt that much, but I didn’t know what to do about it. If I was to walk away, then I surely wouldn’t have him and wasn’t that worse?

  I lay in bed practicing my “I can’t do this anymore” speech for several weeks before one night something clicked. I realized that I had gotten it right and I was going to have to use it. I sobbed. I prayed, “Please, God, no. Tell me I don’t have to do this!” but all I felt was confirmation.

  I told Chad that I couldn’t wait any longer. I had been his girlfriend in my heart for four months, and he hadn’t been my boyfriend in his heart. I was much more invested than he was and the inconsistencies were too hard on me.

  He said, “You’re right, it isn’t fair to you,” and we got off the phone.

  I couldn’t believe it was that easy for him, but I felt a kind of bittersweet relief. Then, a few hours later, he texted me and accused me of seeing someone else.

  Maybe I wasn’t the yo-yo.

  He would text me and I would ignore him. He sent videos of himself playing guitar. He sent “I love you so much” messages—anything to get me to finally answer him. Then, he’d say triumphantly, “you replied!” It was a game to him. I reminded him that “anything shy of being my boyfriend wasn’t enough for me.”

  “I need a yes or no,” I said, “and I need it yesterday.” I went on trying to ignore him.

  It got worse. The last week of May, Chad was still flirting with me by text on Sunday. Monday, he said he still loved me to which I didn’t reply. Wednesday, he got a girlfriend. Thursday, I found out and all hell broke loose. I was so confused. I fought for this relationship so hard, but the person he had become was not someone I wanted to be with. I knew that person could never be my boyfriend, my husband or the one. It was time to let go.

  I wasn’t surprised when I heard that he had started dating the girl again, even though he’d said she was crazy. I’ll show you crazy, I thought. I drove over to his apartment late at night in a raging thunderstorm and pounded on his window until he came to the door. When he stepped out and stood in the rain instead of inviting me in, I knew she was in there. The girl. “Jay.”

  The red ponytail had taken my place.

  “You like her more than me.” I said to myself more than to him.

  “I can’t compare. This is just what I need right now. My family likes her, and...”

  I interrupted, “I need you to say it to me. Tell me you like her more than me.”

  “But I...”

  “Say it!”

  “I like her more than you.”

  “Do not ever call me again,” I whispered. “Not. Ever!”

  I didn’t wait for a response; I had heard everything I needed to hear.

  I was dripping with rain and ecstatic with relief. I still needed to heal but at least that process could finally begin.

  July, 2006.

  That summer, I was coming out of the gloom of my anxiety and heartbreak but was still a walking open wound. Now that Chad wasn’t in my daily life and I was supposed to be “moving on,” it was no longer acceptable for me to ex
cuse myself from the sales floor at work to cry or talk to friends for hours about myself, my feelings and my theories. So I pretended that I was moving on; maybe if I pretended hard enough, it would happen. At the very least, pretending would help me hold on to my friends and prevent me from being locked in the psych ward.

  Pretending was easy when I wasn’t coherent. I would go out with my work friends and drink until I blacked out, baffled at how I got home safely every time. I would sleep it off, get up in the morning and smile through another day.

  I am ready, I am fine. I am fine.

  I was still too thin from having been so sick, but now I could wear flat boots with shorts and silk racerback tanks that were just a little too loose for me. I thought that I looked like a 60’s icon. I would dance until three a.m. and I wouldn’t wash off my makeup. I would just add a little more to it the next morning. Yesterday’s eyeliner always looks better, anyway.

  Objects in mirror are more fucked up than they appear.

  I met someone. Ok, truth be told, I met lots of someones. There was Sam, shockingly attractive, who stopped me one night outside The Red Door. I was leaving the bar unusually early, but he convinced me to come back in with him. It wasn’t a hard sell—it was his birthday, after all. He was from Ohio and he was visiting some friends in town. I caught a glimpse of his ID as he ordered our Yaegerbombs. His birthday was actually in March but we celebrated anyway.

  Then, there was that one guy from the dance party at Ombi Bar. I have a picture with him. Oh, what was his name? I think he had an accent. I don’t even remember taking the picture, though my eyes are focused properly and I look completely lucid. It’s a great skill to have—to take sober-looking pictures when you’re anything but.