I leaned back in my chair and looked around my old room. It was exactly the same as it had been when I moved out to start my apprenticeship when I was eighteen, nearly ten years ago.
Every day, I woke up in my single bed, stared up at the decade-old posters of cars and pop stars, and thought about Jac. I went to work, put on my coveralls, started tuning up whatever car needed tuning up that day, and thought about Jac. I had lunch, thought about Jac. Knocked off, thoughtabout Jac. Came home, had dinner, argued with my poor mum about how I was thinking about Jac too much and needed to stop.
Then I thought about Jac.
I lived in a small town. There wasn’t a thing I could do or a place I could go that wouldn’t make me think about Jac.
I’m scared I’ll never get over my ex,I typed.I’m scared of repeating the same patterns, over and over again. I’m scared of never growing, never changing, never moving forward. I’m scared of feeling like this forever.
I deleted the last sentence in the end. It needed context, and if I started trying to explain what ‘feeling like this’ actually meant, I’d still be sitting here in another ten years.
But it was true. And it was the reason that I hadn’t been able to articulate, the reason I needed to do this.
If I stayed here, in this place where everything had Jac written all over it, I might actually feel like this forever. I needed to be somewhereelse.
I finished my application two nights later. I teared up when I hit the send button, and for once, I let the tears fall instead of blinking them back or wiping them away. It might be a small step, it might be a stupid step, it might be a step that never came to anything, but it was a step I’d taken on my own. It felt like a win.
It felt like another win when a producer named Carrie called me a few weeks later to tell me they wanted to see me for an audition. ‘We loved your application,’ she told me.
‘Really?!’ I asked.
‘Really,’ she said. ‘You’re exactly the kind of contestant we look for onMarry Me, Juliet, Amanda.’
I knew that probably just meant ‘you’re blonde and pretty’, but I let myself count it as another win.Be kind to yourselfwas a very common theme in all the ‘How To Get Over Your Ex’ articles I was reading, and I was trying my very best.
The audition was in the city, about two hours away by train. I told Mum I was going to visit my friend Bec and that I was going to stay the night. I hadn’t talked to her about my application since that night at dinner.
I felt guilty as hell when Mum dropped me off at the train station. ‘Are you sure about going?’ she asked. ‘There’s that virus everyone’s talking about. I don’t want you catching it in the city.’
‘The virus isn’t even in this country, Mum,’ I said, desperate to get out of the car before I chickened out. ‘I’ll be fine.’
She pressed a brown paper bag into my hand. ‘Some lunch,’ she told me.
‘Mum!’ I protested. ‘I’m twenty-seven, not five. I can get my own lunch.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you still need looking after sometimes, Mandie. Don’t go getting hungry. Say hi to Bec for me.’
I can tell you one thing: if you’re already feeling guilty about lying to your mum, her giving you lunch in a brown paper bag intensifies the feeling about fifty times over. My lunch was my tell-tale heart, mutteringwhat are you doing what are you doing what are you doing,over and over again.
‘Are you all right, Amanda?’ the psych asked me in my mandatory evaluation. ‘You seem a bit down, and a bit distracted.’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, and then immediately felt even more guilty for lying. ‘Sorry, what was the question?’
‘What are you looking for in a romantic partner?’
A million images of Jac immediately flashed before my eyes. Her smiling. Her laughing. Her face when I’d first told her I loved her, the long, deliberate pause before she’d looked me in the eyes and said it back.
‘Someone who…’ I bit my lip.
‘It’s all right,’ the psych said. ‘Take your time.’
‘Someone who knows what they want,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t care what that is, as long as it includes me.’
After the psych evaluation and the medical and the group exercises they gave us lunch, some sad platters of soggy sandwiches and trays of fruit that were ninety-five per cent honeydew melon. I took my brown bag outside into the sun instead and sat on the steps of the building, hoping that if I ate the lunch, it’d stop tell-tale-hearting me.
The first thing I pulled out of the bag was a note.Have a great day, darling. I love you. Mum xoxo
And right there, sitting on those very public steps, on a very public street, in the middle of a very public city, I burst into extremely public, extremely embarrassing tears.
