The Resurrection of JD

It has been almost three years since his mom passed away. Two and a half since the miscarriage. And two since the separation. 

If the miscarried baby were a girl, it would be three generations of women leaving him. 

He chuckled at the realization. Half a year ago, the same thought would have sent him into a spiral of despair. It had been an improvement—an achievement even—to rise from the pit, a place in pitch darkness where his cry for help couldn’t escape and only traveled inward and rattled more damage. 

Now he was back. John David was back at the top.

The thought made him giggle again. After everything, he still got the boldness. 

“Better be careful.” JD hummed to himself. These days, he found peace easier than turmoil. But it was still very fresh. He didn’t want to jinx it, not when he still sometimes pondered:

“How did things get so out of control?”

So, scaling back, he was not as depressed. Anxious only when he got looped into the vile exchanges between divorce lawyers. Shame was on its way out and his dojo back. Slowly. He felt ready to get out there. To meet women. 

Online dating had beaten expectations to the upside. The stories of his life from the past few years, construed in a certain way, were met with a level of warmth and tenderness he did not expect even from people who knew him in his real life. These girls, slim, pretty, and below the age of 34, his alleged age in his dating profile, accepted in no time that he was still in the process of a bitter divorce. Some questioned his readiness to move on. But once he confirmed that he was abso-fucking-lutely ready, those some accepted too.

“Am I ready, though?” JD confided in his gal pal, a Chinese girl he befriended from college. She lived in China and went through her own divorce years back. 

“Well, I mean,” the girl paused, pondering, and continued, “they are ready for you. You were with her for a decade. That’s a track record.” 

“I hope the divorce is over already.”

“I know. But it for sure makes you look more miserable!” The girl chortled. 

“That’s a good thing?” JD raised an eyebrow. 

“Hence more desirable.”

Of all the friends who endured him in the past few years, he found the most comfort in her. She had been through a divorce of her own. She knew the storms of emotions he traveled through. Even though sometimes she seemed less compassionate for her fellow womenfolk, her perspective was refreshing. It felt good to have a renegade from the opposite sex who understood their promiscuous ways and chose to side with you, when he sometimes perceived more judgment from his male friends for being the first to break a sacred oath like it was all his fault. 

“Do you like me?” He was always tempted to ask her this question after she had boosted him up.

“Fuck off.” She groaned and he laughed. He made a mental note not to give in to the temptation again. If she said yes, it would unleash another can of worms that he couldn’t deal with but bury and risk losing the voice that, for a long time, had been his only opening for air when the whole world closed in on him. 

He made carbonara for dinner. He had started to enjoy cooking again, for himself. He sat by the long dining table purchased to host but had since served only one, and fondly scanned across the open kitchen extended in front of him. The cream marble countertop top, platinum faucets, all white cabinets, imported stoves, wine cellar that was currently empty, everything baby of his taste and bank account. One of the early signs of his resurrection was the desire to renovate the apartment he purchased with his ex-wife not long before the separation, starting with the kitchen, against his lawyer's suggestion that he should leave the disputed asset be. He had an urge. A dedication. To make the apartment the way it needed to be. He had intended to create a home here, a home of his own, with a wife and kids and all the good stuff. And he was not going to let their absence stop him. The first thing he did was to break the wall that separated the kitchen and dining area to open up the space. He wanted his home to be transpirable and minimalist chic, unlike his childhood home, which was old and clustered, because aesthetics were not considered an achievement by his immigrant parents.  

After dinner, JD cleaned the table and sprawled on his couch in a mostly bare living room. He reached for his phone, and the screen lit up with notifications. He checked Bumble first. A new girl’s profile popped up.

“No fatties.” He swiped left. 

Then he clicked on the Messages app; it was that girl again. He went on two dates with her. Two very good dates he had to admit. She was a good talker. He laughed at her stories and shared his the way he designed them. She was a better listener. She didn’t attend to his wounds on the spot but just lowered her head and said, “Wow.”, which made him share more.

But she was not the one. JD got the sense ten minutes into their first date and decided she would be one of those girls to just have some fun with. After two dates, he thought it was time to freeze her out. Only she had been messaging him. Sometimes, once every other day. More often, multiple at once. Her desperations became apparent while he didn’t care enough to feel annoyed. He only read the messages after they had piled up for days. 

“What do you mean that we are not compatible in the long run?”

He felt sorry for her that she needed to ask. Why? Because you are not good enough. Because you are a 7 and my ex was a 9. You are not the hostess I envision to my castle. You don’t belong here. It was clear that they wouldn’t want him to be this honest. Then why bother to ask? It humored him that he had thought girls over 30 would have the wisdom to take the loss and walk away with dignity. But they were just as nosy as the 20-something, the latter out of naivety, and the former, probably from the confidence in thinking they could take any bloody truth. But he would never tell them. It was not that serious.  

“Are you OK? Given everything you told me, I hope you were not having a hard time.”

Yuk. JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE. These women’s attempts to sympathize with his losses were pathetic. It was his misery, his alone, and he weathered through all by himself. Who do they think they are, like they play a part after a few dates? How delusional? Sympathies for attention. The lowest of the low. 

He found it harder to take them seriously.

“How does it feel losing your mom?”

It took a message for the fortress he spent months building to crumble. In an instant, he was a little boy again. Teary-eyed because he had stubbed his toe on the leg of the bulky coffee table that took up a third of the living room. His mom rushed out of the smoke-infused kitchen, wiped her hands on the apron, kneeled before him, checked his feet, and pretended to be hitting the table like it was its fault for being too big in a crowded living room. Hurriedly, she returned to the blaring fan and sizzling pan, leaving a haze of heat and grease behind, and him still baffled.

“How does it feel losing your mom?”

How dare she? How dare she just throw it like that? With no context. Just like that, she flipped the table of judgment. Every piece of junk in his childhood home, the coffee table included, started retreating. He wanted to crouch and hide but found nothing left except space around him. He couldn’t move. His chest contracted. He forgot how to breathe. What happened? JD lost control, the control he had mastered by not responding. 

Motherless bastard. 

She might as well just say it. He had called himself that when he didn’t have the heart to look up from the bottom. How did he feel about losing his mom? The woman who loved him unconditionally but forgot to teach him how. The woman who shielded him from her pains of dying and had him rattled when losses became inevitable, hers and the subsequent. The woman whose early departure from life sent him into a chase, chasing the ones that outgrew him while being chased by the seriousness of life that he struggled with. The woman who prefaced his book of regrets for not showing her the best version he could be when she was around and making her worried for him till the end.

Are you happy? 

He took a deep breath and typed, “Please do not contact me anymore.”

JD stood up and went inside the guest bathroom. On the window ledge, a half-smoked joint rested on a small china plate. He lit it up and took two puffs. It calmed him a bit. Two weeks back, at the same spot, he was coughing violently from a misdirected inhale. The girl bolstered herself up on the shower step, stroking his back with one hand. 

“You are drooling!” She exclaimed under a suppressed chuckle. He spat into the sink and looked back at her whose eyes bent like crescent moons. Under the gentle honeyed light, her long lashes cast a forest.

The light, the flashback, the marijuana. It all made JD very very tired. 

He headed back to his couch and picked up the phone. He retracted his last message and typed, “What do you mean?”

JD lay flat and started into his light-less ceiling. Once in a while, he lifted his phone to check the Messages app, staring into the chat window, waiting to see the three dots dance.