“I’m in love with someone else,” she says. The two of you are sitting in an Iowa City park next to a baseball diamond after a friend’s baby shower, and you don’t understand how the conversation even arrived at this point. The grass is crowded with dandelions, and you remember, suddenly, that game you played as a kid, yellow-chinned, in love.
“What?” you say.
“With Amber,” she says. You think of Amber—a classmate of hers at Indiana, willow-thin and redheaded, with a soft, mousy voice. “We kissed once, drunkenly, and I realized that I loved her.”
You stare at her, fast-forwarding through a mental film of every time she’d accused you of merely looking at other people the wrong way. She meets your gaze for a moment and then looks away. She slings her arm over the back of the bench, like she’s going to bring you in close. She doesn’t.
You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage.
Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.”