The Me Without the You

My cellphone chirped from the other end of my office. I was always getting distracted from my work, so my girlfriend, erhm ex-girlfriend got me an apple charging station to leave in the corner of the room. Once every hour an alarm would go off prompting me to take my five-minute walk about in the apartment and check my messages, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the news and my fantasy baseball team.

    It was easy to see how and why I got so distracted. I became so viciously connected to my phone that I would literally break into a cold sweat when Corinne first asked me to start taking a break from having it on my person 24/7. The irony. Story for another time.

    She wasn’t wrong. Most people can manage a healthy relationship to most things. I could not. I had a wildly addictive personality and as a precaution never indulged in activities or hobbies that I deemed too dangerous or detrimental to my health and safety or ability to maintain relationships. Whoda thunk that my fucking cell phone would be considered just as high risk as those other things. 

    Nevertheless, I picked up my phone and began to walk about my apartment. I tried to do an entire interior perimeter walk of every room in the place. When I told coworkers that I completed six or seven laps, they were always impressed. Jokes on them. It was a single bedroom apartment. 

    Twitter was my go-to starting place. It felt the most efficient as the majority of what I’d want to see in other apps would inevitably make its way there as well. Smarter, not harder. I only had five minutes after all. 

    Somewhere in that fourth or fifth lap of the apartment, I toggled my way to my text messages. Still locked as my only “favorite” atop the text screen was Corinne. My stomach suddenly felt tense, and my mouth went dry. My thumb hovered and twitched over the icon to open her message for what felt like an eternity. This is a mistake; I thought to myself. 

    After several seconds of playing double dutch with the motor units driving my thumb, I finally clicked Corinne’s icon. 

“HEY YOU”

    Hey you? Hey you?? That’s all she wrote. It had been months since I heard from her. Despite that, I pass her belongings in the box she refused to make time to pick up. Something I took as a sign that cooler heads may prevail, and she’d come back to the apartment one day. 

    Hey you?? Every morning I brushed my teeth and saw the still faded dry erase notes she’d left me on the mirror that never fully wiped off. 

    Hey you?? Every time I opened the medicine cabinet, I saw the still present ring from the base of her dildo she kept in there, that was now rehomed to a box next to the front door with her other belongings. 

    Hey you?? Does she even know that despite giving her my side of my bed in my apartment, that in the months she’d been gone I couldn’t bring myself to slide my body to the side nearest the window, because that was HER side. 

“CORINNE, SO GOOD TO HEAR FROM YOU! HOW ARE YOU?”

    You weak son of a bitch, I thought to myself upon responding to her text. I had that kind of post wank guilt pit that started to form in my loins. What have I even done. You really should know better; I thought to myself again.

    Good to hear from you?? Grow up, Nathan. Grow up. It was never going to be good to hear from her. Not since her new friends came around. 

    Good to hear from you?? And I added a goddamn exclamation point? Looking back, I’m embarrassed. Not only did she not deserve that exclamation point, but she also didn’t deserve an ounce of that perfect grammar I scripted that return message with.

    How are you? Why the hell did I care? Six times I called her those first few weeks. Countless text messages asking for a reason, any reason as to why she left. Countless more resigned to the fact that it was over and just wanting her to pick up her things so I could properly move on. 

    How are you? How was she? Fuck her! How was I? 

“OMG I TOTALLY DIDN’T THINK YOU’D ANSWER!!!”

    OMG? Sweet. Millennial acronyms and the death of genuine dialogue and decent vernacular. She had known that I hated that. I bet she didn’t even care. 

    Didn’t think I’d answer? Not only was I addicted to my phone, which she had made perfectly clear to me those last months, but I still had her shit! Of course I was going to answer. I wasn’t a child.

“WELL, YOU GOT ME. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU, CORINNE?”

    What can I do for her? Was I serious with that response? 23 hours a day I was a trainwreck of a man. I’d wear my underwear as long as my beard that was always sporting nearly a full week of length. I had a bipolar relationship with food either lounging around in a robe with six days of binge ordered take out containers, or thinking the olives in the back of the fridge was ‘too heavy’ of a meal that night. No in between.

The other hour of the day I’d spend in the shower and that was when I was my absolute best self. The gym? I’d start tomorrow. Meal prep? No problem. Dating websites? I’ll write my profile that night! Inevitably, it would all land me in the same place. Trying to be the man Corinne so desperately tried to Picasso into Ryan Reynolds meets Idris Elba meets Oceans 11 version of George Clooney. Hell. I’d fuck that guy.

“O NOTHIN. STILL IN LOVE WITH ME??”

    Still in love with her? Where the hell did she get off? I mean, did I talk about her to coworkers on slack? Yes.  When I phoned home to talk to my parents, did I lie and say we were still together? Sure. 

    Still in love with her? The gall. And to have messaged me out of the blue, and CHIME CHIME CHIME…

    Had a I really been pacing my apartment for an entire cycle of my alarm break?? I thought to myself. 

“I MEAN, I MISS YOU. I WISH I KNEW WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN US.”

    I missed her? If ever there was a time to lie, that was it! Power, Corinne. Advantage, Corinne. Sad sorry sack of pringle dust and Chinese food grease, me. 

    Wish I knew what happened? I knew what happened. She left! I had worn a good footpath into that raggedy old patch of carpet in the lone hallway of the apartment. She was like a drug. I was her puppet. She never loved me. She loved who she thought she could mold me to be. I didn’t like fedora’s or infinity scarves. I didn’t like trivia at the bar every Tuesday night with her high fashion, new rich friends. I didn’t like reading the extreme feminist articles she’d send me about how the patriarchy is to blame for everything and men are all useless, egotistically rats. And I wanted my goddamn side of my own bed back!

“O NATHAN. IDK WUT TO SAY. CAN I COME OVER?”

    Fireworks. Symphonies with a natural crescendo of hope that started from my toes. She wanted to see me. She wanted to get back together! I was no longer going to be lying to my mom, Corinne was coming back!

“YEA! PLEASE! COME ON BY! THE NEW CODE FOR THE BUILDING IS 3825#. I’LL LEAVE THE DOOR UNLOCKED FOR YOU. WHEN IS GOOD FOR YOU?

    Who. The hell. Was I? This girl ripped me apart. Made me the worst version of myself that I had ever known. Sure, I wasn’t yet over her, but I was going to be any day! I was close. I felt it! So, why on earth did I cave so quickly??

    I spent the next several hours straightening the place up that night. I had put back up some of the photos from the box by the front door, made a trip to the laundry room on our floor where I washed her clothes. Afterall, they had been in that musty box for months! 

    I vacuumed the sofa, squeegeed the shower glass, scrubbed the toilet bowl and sprayed copious amounts of lavender scented Lysol just the way she liked. I even lit four candles. One for each room of the house, all in different scents, but I had to make do. 

    Freshly showered, shaved and dressed in semi casual wear that was all purchased by her, I sat with an open bottle of red wine poured into a decanter with a pair of glasses on our favorite part of the apartment, the breakfast island. 

    DING. The elevator doors opened and with them my sweat glands betrayed me and opened up as well. Fuck. Not now. Keep it together, I thought to myself. The knob of the front door twisted open and my pulse repped the William Tell Overture in double time. My tongue was sandpaper dry and the red wine next to me was of zero assistance. 

    Corinne stumbled in, partially drunk in the middle of a day. She didn’t work, she had what they called old money and neither her, nor her new Instagram friends had any semblance of the real world. When I met her by, I had charmed my way into her space when a valet at an art gallery pretended to have lost her car so that he could chat her up for a few moments. How different she was back then. How different we both were.  

    I swooped in wearing my best Men’s Warehouse suit and played the role of her boyfriend to bat off the overzealous valet. We took off in her Mercedes S Class and left my beat up civic at the gallery and for one week, I got to pretend I too was of money, class and substance. 

Strangest thing, though. At the time she didn’t care. We just connected. I had my insecurities, though. I was the man, and I should have been able to provide. For the longest time, she never made me feel less than. Then the new friends came into the picture and things just…changed.  

    When my wallet ran dry and I had no more suits, I came clean. Corinne just laughed and took it in stride. We were from two different worlds, but it kept the match struck and ever so close to the candle every time one of our worlds tried to pry us apart. 

    For a while it worked. Until the pressure of her new friends became too much. She started changing. Changing me. Changing us. We needed to fit that high-class world.

    “Corinne. H…hi. You look…beautiful.” I, said. 

    She did, too. Day time tipsy wasn’t a bad look on her in all fairness. She was so uptight and determined to fit the mold of her role in her new group of Instagram friends that sometimes, a few glasses of wine were the only way she could let her hair down and be even a percentage of the girl I fell in love with that first week after the gallery. 

    “Oh, Nathan. The place looks…nice.” She, said. Sounding ever so slightly condescending.

    I was dipping my toes into the water of how to act, how to talk, what to do that I didn’t even realize the meticulous path around the apartment Corinne had taken, grabbing one photo after another and jamming them into an oversized purse. 

    “Wh…what are you doing? Corinne, I thought you wanted to see me? I thought you’d…” I, said.

    Corinne continued to collect items as she floated around the apartment in a sort of weightlessness that wore a stark contrast to my now cemented stillness by sofa. Photo after photo, trinket after trinket, toiletry after toiletry.  Corinne never stood still. She muttered some random nonsense as she coursed through room after room. What she said, I’ll never know. 

    As quick as she arrived was as quick as she’d gone to leave. Not so much as a kiss on the cheek, a hug or handshake, or even a verbal acknowledgement that it would likely be the last I ever saw or heard from her. 

    My eyes were ice cold from what I could only assume was several minutes without blink and my knees had started to have that tinge they’d get from being locked in place for too long of a time. I sat down on the sofa, utterly exhausted from the emotional turmoil I allowed my hopeful self to construct. 

    Fuck it. It’s over. I can move on now. I thought to myself.

    As the words processed in my brain the doorknob turned behind me. Fireworks. Symphonies return. The yo-yo lives to rise and fall again. 

    Corinne walked in, right past me and to the bathroom. Seconds later she exited, walking down the hall waving her pink dildo that I had placed back in its spot in the medicine cabinet.

    “Can’t forget this!” She said, proudly.

    CHIME. CHIME. CHIME. Another alarm set to pass giving me permission not to simply use my phone, but to be myself. 5 minutes. Every hour. 

    I should have known better.