How Not to Let Go

I’ve never driven a moving truck before, but I drive this one for twelve hours, Indiana to New York, sobbing off and on the whole way. I listen to Beck’s version of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” on repeat. The sky is gray and it spits rain all day, like there’s a raincloud following me east.

By the time I pull up in front of my parents’ building on Fifth Avenue, opposite the park, the sky is thundery and dark, too dark for an evening in June. My parents meet me under the green awning and hug me in happy greeting. If they notice my blotchy, tear-stained face, they don’t mention it. If they wonder why, when I say I’m so glad to be home, I instantly burst into tears, they don’t ask.

Maybe they think it’s because of the rain.

I was nine years old and living a little over a mile from Ground Zero on 9/11. Mostly what I remember is the way a bright sunny day was transformed into the uniform, infinite gray of my parents’ fear, the smell of burning, and the taste of ash. It felt like the whole world was covered in ash and debris. It was Charles who pointed out to me that this is probably why sometimes when it rains I get this swamping dread that the sun might never come out again, that the universe is a fundamentally unreliable place and the laws of physics could simply stop functioning at any time.

It’s maybe also why I had a thing about heights until Charles took me rock climbing and I learned to trust the harness and the rope and my partner.

Charles, I should explain, was the postdoc in my research lab—or anyway, that’s what he was for almost two years: my research supervisor, my mentor, my tutor, my climbing partner, and, not least, my hot crush.

Then at the end of my last semester, we spent four weeks having sex, because I was like, “Dude, we have A Thing,” and he was like, “Yes, we do, but it’s not appropriate,” and I was like, “Once I graduate, it’s appropriate,” and he was like, “We’ll talk about it when the semester ends.” And when the semester ended, I went over to his apartment and . . . I spent almost every night there until I left Indiana for good. Until last night.

And I—ugh, god, it seems so inevitable in retrospect—I fell in love with him. How could I not? Brilliant, compassionate, beautiful, funny, I mean how could anyone not fall in love with Charles?

He, I think, may have fallen in love with me, but he never said it and he told me that he was broken, that love didn’t happen for him. He explained it with science, so I believed him—but I didn’t believe him when he said it wasn’t fixable. Everything is fixable. Except he didn’t want to be fixed.

And so this morning, at the end of our month, I left before dawn, sneaking out of his bed and out of his apartment while he was still asleep, because I was too much of a coward to say good-bye.

And I drove home.

And here I am.

The super found a couple guys to move my stuff into the library, so Mom and Dad and I have dinner while the guys bring it all in. I take a shower and wash away last night’s sex, and then my parents and I sit on the living room couch and celebrate my homecoming by binge-watching Gilmore Girls, which was one of my favorite shows when I was little.

And then I go to bed alone. I lie there, wondering what Charles is doing, how he feels, how he felt when he woke up and I wasn’t there.

The swamping shame of sneaking out like that is too much. I curl up in a ball, teeth gritted, and try to soothe myself by making lists in my head of the many valuable things I’ve learned recently:

• How you feel about a person doesn’t necessarily match the kind of relationship you can have with them.

• When you and your partner laugh during sex, you can feel the laughter inside your body.

• If a baby monkey’s mother starts abusively rejecting the baby, it will abandon all its friends and obsessively try to make its mother love it again.

Bonus lesson: The best way not to fall is not to mind falling, and the way not to mind falling is to fall a lot.

That one is about rock climbing.

I cry myself to sleep.

I wake up, cry a little more, go for a run, take a nap, eat dinner with my parents and watch a movie with them, and then cry myself to sleep again.

This is most of how I spend my month at home before I leave for medical school.

At my parents’ suggestion, I start attending the drop-in ballet classes for adults at Joffrey a few times a week. They think the discipline and the community will do me good. They’re right. I rip the shanks out of some old, dead pointe shoes, stop eating sugar, and kick my own ass three nights a week, and it keeps my bleeding heart tethered to the rest of my body. I enjoy being in a group of “adults.” Which is apparently what I am now.

And every night for a month, I lie in bed staring at my Alan Turing poster—“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”—and I make lists in my head to remind myself of all the important things I’m learning:

• The death of hope is like the death of a parent, the permanent loss of the place you would return to when life is at its worst.

• When you sob until you can’t breathe, you don’t die, even though it feels like you might. All that happens is you stop sobbing and you start breathing.

• The universe is not, despite my dread and my despair, a fundamentally unreliable place; it behaves with perfect consistency. However, my expectations of it have been warped and confused. Now that my expectations are more realistic, it’s easier for me to trust that the universe will catch me if I fall.

• My mom is really, really, really smart.

I knew that last one already, but about ten days into my cry/run/nap/ballet/dinner/cry/sleep routine, she follows me into my room after we watch Groundhog Day, sits on the bed, and pats the spot next to her.

“Tell me what’s going on, girl.”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, and she pats the bed again.

So I sit beside her and bunch my lips together against the trembling they’ve learned to associate with lying in this bed: If on bed, then cry until asleep. Ugh.

“Charles,” I say, suppressing my tears. I stare at my hands.

“What did he do?”

“Nothing.”

“I repeat: Yeah.”

“He didn’t—” I stop and hold my breath, and then whimper, “He just didn’t love me.” I curl up in a ball with my forehead against my knees and let myself cry in front of my mom. I feel like a six-year-old confessing that another kid at school didn’t want to be my friend.

She sighs heavily and brushes her hand softly over my hair. “Annabelle Frances Coffey.” She only uses my whole name when she’s about to say something she feels self-conscious about saying. My mom isn’t demonstrative the way my dad is.

“Yeah,” I sniff.

“Are you listening?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m only going to say this once. Are you really listening?”

“Yeah,” I huff into my knees.

“Your heart. Is too wise. To love someone. Who doesn’t deserve it. So either: He’s a superb human being who has earned your friendship. Or else you will stop loving him altogether, and soon. I don’t know which it is, but I know it’s one or the other. This thing you’re experiencing right now is the chaos as your heart decides whether to let go of the love or . . . hold on to it in a new way.”

I wipe my nose on my sleeve and try to breathe. I ask, “How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know my heart will figure out what to do?”

“That’s what hearts do, when you let them.”

I sigh and sniff again, and I believe her. “Okay.”

And she’s right. That’s what my heart does.

Slowly, painfully, like a hand uncurling from a fist to an open palm, my heart opens up, exploring ways to hold Charles differently.

But.

I’m not out of the chaos yet when Margaret calls me, barely three weeks after I left Indiana, and says in an urgent voice, “I know the answer is probably no, but you’re my best friend and I have to ask: Can you fly to Indiana tomorrow to attend my wedding?”

“What?!”

“The district court overturned the same-sex marriage ban today. We want to go get a license right away because you know that shit is going to be stopped within a matter of days.”

“Oh my god, yes! Oh my god!”

I ask my parents for the thousand dollars it costs to book the next flight to Indianapolis, explaining about both the personal and the historical importance of this moment, and they agree that I should be there if I can.

Margaret and Reshma pick me up at the airport the next morning and take me to Reshma’s moms’ house, and we clean and decorate and cook and hug and laugh. I go out and mow the lawn while Margaret and Reshma weed the flowerbeds, which seems to be mostly an excuse to roll around in the dirt, tickling each other. The moms are inside moving furniture around to create space and “flow.” They’re getting married, too—a double wedding in the backyard—and I feel so, so lucky to be here with these amazing people on this amazing day.

I also feel like I’m a one-hour drive away from Charles. I don’t know if he’s coming and I can’t bring myself to ask. I just do what I’m instructed to do, being as helpful as I can until it’s my turn to take a shower and put on a dress, and then I start meeting guests at the back fence. My job is to let people in without letting the dog out. (The dog has no interest in getting out. He’s a twelve-year-old bulldog with an underbite and a casual attitude about licking his penis in public.)

I don’t know any of the people who start streaming in with potluck dishes and folding chairs—the planning was so last-minute that the e-mail invitation literally asked people to bring their own chairs—but every one of them is beaming with joy in the midst of the makeshift, overnight wedding.

Eventually Margaret’s and my research supervisor, Professor Smith—“Diana,” she insists—arrives with her husband. I hug her hello. She’s so pregnant I worry she might pop like a balloon if I squeeze her, but I hug her as hard as I dare.

“Hey, is Charles coming?” I ask casually. The impression I want to give is that this isn’t something I’ve been obsessing about more or less nonstop since Margaret called.

Professor Smith—Diana—looks at me suspiciously but only says, “He’s here—we drove up together.”

“Oh.” Something cold drops into my stomach, even as my heart starts fluttering.

All of our heads turn back to the driveway, and there he is.