With that witty one-liner, I show myself out, teetering alone back to Marlow House. Forgetting how cars drive on the left, I look the wrong way as I’m crossing Upper Street, and a moped whizzes by, too close for comfort.
Marlow House looks haunted tonight, all dark and shadowy, secondhand light from lampposts flickering across the old-fashioned window panes in eerie patterns, like ghosts. Rather than scaring me, it almost comforts me in a pity-party sort of way. Sharing my place with spirits would mean I’m not so alone.
Back inside my flat, I strip down to my underwear. I’d donned my sexiest lace thong for the big moment of Meeting My True Love, but now I swap it out for my baggiest briefs and pull on my sweatpants that I call pajamas.
Wrapping a tartan blanket around me, I slouch on the sitting room sofa with a sleeve of McVitie’s dark chocolate biscuits in one hand and my pint in the other. I text my friend Blake, saying weneed to catch up, though I know she’s fast asleep back in New York. With my computer connected to the TV, I turn onMarried at First Sightso I can sink even deeper into my sulk.
The whole premise of the show now seems glaringly flawed and vapidly commercial, a ridiculously insincere profit-seeking scheme that manufactures fake love for money.
Willpower gone, I look up spoilers and read the gossip columns on my phone. The two couples I’d been so sure were going to live happily ever after have both broken up, and within three weeks of the show’s finale. One of those couples had apparently staged the whole thing to boost their social media followings, and the husband in the other couple was caught cheating with a teenage girl half his age, then tried to defend himself by saying it wasn’t his fault, that humans just aren’t genetically wired for monogamy.
For a moment, this all makes me feel a bit better, like I’m not alone in my woes. But then the full weight of the other couples’ breakups presses into me, and I become entirely inconsolable, convinced that love is officially dead forever and ever. If Hollie and George from the show can’t survive, despite how lovingly they stared into each other’s eyes at the altar and cried like babies on each other’s shoulders when they opened up about their parents’ divorces, what hope do I possibly have at finding love and actually making it last?
I might as well just give up now. Adopt a few cats and embrace the spinster life. HaveLove Losertattooed on my forehead and monetize my misery by going viral on TikTok as “that comically sad cat lady.” Then I’ll use the profits to buy a vacation home on some tropical island where no one can find me, except tanned and toned gardeners I’ll admire as I lounge by the pool but will never actually speak to lest I break the illusion once more.
These are the highly rational thoughts looping through my brain as I hastily brush my teeth, then plop into bed. I pull the duvet up to my chin and seal myself in, safe in an envelope of a love letter that Alexander will never read because Alexander doesn’t exist.
Wiggling around from one side to the other and back again, I’m unable to get comfortable. I feel lonely because I’m tipsy, or maybe I’m just tipsy enough to admit that I feel lonely, that I have for a while now.
I miss Mateo. Or at least I miss havingsomeone. Someone whose arms I can fall into at the end of a long day. Someone who holds me close and tells me that he’s right there, that everything is going to be okay, no matter what work drama or deadline I’m stressed about.
This didn’t actually happen all that often, even when Iwaswith Mateo, because I was always traveling and networking andgrinding my way up, but hindsight makes our relationship look a bit warmer, a bit cozier, and in this moment I’m nostalgic for something that may or may not have ever existed in the first place.
I guess I never really confronted the breakup head-on. I distracted myself with work and then the move to London and the new case and the full pipeline of dating app suitors. And then when those guys let me down, I latched onto my double-decker prince, convinced that he was the panacea that would save me. Now, in the wake of the collapse, I’m flailing around in the vacuum that’s been left behind, oppressed by all the extra space.
I turn my phone off so I won’t fall into the trap of re-downloading the dating apps and binge-matching with fifty-two new people to make me feel wanted, all of whom I’ll promptly ghost tomorrow. And also so I won’t drunkenly reach back out to Mateo.
But even as the loneliness presses in and presses out, I don’t have any real desire to contact Mateo. I don’t consider asking for another chance. He wasn’t the right person for me. He never loved me deeply enough for me to feel confident building an entire life with him.
Maybe that’s because you never loved yourself deeply enough,the little voice in my head whispers.
I try to shut it out but can’t help but wonder if there’s some truth in it. If maybe someone can only love you as much as you love yourself. If maybe the reason I felt like Mateo didn’t know me was because I actually didn’t know myself. If maybe I’ve been trying so hard tobecomesomeone that I’ve lost touch with who Iam. And who I used to be and who I’ve always been.
The bedroom walls shift around me, mocking me with their movement when everything inside me feels so stuck. Aching to be held and aching to hold, I wrap my arms around my spare pillow and suffocate it with all the love that I have nowhere else to spill.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Maybe yesterday hadn’t really happened. Maybe it was one elaborate trick of the mind, a side effect of too much cumulative caffeine. It might’ve just been a bad practical joke played by the neurons in my brain, which have a very unfortunate sense of humor.
Sprawled in my Marlow House bathtub, I try to soothe myself, though I feel the truth in my brittle bones and burning muscles.
Without ever having done more than a few down dogs in my life, I decided to attend a two-hour yoga class to bring some calm and clarity. After the first few treacherous sequences, I sought refuge in child’s pose and stayed there until shavasana. “I salute your courage for showing up for yourself,” was what the impossibly lithe instructor said on the way out, bowing in a prayerful posture, probably just giving thanks that I didn’t kill myself and subject him to a lawsuit.
Now I’m nursing myself back to life from underneath the bathwater, which I periodically have to drain and refill to keep it hot.My fingers and toes have shriveled up, and my stomach growls ominously, unamused with the measly green juice I’ve been feeding it after my ill-fated yoga adventure.
Rain is pattering on the skylight of the bathroom. It’s not a cathartic downpour. The white-gray sky is just spitting haphazard droplets, like it can’t be bothered to put in much effort.
My breath is even shallower and choppier than it was before yoga. I reach for a cucumber tonic juice on the floor beside me—nearly capsizing the tub in the process—and put on a moisturizing face mask from Boots pharmacy because these are the things that are supposed to make you feel better.
While waiting for my forehead lines to be miraculously erased within fifteen minutes, as per the claims on the pastel packaging, I turn on my phone for the first time since yesterday, resigned to face the world again. The work emails flood in, along with only two measly WhatsApp messages. One is from Blake, saying, yes, we should definitely catch up soon, with an excess of exclamation points, but no suggestion of when. And then the second message is from a +44 UK number I don’t have saved.
Hi Kat! Rory here. Great meeting you yesterday! Fancy a coffee soon? (Practicing my British lingo!) Let me know what your calendar (oops, I mean “diary”) looks like. Weekends are pretty wide open for me.
The brightness of the message makes everything inside feel painfully dim, painfully dull. I sink farther down into the wobbly tub as the message confirms the ugly truth that all my grand Alexander hopes have gone up in the wispy smoke of a Michigan bonfire.
Finally extricating myself from the bath, I wrap myself in a towel and walk into the kitchen to stress eat some Shreddies. Then Iscreenshot Rory’s text and send it to Jules, with the emoji that looks to be in the most agony.
The lad is keen,Jules replies, after I’ve removed my face mask to find absolutely zero improvement. If anything, I’m now more wrinkled because I’m frowning about the false marketing promises and the way my pores feel clogged with slime.
