Wendy and Nathan break up
This book, I wrote in my last post, seems to mirror my circumstances. It got weirder when Wendy and her boyfriend Nathan started having problems. The chapter about their break up started like this: It needs to be said that we’re not breaking up. And she talks about bringing some of his stuff back to his apartment. She knows it’s coming (she senses it), but she isn’t the one to do it. She doesn’t want to break up with him, though maybe in the past it had crossed her mind.
So then the rest of the chapter happens and so does the following chapter and my stomach does flip flops and my head says, “Yes, exactly.”
Whenever I finish a cigarette I walk to the curb to drop the butt in the gutter and watch for Nathan’s bike down the street. I think we’re trying to be ourselves again, and I want to give him these things that are his, and then I haven’t really thought about what’s going to happen next. For now I leave a note telling him I’m glad he hasn’t been killed. I ought to start with him being alive and then go from there, I think. … [Nathan calls her]
“I think you need to come back over now,” he says. “If you’re not too far.”
“You want me to come back to your place?”
I’m about a mile away. …
“I think you should come back over,” he repeats. “It won’t take long.”
“What won’t?”
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he says, and hangs up.
[Two pages later]
Also the truth is that at this moment I’m crying about being alone on New Year’s. It’s a week before Thanksgiving right now. “This is the worst time to break up with someone,” I say. “Worst fucking time ever” (I Am Not the New Me, pp. 203-204, 207).
Wendy, you’re not alone.
December 19, 2011