I have mentioned in the past that there was a time when I maintained an extended emotional involvement with a person who made me feel very bad about myself. The relationship was such that at first I was enamored by the highs and lows of our interactions, but then very slowly the highs began to sink and sag until there was nothing but lows. It was a constant stream of lows, but I refused to accept this reality, focusing instead on the increasingly delayed return of the highs. The people who cared about me were exhausted of hearing me complain about the situation and would quietly tap out of the conversation when I tried to bring it up. I was frankly sick of it myself, so toward the end I kept our interactions a secret. Most people thought I had shut things down entirely. Nobody necessarily congratulated me on this decision. I should have made it years earlier.
After the rollercoaster had been closed down and the ticket booth shuttered, my counterpart proved that I was never very important to him at all, by sending me perfunctory instant messages that pretended not to recognize any sort of mutual torrid past. These came about once a week, always during business hours. I refused to respond. He had my email, cell phone, work and home addresses. If he'd cared about me he would have been ringing my doorbell with a bouquet of flowers, but he couldn't muster more energy than it took to type "How's it hanging" when he was bored at work. I ignored his attempts at half-assery. Eventually the messages stopped too.
Yesterday was a slow, rainy Thursday and I decided to use my lunch break to stomp around outdoors for a bit. I needed new socks. Taking off my shoes had become something of an embarrassment, even when I was at home alone. So I was trudging up Broadway with my head halfway inside my umbrella because I am wary of splashback, and I was listening to this song. If you want a more authentic reenactment of my experience, you should play this song while you read this entry. And stand in the shower with the cold water on full blast.
So I was out in the rain with music in my ears and my head in an umbrella and I was thinking about him, actually. I told myself to stop thinking about him because I appear to have the ability to conjure his presence if I give him too much space in my consciousness, but I was thinking about the song, which is a remix, and it takes a little while to build into itself, so that at first listen one might be confronted by a couple echoing drum-bangs and think for a moment that this track is not the masterpiece it actually is. An impatient man sitting in the dark of my living room might say, "Kaitlyn, what the fuck are we listening to? Can I put on my music instead?" That is literally exactly what he would say. I know because he said it the last time he was at my house, listening to a different song, about forty-five minutes before I started screaming and swearing and kicked him out. It was his birthday.
I was reminiscing on this little drama, lost in the building drum beats and the wails of Gotye and the wretched feeling I'd had when I woke up that next morning and tried to remember why he wasn't there. I was wading through lower Manhattan and my instincts picked it up before my senses did. Through the splash of footsteps on concrete there came from the sea of anonymous galoshes a gait imprinted in my mental file, one that I didn't even know I could recognize but that nevertheless remains permanently accessible, the way when I was younger in my second-story bedroom I could tell if it was my brother or sister coming up the stairs based on the creak of the wood. I pulled my head out of the umbrella and met his eyes.
He said, "Hi." I think he did, anyway; I had my headphones in but his mouth moved in a monosyllabic motion and it looked like a greeting. I said, "Hi." I did not smile. I did not break stride. I kept going with a sudden twisting fire in my belly and I swear to God that as I passed him Gotye started bellowing out the chorus like a soundtrack to my lunch break:
But you didn't have to cut me out
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
And I don't even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough
I didn't turn around. I couldn't risk becoming a pillar of salt while it was raining so hard. I was relieved, at least, that I for once looked presentable and didn't fall on my face in front of him like I almost always do. But as I continued up Broadway the belly fire got hotter and even the downpour couldn't quench it; as we parted ways ever further there was no sudden tug on the sleeve of my pink trench, no short-of-breath greeting, no attempt at pursuing a stunted catch-up conversation. He had passed me and he had seen me and he had not cared.
I could think of one person who'd marry me tomorrow and another who's at work building an altar of squirrel bones upon which to sacrifice my still-beating heart. But the one who stood out as the definitive relationship of my adult life could only afford me a cursory nod. This was of course the one I held onto, the one whose total dearth of respect for my being weighed heavily in the balancing act of my personal self-worth.
The choice to cut ties was mine. I could have responded to the instant messages; I could have reached out with a friendly text. I could have acquiesced to spending the occasional lunch break at his apartment sharing sandwiches and talking about his new girlfriend, the one who probably keeps a toothbrush at his house and gets invited to parties and introduced to his friends, rather than just squirreled away like some kind of top-secret side project. I'd told him that if I couldn't be everything then I wouldn't be anything. And after I'd insisted it two hundred times, I finally made good on my promise.
So if I was nobody, if we were not lovers and not friends and not even acquaintances, there was no reason for more than a muted "Hi" between raindrops. After all, I only had an hour for lunch. So I followed through with my sock-shopping plans and allowed myself to retail-therapute with a few bras as well, although in my lingering sense of disquiet I bought the wrong size. And that was it. There was no thundering two-world collision, no epiphanic ray of light shining between the parting clouds. It was just a passing interaction of the shallowest type. I was out at lunchtime and I saw somebody that I used to know.
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