The weather turned from hard wet (ice, hail) to soft wet (rain, mush), and I was still living at my dad’s, a three-bedroom bungalow near Sydenham he had begun referring to as “Divorce Club.” I had planned to stay with my mother, historically the more tolerant parent, but things were getting serious between her and Jeff, so Divorce Club it was.
To my surprise, my father and I had settled easily into a cohabiting rhythm, sharing breakfast and then going our separate ways until dinner. On Wednesdays I would borrow his car and drive to Toronto, where I would teach and hold office hours, see Helen, and sleep on Lauren’s couch. On Thursdays I taught another class and took Merris to physio or to run other errands before driving back to my dad’s to pedal a stationary bike in the den and consider my credit card debt. On weekends I worked at a cheese store that smelled terrible.
The house had been purchased after I’d moved to Toronto, so it was not enormously familiar to me. I would occasionally open the linen closet door thinking it led to the bathroom, and I had no idea where pots and pans went in the cheerful, jumbled kitchen. I slept in a single bed in a room with wood-paneled walls that I worked hard to find pleasingly ascetic, if not aesthetic—hygge on a budget. My father was very understanding and gave me a great deal of space and privacy, but I was always on the lookout for the generational difference that would disrupt our fragile peace. On Twitter I followed a few millennials who lived with their parents and were constantly having to school them about how to be good and conscientious people. It seemed easier to live with children; they were always wandering into living rooms saying something accidentally profound—Mom, it’s so important when women vote, etc.—but I had a male boomer on my hands. Nightmare.
“Look at this,” he said one morning, gesturing to a physical newspaper he had somehow acquired. “A bunch of fast-food employees want to raise the minimum wage. Fifteen dollars an hour, to work in McDonald’s.”
He tutted and I cracked my knuckles, readying myself to make a speech. I did not relish the idea of yelling at my father, but he was being a small-minded classist, and I knew, as someone who had read more of the right articles, that I had a certain responsibility. “Dad—” I started, but he was not finished.
“It’s not really enough,” he said. “With inflation, I mean.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” I looked down and saw I had adopted a kind of Power Rangers stance, my feet wide, my hands on my hips. “Well, they wouldn’t even have to worry about it if we had universal basic income.”
He took a long sip of coffee and looked at me with a placid expression. “I agree,” he said, and went back to his paper. To purge some of the righteousness I’d built up, I picked a fight about his belief that the property bubble would one day burst, allowing me to purchase a home.
I went back to my bedroom and deleted Twitter, Tinder, Hinge, Instagram, Bumble, TikTok, and Facebook from my phone, then redownloaded them a week later, plus an app that would limit the window during which I could access the internet. I downloaded another app to show me where the moon was in the sky, whether it was waxing or waning. I downloaded something called a “newsfeed eradicator” that promised to claw back my attention span by replacing the endless updates from friends, brands, and journalists deafened by silence with motivational quotes. The first one it showed me read, “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, ‘I’m possible’!” attributed to the actress Audrey Hepburn.
I unfollowed the tiny Instagram women having picnics in the sun and started following a “radical softness”–themed account that was mostly shots of ecstatic fat women dancing around in their underwear. Sometimes their pets featured. I watched a girl in Korea fill in paintings of her friends’ gracefully sloping bodies. I listened to a livestream of a tulip field in the Netherlands. I visited a website that let you look out strangers’ windows. I cut and bleached my hair and resisted a near-physical yearning to share a photo of it online. As a compromise, I sent seven different Live Photos to the group chat, who all agreed they had been wrong, this was a great move, and I looked, in Lauren’s words, possibly damaged but definitely sexy, so: net positive.
I cut back heavily on posting, though the compulsion was still there—to have something to say or show for myself, to “share.” When I did say or show or share something (a tweet about my menstrual cycle, a photo of flowers by the lake with the caption ok spring!!), I felt instantly and viscerally ashamed and often deleted what I’d posted. This did not help. In fact, the deleting felt, in many ways, just as white-hot humiliating as leaving the posts up, because it was the act of posting in the first place, the expression of the compulsion, that shamed me. No need to admit this publicly too.
I didn’t know where this aversion had come from. No one else in my life seemed to share it. Clive and Lauren had started “going live” on Friday nights, drinking and laughing and performing very loosely sketched out character comedy for six or seven people. Friends who seemed completely normal IRL were taking slow-motion videos of themselves weeping and putting them on TikTok with messages about how to respect but also push past one’s comfort zone. A guy I often saw in the department kitchen turned out to have a famous Twitter account where he tweeted not now babe to various world leaders.
Sometimes I thought: Why shouldn’t I post a little joke, or tell a pundit he’s being an asshole? Why shouldn’t I share some photos that make me feel beautiful? Why not document my life, my face, my moods? And sometimes I thought that setting up a self-timer in my bathroom, biting my lower lip over and over, then posting the one image I liked from the four hundred I’d taken was as vulgar and unnecessary as bending over and showing everyone my asshole.
One night I was in the den “stretching” after a bike ride, which mostly meant lying on the floor with my legs up the wall. Usually I spent this post-workout time trying to sit quietly with myself, but if I did that for too long I almost always became overwhelmed with memories of the phone calls and voicemails and texts to Jon, or the image of Merris on the ground outside the wedding, or how Amy’s face had looked when she told me I was being mean. It was horrible to remember these things. I knew, theoretically, that to err was human, but it sort of seemed like there should be a limit on how much erring one human could do.
I thought about that first night with Simon: how can you tell if something you did was a stupid mistake or a real sign of your character? I still didn’t know, but it was starting to feel like thinking about it all the time was not as useful as just trying not to do it again. I nudged my butt closer to the wall, pushing my legs up higher, and stretched my arms out on both sides until my left hand curled around my phone. Outside the door, I could hear my father plodding around, probably making some wild Dad Snack—he had recently bought us individual his ’n’ hers jars of applesauce—or watching the news on both the television and a nearby iPad.
I was looking over old photos I’d sent to/received from Simon when the screen went dark and his name appeared. I stared at my phone for a few confused seconds before realizing it was a call. Simon was calling me.
I held the phone to my ear tentatively, like it was a trick. “Hello . . . ?”
“Maggie, hi,” he said, his voice as warm and steady as I remembered. “Sorry to call. I was thinking about you and had an urge, but maybe I should have gone for a walk or something.”
I told him it was not a problem and asked how he was. He was good, of course. Work was busy. His parents had decided to move. He was tuning up his bike in preparation for spring. He missed me and wondered if we could get together and talk a few things over.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “About the last time we talked.”
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I feel like we really rushed into things. Like it was nice to meet you, and it was so nice to feel something other than incredibly bad about my breakup all the time, but I think I should have been better about keeping it casual, giving us some time to get to know each other. I guess I’d like to take you on a date and see if we want to go on another one a week later.”
“God,” I said. “Shit.”
“Oh, right, well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Never mind.”
“No, not shit like bad, shit like good.”
“That famous application of the word ‘shit.’”
I looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Well, I guess shit bad, because I can’t see you,” I said. “Helen and I have agreed to put that area of my life on hiatus.”
“Who’s Helen?”
He was going to love this. He was going to cream his jeans.
“She’s my therapist.”
Simon was quiet, a therapist-acquired trick if there ever was one. It worked, unfortunately, and I went on a long rant about how we were doing the smart thing. The mature thing, even! Ultimately, we were being wise. Yes, I liked him, and he liked me, but nipping that in the bud meant I did not have to disappoint Helen. It also meant neither of us had to disappoint each other, eventually. It had gone bad so quickly the first time.
“Sounds like decathecting to me,” said Simon.
“I don’t know what that is, but don’t tell me.”
“Okay. Well, call me if you change your mind.”
“Okay.”
Another pause.
“This is embarrassing,” I said, “but I haven’t been alone in a long time, and now I am, and if I don’t stay that way for a bit, I will never understand what it is I actually like or want or even, maybe, feel, so I have to be a careful little nun for a few weeks or months, and then who knows? Maybe I’ll have missed the window and every person worth dating will be taken and I’ll just stay alone for the rest of my life.”
“I think that’s unlikely,” said Simon. “But it sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.”
A non-negligible part of me was screaming, run, run toward the kindness the handsome man is offering, it may be the last time this ever, ever happens. But I had meant what I said. It was not a good time. I closed my eyes and said, “Thank you, Simon,” and I felt like I could hear him smile.
After he hung up, I looked up the word “decathecting,” then spent twenty minutes trying to compose a tweet listing the events of a decathect-lon—like a decathlon, but for protecting your emotional sanity. I did not even save it to drafts.
I wandered into the kitchen and told my father I was experimenting with interiority. He looked up from the crossword only briefly. “Oh?”
“This sounds very basic,” I said, “but you don’t have to say everything you think and feel to everyone around you all the time. Even if you want to. You can keep it to yourself. Sometimes, that feels better.”
“‘Teaspoon,’” he said, filling in 10-down. “That’s lovely, sweetheart. As you know, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”
I told him my discovery had inspired some fruitful experimentation. My options, when I had a thought, experience, or god forbid, a feeling, were to write it down and resist the impulse to text or tweet it, or to mentally note what I was feeling and—and this was the thing that seemed impossible, possibly even fake—let it pass.
“Well,” he said, counting out the letters in the word “petrichor.” “Could have saved us all a lot of trouble by discovering this in high school, but better late than never.”
“I’m serious,” I said, grabbing some milk from the fridge. I told him I’d realized recently that almost nothing had ever happened to me that I had not shared with someone else. This had, after all, been one of the big appeals of marriage: somebody to say all my stupid bullshit to or run my decisions past, someone to listen to me forever. I poured the milk over an enormous bowl of cereal, letting it crackle and hiss before digging my spoon in and taking a bite.
“Of course, the whole point of a relationship is you’ve also got to listen to—pardon my French—their stupid bullshit,” said my dad. “I assume you struggled in this area.”
I ignored this, though he was not wrong.
“I saw Mom yesterday,” I said. “She’s still mad at you.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “I was kind of an asshole.”
I asked what had happened between them, really. He told me he was almost finished with the crossword and would prefer I experimented further with interiority.
“Aside from the fact that it’s none of your business,” he said, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I thought I did, at the time, but the further I get from it the more I see how little I understood what was going on in there. My feelings about it and your mother’s feelings about it are very different. Neither of us is exactly right, but both versions are accurate.”
I said this was disappointing to hear. Distance was supposed to give you more perspective, not less.
“I think it did,” he said. “With time I stopped clinging to my own version of events and accepted that two things can be true, that we might never agree about what exactly went wrong. Though I’m sure she’d agree we should never have had that swingers’ night with the Carlsons.”
I stayed poker-faced and waited for him to say he was kidding. He remained focused on the crossword. I peeped over his shoulder and said, “‘Prolix.’”
He filled in the relevant squares. “You’re telling me.”
I went back to the den and climbed onto the stationary bike. I finished a triathlon in the remaining weeks of April, a laughably modest goal the completion of which felt better than drugs. While running some of my twenty kilometers, I tripped over a root in the sidewalk, falling hard onto the side of my body where a sporty little fanny pack held my keys, phone, and some extra hair ties. I completed a full thirty minutes of running, went home, and got in the shower. Later that night, I went to text the group chat an image of a fish finger that looked like a dick and found the fall had cracked my phone screen. It was still functional, just less pleasant to use, and I worried I might get a glass sliver stuck in my fingertip. Charlie Brooker, I thought, you’ve done it again!
The weeks continued this way: more newspapers, more cereal, more driving to Toronto, more driving back. I felt very fortunate and a little bored. I helped Merris with groceries and minor housekeeping and stayed out of her way at work, though we sometimes had tea when I brought her home from physio. I read a few poems from Amy’s book and hated them a lot, but felt fondness for the person who gave them to me, who was comforted by the idea of a woman whose heart was a house fire. Amirah and I had our green-tea-and-grovel session, and I went with her afterward to a hospital fundraiser/musical revue featuring a bunch of a cappella anesthesiologists. It was completely terrible and so, so fun to be there with her, whispering and giggling at the back of the room. I saw Clive and Lauren and Emotional Lauren in real life, one-on-one situations where I tried to be a good listener and better friend. Sometimes I succeeded. This was quietly satisfying but did not do much to quell the shame that would rise in me every few hours like acid reflux—a reminder that I was a failure, back in the town she grew up in, eating applesauce her dad had paid for.
Still, pleasant moments found ways of sneaking in: finding a solo seat on the bus near a window, having enough coffee left for a perfect top-up, coming home from the grocery store with flowers, to put tomatoes in a different bowl from bananas. In one of our now-weekly sessions, I described these moments to Helen. As I was leaving her office, I caught a glimpse of her notes: “finding joy in the mundanity of life.”
It did feel mundane. Everything just kept happening.