There’s a fiddling of a door handle, and Jules bursts through the connector between our flats. “Can I borrow your Hoover, babes?” she says. “My earrings got sucked up in ours and broke it, and Nina’s been on about tidying up.” Flicking the lights on, Jules finds me in my (previously) peaceful trance. “Bloody ’ell,” she says. “You’re alright? ’Aving a seizer or summit?”
“I’m cultivating inner calmness and tranquility,” I tell her solemnly, reciting the verbiage from the essential oils label.
“What’s all this faff about?” she asks, looking around at the candles and oils, as if she’s walked in on some kind of blood-drinking cult.
I don’t want to tell Jules about the letter I wrote to Rory, but I do. The story leaks from me, and once it’s out, I’m glad I’ve unburdened myself. There are few surer ways of lightening your own load than by sharing it with another woman. Especially a woman like Jules, who’s guaranteed to side with me no matter what. Blake would too, but I haven’t filled her in yet. It would require too much backstory, and I’m not in the mood to have to explain.
“It was deffo the right thing to do, babes,” Jules declares confidently. She’s plopped down on the floor to sit next to me, backslouched against the sofa. “And it’s only been a few hours. Rory’s probably at the florist, loading up on roses so he can come stand outside Marlow House and toss stones at your window until you come out.”
“Zero chance,” I protest. “This isRorywe’re talking about.”
“Wouldn’t put it past ’im. The bloke knows you like that rubbish.”
But I don’t need or even want flowers or serenades or any grand gestures. Just the chime of a text or a buzz of the doorbell would do. But there’s nothing, only the static of my imagination as it formulates potential explanations, each one more dire than the prior, plus the rise and fall of Jules’s cockney accent as she tries to comfort me.
“Stop checking your dog and bone,” Jules says, plucking my phone out of my hand. “At least now you’ll get your clarity. Even if it does turn out that Rory’s a proper arse.”
“He’s not an arse,” I defend. “He’s just sensible enough not to get involved with a maniac like me.”
“You’re not a maniac,” Jules says. “An overachiever, maybe, but it’s all from the right place, innit?”
“Is it?” I question, turning inward to examine the root of my motives for my insatiable need to be the best.
“Dunno,” Jules admits candidly. “Just said that ter make you feel better.” She hands me a whiskey flask that she seems to have conjured from thin air. “This’ll help you forget all your barney rubble—trouble.”
“I’m not drinking tonight,” I decline. “I’m keeping my vessel clear.” I saw that phrase on a wellness Instagram account, and it seems to fit the occasion.
“Sounds like a load of shite to me,” Jules says, crinkling her pierced nose in disapproval. “But ’ave it your way.”
So she takes a second gulp of whiskey on my behalf and stays there a little while longer, listening to me hash and rehash how I shouldn’t have written that note, how it was a completely imprudent and irrational thing to do.
Jules takes the vacuum back to her flat, determined to clean before Nina gets home. I check my phone again. Still no word from Rory.
For the first time, I consider the possibility that he might never reply. He might ignore the message in the card to avoid the confrontation of an uncomfortable conversation. He might just ghost me, like the players I was sure he was so different from.
My judgment might be off with him, like it’s been off with so many people from my past, as I blindly saw their best and blocked out their worst.
Blowing out the candle, I smear more essential oils on my neck and turn on some mindless show to try to drown out the refrain that’s coursing through my brain. The refrain is something about how it couldn’t actually have been true love with Rory because true love is reciprocated, and this clearly wasn’t. I was just latching onto another counterfeit connection, fanning the flames of my fantasy until the fire burned my face and reminded me that I’m still farther than ever from my happily-ever-after-ride-off-together-into-the-sunset-as-the-credits-start-rolling moment.
By midday Saturday, I’ve accepted that I’m never going to hear from Rory again.
Or at least I’ve told myself that I need to accept it, which is the first step … well, perhaps the second; the first was eating an entirepint of gelato for the therapeutic value and also because I’m determined to reclaim gelato as something that’s justmine, not mine and Rory’s.
Anger starts to push out the humiliation and hurt, and I’m glad for this. It’s much more enjoyable to be angry than sad. Anger gives you permission to sling blame this way and that, all while vindicating yourself and assuming the role of the irreproachable, underappreciated heroine.
I’m whizzing through the stages of grief. Within no time, I’ll be back to normal. Though the thought doesn’t exactly cheer me up.Normalis a state before Rory.Normalis that vacant way of life where I elevate everything unimportant and de-prioritize the highest-value parts.Normalis backward.
Thoughts like these are entirely unhelpful, so I preoccupy myself with a long walk along Upper Street, all the way up to Highbury Fields, the largest park within walking distance. The dewy green acres are far off the tourist track, more serene than the always bustling Hyde Park, though it’s still too cluttered for my liking. Children hustle in youth soccer scrimmages, hovering parents coaching from the sidelines as off-leash dogs yap at seagulls and sparrows. The damp dirt paths that zigzag through the park are filled with an inordinate amount of hand-holding couples, and it feels highly insensitive for them to be parading their partnership so conspicuously.
I try to curl up into a hostile shell and repeat some feminist quote about how I don’t need a man. How I’m alone but not lonely, thank you very much. I try to scorn all the suckers who latch onto each other just because they’re too lazy to do the work and stand up on their own two feet.
But I can’t do that. The next couple I pass—arms looped together as they balance coffee thermoses and croissants, quietly giggling at some private joke I doubt anyone else would find funny—is too adorable for me to slash with my serrated cynicism. It’s not the in-your-face PDA sort of happiness. It’s the subtle kind of bliss that’s exceptional precisely because of how ordinary it is.
And in that moment, as the squally English wind scuffs against my face, I stop regretting how I put myself out there with Rory and start respecting it, even if it led me here, to a pain that’s tender even in its sharpness.
And though my mind keeps spiraling and my chest keeps clenching, there’s a certain stillness at my core. Not a lifeless stillness but a serene one. The type of stillness that comes when you know that you’ve done what you’re supposed to do, and regardless of the outcome, you wouldn’t take it back.
Because it was born from loving someone good, and when you lose someone good, your heart can be bruised and bent and dented, but it can never quite shatter because that person brought out the best in you, and the best is still there even when they’re not.
