The triumph from the promotion only seems to be touching my skin, which has lost its initial goose bumps. My palpitating heart has returned to its normal pace, and it’s eerily comparable to that sinking feeling when a crush starts to wear off. When you’re compelled to see the other person for who they really are rather than who you wanted them to be.
Though I’m already dressed for the office, I trade out my pantsuit for joggers and decide to work from home in hopes that the existential dread will pass like a twenty-four-hour flu. As I sit down at my desk, my eyes automatically search for the 4 bus out the window, and I don’t stop them. I’m mature enough to be able to see Rory on a bus and not fracture into a thousand fragments.
He passes by right around seven forty-fiveAM, like always. He’s in his usual seat but doesn’t seem to be reading anything. My body tenses as I remember how relaxing his presence used to feel.
I want him to look up so he’ll see me and be reminded of the love he shoved away, but he keeps his eyes down. Too hastily, the bus leaves the St. Mary’s stop, and I’m left gripping Rory’s ghost, trying to let go of what I’m unable to hold onto as I repeat all the reasons that we’re not right together. How being with him would hinder my ambition and how I don’t want someone who doesn’t want me.
I’d like him to feel the pain of losing me, but I also don’t want him to hurt, and my generosity irks me. I’m at the stage in my healing where I’m seeing how this whole thing is his fault more than mine. I didn’t do anything wrong except make up a rom-com story about a guy I had a crush on, and what female on the planet hasn’t done something like that at some point in her life?
My head is packed but my heart is void as my emotions rattle around in the empty space where Rory used to fit like a mitten.
I feel an unwelcome urge to jump off my life path and onto his, or at least find a way for ours to intersect again. The C-suite track doesn’t feel as reliable as it used to. Part of me is starting to wonder if it was designed by a con artist or perhaps just a clueless buffoon.Maybe this is what Blake realized too, but she’s been reluctant to share her full epiphany in fear of dissuading my own ambition.
But even if I wanted to, I’m too far down the road to change directions or retrace my steps. And I certainly wouldn’t know how to do it without Rory. He was the only one who could encourage me to shift my priorities and excavate myself from the shrine of impressive résumés and C-suite status. And now that one person who could help has abandoned me.
Though I wonder, deep down in the places I don’t want to go but can’t stay away from, if maybe I can’t pin the blame on Rory for leaving me, not when I left myself long ago. Maybe I’ve been looking for the easy way out by having someone else come and save me when the truth is that it’s not up to him to show me the way back home. That’s on me.
No matter if it’s back in my hometown or on the other side of the world, I need to reclaim my life so I’m proud of the person I am right now, not the one I might be down the road. So that I’m living with purpose for today, not just promise for tomorrow. So that I’m making space for grace and joy and play instead of just grinding and gritting my teeth so I can get some shiny prize on the other side.
And I know it’s deeper than the job. The job is the symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. For so many years now, I’ve been looking for things to pour into so I don’t have to peer into myself.
Because that’s what I do. I throw myself into jobs the same way I throw myself into relationships. I build up the promotion and the proposal to be my savior, latching onto the promise that the perfect position or the perfect person will fulfill me.
When fullness can only overflow from what’s already within.
Shutting my laptop, I pour the hot water into a thermos, then add a teabag and a dollop of gelato on top just to feel a little closer to my kid self. Pulling on my squeaky wellies, I take the sweet tea with me as I head outside for a walk. My morning Zooms can wait. Right now, I have to meet myself.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I’m not sure what to do about my job-related doubts, so I don’t do anything about them. I keep schlepping to the office each morning and schlepping back at night, lulled by the routine and lifted by the fleeting highs that come from moving into my glass-walled office and depositing my first partner payslip.
I receive a partner plaque too, inscribed with my name. Though I judged how prominently Oliver displayed his trophies, I find myself polishing mine and putting it next to the window, so the sunlight catches it in the rare hours that the clouds peel away.
While swiveling in my fancy new office chair, I update my LinkedIn with my new title, and comments and congratulations come rolling in from old high school teachers and people I haven’t spoken to in years. Things like:Always knew you were going places! Keep making us proud.
It’s only when I start to question whether people back homeshouldbe proud of me that I realize how much I want them to be.Though my title has changed, my day-to-day work hasn’t, nor has the amount of power that I feel like I wield walking around the office. The seat at the partner table feels so anticlimactic that it makes me wonder again if it’s success at all or just something else that society has manufactured to replicate success so no one will probe into the real thing.
One night a couple weeks after the wedding, I pop by the King’s Head. Jules has texted me that they’re back from their honeymoon, and she’s keen to catch up.
Taking a seat on a barstool, I listen as she jabbers on about the exact shade of turquoise of the water in Mallorca and the wide-open days for sex and all-inclusive buffets and bars, followed by more sex.
“Reckon I was made for the retirement life,” Jules declares. She’s one of those people who doesn’t seem to tan, only burns, and her freckled face is bright pink and peeling, with cat-eye sunglasses lines giving a striking racoon effect. She seems proud to show off her fried complexion, as if it’s a souvenir from her honeymoon heaven. “But enough about me,” she goes on. “What I’d miss ’round ’ere?”
“Not much,” I say dryly. “I got promoted.”
Jules whistles through her teeth. “Bloody ’ell. Well done, babes,” she says, summoning two glasses of bubbly. “Why aren’t you more chuffed ’bout this?”
“It’s just … not really what I pictured so far,” I say as we clink glasses. “And Rory and I broke up,” I tack on, hoping to train my brain to make him an afterthought.
“What?”Jules says, eyes bugging out in horror. “You’re joshing me.”
I tell her everything, or mostly everything, except her role in the conversation at the wedding (it’s clear she doesn’t remember, and I don’t want to make her feel bad).
“I ruined it,” I lament, sipping very slowly on the champagne because I know by now how alcohol is inversely related to my healing. “I finally found real love, the kind you can build a life on, and I ruined it within a week.”
“You didn’t ruin it, babes,” Jules says. “If Rory can’t come around and see sense, then ’e doesn’t deserve you. That’s all there is to it.” She presents me with a basket of chips and a side of fried pickles, and it means a lot to me, how she’s taking my side even when I know how much she adores Rory.
“He’s talked himself out of it,” I say. “I’m sure of it. He’s so logical that he’s no doubt stacked up all the facts about why I’m not a suitable partner—that I’m too emotionally driven and have unrealistic expectations. Then add on the instability of where I’ll be living, and he can’t remember anymore why he ever thought he loved me at all.”
