“Okay, I guess. She seems stressed. We both are. I think it might help if we weren’t constantly winding each other up, but I don’t think she wants to have sex with me if I can’t commit to her.”
“Brendan,” my mom says, “you are committed to her.”
For a second I can’t speak. My voice comes out hoarse. “Am I?”
“You can’t bring yourself to see other people. You spend all your time with her. You’re in love with her. What piece of commitment are you missing?”
“The part where I can call it a relationship.The part where she can tell everyone we’re together.They’re important, those words.That sense of definition.”
Those words might not have meant much to Candace, ultimately. But they always have to me, and I hate the way my mind rebels against them now, no matter how much I want them with Su-Lin.
Mom is quiet for a minute. “Have you tried practicing saying the words when you’re alone?”
That’s exactly what my therapist would suggest, but I’m too scared. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. I feel things for Su-Lin that I never felt for Candace, and I was in that relationship for sixyears. “It doesn’t make any sense, but when I try to use the words, I freeze.”
“Do you know what it is that you’re scared of?”
I shiver. Mom’s being nice about it—she’s been listening to my illogical thought processes since I was first self-aware enough to describe them. She doesn’t judge me for them—but I judge myself.
“I’m scared of it ending,” I say. “The way it did with Candace.”
“Do you seriously think that Su-Lin is going to sleep with all your friends?”
As far as I know, Candace mostly slept with John, but I’m pretty sure there were others. “No, not that,” I say. “Just—even if she hadn’t done that, things were still bad between us.”
“And you think Su-Lin would treat you like that.”
“No.” It comes out angrier than I want it to. Even though I know Mom is just playing devil’s advocate to get me to see how irrational the fears are, I don’t like anyone suggesting things like that about Su-Lin. She would never say the kinds of hurtful things Candace did, just to make me feel worthless and dependent on her. Su-Lin would never toy with my emotions just because she could.
But that wasn’t the whole picture, either.
“Not everything that happened was Candace’s fault. It was her fault that it ended, but we were both to blame for how bad it was.”
Mom is quiet. She doesn’t believe this, because I’m her kid, and she always wants to think the best of me. But I’ve never fully told her how I was with Candace, how when she’d get bored or annoyed and stop talking to me, or start making noise about wanting to break up, I’d be obsessive about holding onto her.
“I know you want it to be all her fault,” I say. “But when things were bad, I used to fall apart, hard. I’d call her phone dozens of times, leave needy messages, drive by our friends’ houses to see if her car was there. I’ve got attachment issues, and I’m not good with relationships. And I don’t want to do that with Su-Lin.” When things got really bad, I used to threaten to kill myself. My therapist says I was never a suicide risk, because people who are at risk have plans, they have means, they know exactly how they’re going to do it, and I never did. But that means that I was being dramatic to manipulate her, which, yeah, she did to me plenty, too.
Mom’s right; Su-Lin isn’t like that.
But that doesn’t change that I’m an emotional train wreck, and I don’t want her anywhere near the tracks.
“Honey,” Mom says. And I know what she’s going to say. She’s going to tell me that it isn’t my fault, that this time will be different. But she doesn’t know that, and neither do I.
“It’s okay,” I say, before she can respond. “I’m working on it, and I’m going to figure it out.”
But all I can see is the anguished look on Su-Lin’s face when she knows she has to break up with me for her own stability and mental health, because I’m dissolving into a co-dependent puddle, and then I lose everything again and don’t know how I’m going to go on.
And this time, I don’t get to come out the other side of that storm knowing I’m better off without her, because she’sSu-Lin.This time, I would have to live with not only having lost the most wonderful woman in the world, but having donethatto her.
“You’ll figure it out,” Mom says. “I know you will.”
I believe her. But at this moment, I’m afraid what I’m going to figure out is that Su-Lin—like everyone else in the world—would be better off without me.
Eleven
Su-Lin
Ilove food trucks.This isn’t exactly a popular opinion in my family—Aunt Alice calls them “salmonella wagons,” and even my dad eyes them with skepticism. But I love their quirky uniqueness, their tendency to focus on making one thing really well, and especially their often hilarious, punny names, like I Dream of Weenie and Nacho Business.
