Blissfully uncertain

The AC is busted again, so we’re stuck on the porch trying to cool down. Even out here, the air feels like soup, that stifling summer-in-the-city weather that always has me looking up Alaska’s housing prices on Zillow.

“I’m telling you, man. It’s like that white woman thing about actualizing your goals.”

Benny stares at me, one eyebrow raised, as if I just told him I bought a time share. I can tell he doesn’t believe a word I’m saying, but I need to tell someone and he’s the only one I can say it to if I want to avoid grippy socks.

“Seriously, no shit. Everything I’ve written, since that day, has happened.”

“That’s not what actualizing your goals is, man.” Now it’s my turn to be skeptical. “Karen got a book about it, it was in the bathroom, my phone was dead, I flipped through it. Anyway,” he continues, shaking his head, “actualizing shit is like… it’s intentional. Like, you know what you want, and you take concrete steps to make it happen, like ‘I want a pizza’ and you open your Domino’s app, but for bigger stuff. It’s not wish fulfillment, it’s you putting in the work.” He takes a drag off the joint and hands it back to me, squinting through the wisps of smoke. “Your thing is more like… manifesting. Vision boards and shit. That’s what you’re talking about.”

Slowly exhaling, I studied his expression. It was vacant, but present. “You flipped through it? You seem pretty well-versed for someone who just ‘flipped through it.’” He shrugged his shoulders, taking a sip of his Modelo and turning his face to the sun. “Look, man, whatever it’s called. It’s working. How else do you explain Laura coming back?”

I’ve got him with that one. The breakup had been brutal, and it sure as shit felt final. I got the KitchenAid, she took the cat. Hell, she got an apartment - shockingly fast, too, like she’d been planning on leaving for a while, which was just a hunch I’d had until she came to pack up her side of the closet and told me, point blank, “I’ve known this was coming for a while.” I’d opened accounts on every dating app I could think of, just to see if she was on them; she was. One day, I went to check the mail and her copy of the New Yorker hadn’t come. I mean, this breakup was change-of-address-forms final.

“I don’t know, dude, maybe my wishes are coming true.” I look to him for clarification, but he has the explanation locked and loaded. “Come on. You were pretty rough to live with for a while there, all drunk and unshowered. You almost tanked my life. Alex’s, too. You were like a relationship suicide bomber.”

He’s not wrong, and I hate that he’s not wrong. I light a cigarette, more to let the uncomfortable truth dissipate than out of an actual desire to smoke one. Leaning back, I turn to face him. “But it’s better now, right?”

He looks annoyed. “Yeah, man, it’s ‘better now.’ But it’s always ‘better now,’ and then it’s not again. I don’t know how you did it - I swear to fucking god if you mention that story one more time I’ll throw your computer off the porch - but make sure it stays better this time.”

“Yeah, man, obviously.”

He might not want to hear about the story, but that won’t stop it from keeping me up at night. Benny offers to grab me another beer while he’s up, and I accept and open my laptop. I know I only have a couple of minutes before he comes back, so I rush out the first sentence that comes to mind. Benny climbs back out the window, hands me a beer, and drops a bag of chips on the table, complaining that the new owners at the bodega never stock enough Takis. I snap my computer closed and swill the last of my now-tepid Modelo.

He comes back outside with our drinks and a bag of sour cream and onion Lay’s. The beer tastes better cold, but I’m so focused on not forcing the conversation about the chips that I can barely enjoy it. I shred the label quietly, just waiting for him to speak. After what feels like forever, he does.

“I miss when the bodega was Mexican,” he mutters. “White people snacks are so boring.” I eat a handful of chips and agree with him, trying not to prompt what I’ve already decided he’s going to say. Another brief silence rolls over the porch like the molasses flood of 1919. I remind myself that he’s always a lethargic conversationalist, and that weed tends to amplify this already irritating aspect of his personality. Finally, with his mouth full of chip shrapnel, he speaks. “Like fuck, man, get some goddamn Takis up in there. Even the ranch ones, shit, I ain’t picky.”

I shoot up straight, almost knocking over my beer in my rush to open the story. He reads the last lines, his brow furrowed. “So you can make anything happen, anything at all, and you’re using it for subpar snacks?”

He may think it’s stupid, but at least now I have his attention, so I tell him everything, from the very beginning this time. How that first day, when I found Laura on Tinder looking for a “relationship” and I realized she was moving on, my writers’ block had shattered right alongside my will to live. How at first it was just little shit, like I wrote a story about watching the Madrid-Barcelona match and MBappé scored in the first minute, and then the next week that happened. Or the one about a person faking mental illness to get a subway car to himself, and the next day I was outside of the city and noticed one of the local crazy guys from our neighborhood just sitting quietly on a bench, reading the Wall St Journal. Or a story about family dinner, and the family in the story has an awkward dynamic over roast chicken and rice pilaf, and two weeks later when I showed up at my parents’ house my sister and her husband were fighting and the chicken was burnt, but at least the rice was good.

He still looks like he wants to have me committed, so I tell him how I know that it doesn’t work on everything. “When I started noticing a trend, I tested it out the way most people would; I wrote a story about winning the lottery. I made the guy kind of like me, and once I finished it I waited until I had to go to the bodega anyway, because he bought the ticket on a whim in the story. I even wore the same clothes as him, manufactured the same small-talk with the guy behind the counter, which was insane because in real life it was only sixty degrees and I had to stand there in shorts and slides talking about ‘hope it cools down soon.’ Kevin (in the story my name is Kevin) forgets about the ticket, which I couldn’t do but I stuffed it in the same drawer of my desk as he did, and then he remembers it when the store has one of those “winning ticket sold here” signs and he goes home and checks and it’s his. They didn’t have a sign next time I walked by, but who even knows if those are really sent out, you know, so I checked anyway, and long story short…”

Benny looks at me sideways. “Long story short, you still have roommates and an unpaid student loan.”

I tell him about how I gave up on the idea, how I went back to real life. Working stupid hours, creating sad little stories about what I’d thrown away, drunk-dialing her at times of day one should definitely not be drunk. He tells me he already knows that last part; Karen played him some of my voicemails.

“Great,” I mutter. I can feel my face get hot, but I’m so close to getting him to understand, so I push through the embarrassment and tell him about the last phone call, where I had tried to remind Laura of how great we were together, only to have her sharply reprimand me for rewriting history.

“Say that again,” I had told her.

“You always do this, Pete. You don’t notice I’m even there until I’m not, and then you talk about how great it was when in reality it was only great for you. It’s manic pixie dream girl shit, and that’s not me.”

“I can’t rewrite history,” I’d said. It wasn’t a question, but she took it as one, reassured me that no, I can’t, and said she was running late and had to go. With the echo of her words ringing in my head, I opened a new word document on my laptop. She was right, of course, you can’t rewrite history, and you can’t just make shit happen, not big stuff anyway, not lottery wins and reconciliations. The lottery story had felt forced, which of course it was, trite and almost absurd in its simplicity. But it couldn’t all be a coincidence, not the burnt chicken and the soccer game and Spare Change Guy reading about the stock market. The stories that felt real when I wrote them, the ones I could see if I closed my eyes, those silly little details of a silly little life had moved from the page to the real world.

My phone buzzes, I typed, and it’s Laura. She’ll be in the neighborhood later, so maybe we could grab a drink. Her tone seems intentionally casual.

The hours ticked by. I made pizza rolls, played solitaire, even tried napping but couldn’t quite get my pillows into a comfortable position. I texted Alex to meet me at the bar, promising not to be, as he so lovingly put it, “the opposite of Prozac,” and hopped in the shower. As I grabbed my phone on the way out the door, I saw her text. “Hey, just had lunch with my sister at Charlie’s so obviously I’m gonna need a drink, want to meet me?” She must have sent it the moment I left the room. A followup text read, “It’s so dead in here, I love dive bars on Tuesdays.”

I didn’t run to the bar, per se, but I definitely treated the sidewalks like a pedestrian autobahn. She was perched on a bar stool, sipping a tallboy of Narragansett, talking so forcefully with her hands I worried she might knock over her water glass. I nodded hello to Anna behind the bar and sat down. As Anna placed my beer in front of me, she looked over to Laura. “So what, though? My sister was the same way, like an absolute fucking trainwreck and then all of a sudden just a hot mess of a type-A when the wedding was involved. Like it’s one day, how do they take it so seriously?!”

“Lexie’s still melting down?” I asked.

Laura nodded. “Now she’s mad because we broke up, but it’s weird because you and John are such good friends and she doesn’t want the wedding to be about us so she wants us to still go together, not say anything. I told her she’s crazy, that you would never -”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s fine.”

When I got home, I wrote a story about the wedding. At first I wrote a rainstorm, and awkward group photos that they’d be stuck with forever, and a quick kiss on the dance floor that we both could blame on too much champagne. The night before the nuptials, I checked the forecast, edited the story, thought how annoyed Lexie would have been if I’d intentionally ruined the weather on her wedding day, and god forbid we get a little tipsy. But it rained, and we drank, and we kissed.

Two weeks later, she started leaving things behind at the apartment. I pretended to “catch” her doing it, even teased her about it, but I was the one who wrote about the hair elastic she kept on the bedside table, the Apple charger that mysteriously ended up next to my Android one, the dog-eared copy of Geography of Oysters that had made its way home to our Ikea bookshelf. I wrote about those things the morning after the wedding. I made room in the spaces I wanted them to occupy. I tell Benny it’s like Field of Dreams, in that if I build it, it will come.

He scrolls back through the pages, looking tired. Like maybe he believes me, but he definitely doesn’t want to. “So you made her come back? Like, you’re making decisions for her, she has no control over her actions?”

“I mean, I guess? I’m not sure, really. I mean, she’s not different, really, except for taking me back. I guess we fight less, but that’s just because now I know what’s coming, I can sidestep it.”

We sit in silence for a minute. I know what he’s going to say before he says it, not because I wrote it but because I’ve been wondering the same thing.

“It’s not really… ethical, man, right? If you think about it. It’s like, lack of consent? Like an emotional roofie.”

“Great band name, by the way.”

He sighs. “Yeah, sure. But Pete, man, it’s fucked up. You gotta tell her, dude.”

“Yeah, Benny, let me just tell her that every decision she’s made in the past few months was actually my decision, that I wrote it and then she just magically did the things I wanted her to do. Forget about the betrayal of trust, leaving that part aside for just a second, it’s fucking insane.” He nods. “Shit, I didn’t even want to tell you, and you believe in chemtrails and think flat-earthers have some ‘kind of ok’ ideas.” He leans forward. “And no, we are not getting into that right now.”

He knows I’m right. I can see it in his eyes. “So obviously, we cant undo what you did.”

“No, ‘rewriting history’ appears to be off the table. Like with wishes from a genie, there’s just some shit I can’t do.”

He grabs a handful of chips while I light another cigarette. “Ok.” He takes a deep breath. “So, you just stop writing the story.” I look over at him. “Not like you stop writing, but you stop writing about her. That saying about ‘writing what you know,’ you stop doing that. You leave us out of it, and if you want to make shit happen, you do it the normal way. Flowers, going to weddings without bitching about it, doing the dishes when it’s your turn. You can still avoid fights, you just have to read the room once in a while.”

I know he’s right, but it’s been so comfortable this way. No surprises, no doubts. Just smooth predictability.

“Just delete it, bro. Give her back her life.”

I’m pretty sure the word document itself has nothing to do with this, but I delete it for the symbolism, show him it’s gone, and lean back in my chair. “Atta boy. At least now when she walks in the door, you’ll know she wanted to. I’m heading out to meet Karen for dinner, think you guys want to do something later? Maybe grab a drink, play some foosball? I can kick your ass at darts, if you want.”

“Yeah, maybe.” After the last few months, the word feels unfamiliar, almost whimsical. He ducks through the window and I stretch out on the chaise, both terrifyingly and blissfully uncertain, learning anew what it is to wonder.