WHEN I FIRST STARTED THIS BOOK, I assumed it would end with a wedding.
Not mine, obviously—that would be ludicrous—but Rylee’s. She was dating a man named Andres whom she had met while working as a seasonal grounds-crew member at an arboretum. Andres was a full-time horticulturist and, naturally, he had a crush on Rylee from the day she started. She had another boyfriend when he first met her, but they broke up. Three weeks later—it wasn’t a particularly tragic recovery period—she started dating Andres. A few weeks after that, something very, very strange happened. I realized that I thought he sounded great. Perfect, even. For basically the first time in my entire life, I thought I might actually like one of my friend’s boyfriends.
It was something about the way she talked about him. There wasn’t any hedging, no habits he had that she would complain about and subsequently defend when I asked her if she didn’t think they might be a problem for her. She talked about him leaving M&M’s and a can of Diet Coke (her two favorite food items) in her work cubby to surprise her. She talked about the two of them spending time running around outdoors, making each other laugh so hard they could hardly concentrate on Mario Kart, and having really good sex. She told me her family loved him, and that his loved her. It all kind of made me want to throw up, and I told her so. In a loving way. She knows me well enough to know that, from me, that was distinctively high praise.
I guess it was about three or four months in when I decided he was “the one.” I don’t mean “decided” in that I was going to arrange their marriage, but just that I felt very certain that they were going to be in love forever. I remember when I knew: We were on the phone, and she was telling me that, the past Friday, they had gone out drinking with work friends and on the walk home, they had taken turns pretending to throw up off the sidewalk, made sick by how much they physically repulsed one another. You know: like twenty-four-year-old girls and twenty-six-year-old boys do when they really like each other. It was the kind of thing that, before, only Rylee would have found hilarious. It was the kind of thing that other boyfriends ignored or nervously laughed at, or it was the kind of thing Rylee would have previously kept herself from doing in order to make herself more “suitable” to the person she was dating. So that was when I started a Word document for her wedding toast. I like to be prepared. Every time I opened it and tried to write a few words, I started crying. It was the first time I have ever cried from being happy. That’s another reason I knew.
Rylee always wanted to find him so badly. She’s talked about (or at least thought about) marriage with every boyfriend she’s ever had. Even Aaron, the PowerPoint Presenter. Even the redhead hipster she dated for one month after she transferred, and even (improbably) the pothead Phish-loving hippie she dated for three weeks the year after that. Even everyone in between. These discussions (when relayed to me later) inspired varying levels of panic in me, depending on the particular boyfriend’s relative awfulness. When Rylee started telling me she and Andres had started talking about getting married someday, I didn’t worry. The thought had already occurred to me. Knowing that I thought they were meant to be made me feel better—because if someone was going to take my best friend away from me, he had better be goddamn flawless—and apparently Rylee knowing that I thought they were meant to be made her feel better, more sure that it was right. When she told me that, I happiness-cried again. “I told you that all those years of telling you I hated your other boyfriends would pay off,” I told her. She just glared, but I knew it was in a way that meant, “You’re right, and it is clear to me now that your unflinching rigidity and hostility toward my past boyfriends has been for my own good.” It felt so good, the two of us agreeing on how great her boyfriend was for once. We could both be right.
And then we were wrong. Then, almost two years into their relationship, when she and I were both twenty-five, Andres cheated on Rylee. He drunkenly made out with the girl Rylee had always worried about—the one lingering fear she’d had about him, that he’d end up thinking of that girl as more than a friend—and then spent the rest of the night cuddling with her in her bed. It was winter break and Rylee was in Chicago, home from school. Andres told her what happened right before Christmas, though it had happened a week earlier. He had planned to wait until after Christmas, so she could “enjoy the holiday,” but somehow Rylee got a feeling. She asked him on December twenty-third if he had ever cheated on her, and he said no. She asked him again—asked him to swear—and, that time, he said yes. She called me crying, right after he told her, from her car on the street outside his apartment. She was trying to run but couldn’t quite get herself to do it. Under any other circumstances, I would have told her to leave and not look back. But we were adults now, and I was in shock. I could not believe this was happening. I wanted to kill him. But when she told me she thought she should go back inside and talk to him before making any rash decisions, I said I thought that was a good idea.
Before it actually happened, I think both Rylee and I believed that she wouldn’t survive breaking up with Andres. I didn’t know what she would do, but I had thought it would be reckless. She has spent her whole life looking for her husband, and I didn’t know how she’d be able to live through losing the person she had decided was him. It’s not that I didn’t think she was strong. I did, and I do. But Rylee is impulsive and heartfelt and persistent, jumping into things before she’s sure she’s ready and often unwilling to break away unless she’s forced. So I expected her to stay and try and work until he made her leave. And she did, for one week. But it wasn’t him who made her go—he was the catalyst, but he was also too weak (a “fucking coward,” in my preferred refrain) to tell her he wanted things to end. He would have passively gone along with whatever she decided, at least for a while. And she realized that. So Rylee did the bravest thing I’ve ever known her to do, and she left. She drove back to Minnesota a week before the end of winter break, because the man from whom she had been expecting an engagement ring had cheated on her at Christmastime. She didn’t do anything crazy. She just cried—the whole drive home, and for the entire two weeks after that. It was more crying than I knew was possible, but it wasn’t hysterical. It was the calmest round-the-clock sobbing a person could do.
The first few days gave me a false impression of her recovery rate, because she was too deep in shock to let any kind of finality sink in. She laughed at a few things here and there, and I thought that meant she’d be happy soon. You always forget that it’s impossible to grieve every minute of the day. You always forget that a mourning period can include laughter, but just because it’s there, it won’t mean that you’re really okay. It got worse before it got better. There were the aftermath phone calls with Andres, in which they both danced around the idea of leaving a renewed relationship a future option, and the talks we had afterward in which we both tried to decide whether holding out hope was a very good idea. I said I didn’t think it was. She said she didn’t even know how to rule out that chance, and wasn’t sure she wanted to try.
Sometimes I heard her crying from my room. I’d go to check on her and she’d be in her (empty) bathtub. There is just something about bathroom basins that call out to a person who is crying about a guy. It’s not comfortable and that’s welcome because you don’t want to BE comfortable. The porcelain and Formica are cold and unforgiving, just like SOME people you know.
The main thing she kept asking me was, “When am I going to feel better?” I told her, “Soon.” Or I told her, “I don’t know when, but you will.” Or I told her, “It’s just going to take time.” These are the things we tell each other more because we want them to be true than because we know they will be. I mean, it’s not like I could really be sure that her heart wouldn’t get so heavy that it would slide out of place and into her feet, so that her heart rate would always have to be measured by a nurse holding her foot. I wasn’t certain that Andres wouldn’t mail her a package of the things she’d left behind, with a note reading “I always hated you AND, even though I can’t see you, I think your hair looks dumb today.” I wasn’t sure that the world wouldn’t one day soon fall off its axis and we’d all go sliding off the ends of the earth into space and suffocate. I’m still a little worried about that one, actually. But I wasn’t going to tell her that. I was going to tell her that I knew, without a doubt, that everything was going to be okay. Just because I needed it to be.
I had always wanted there to be a reason for her to stay in Minneapolis forever, and not go back to Chicago as she had planned. I had always wanted us to live together and be single at the same time for any real length of time, just for once in our lives. We had gotten into little fights about this. I’d get upset when she’d delay something we planned to do because she had to talk to Andres on the phone, and I would tell her that I wished he wouldn’t have to figure into every last thing we did. And because I don’t know how to not say things that come into my mind, I would tell her that I just wished she was single sometimes. It was selfish in the way we sometimes want our most adored others to be ours alone. Her whole life has been spent looking for that in a man, and mine has been spent looking for it in a best friend who doesn’t ever date anyone either and can be with me twenty-four hours a day—or at least some slightly tempered, less creepy-sounding version of the same. Now it looked like I would be getting what I wanted, but not in a way I would have ever wished for. She would stay because here at least she had a roommate and more job prospects. It was practical, and it was anticlimactic, because it didn’t feel like something I should express excitement about. “Your boyfriend cheated on you and you have no future left in Chicago and so now you’re staying with meeeee! YAYYYY!!!!” That would have been kind of rude.
Soon, though, there were signs that things really were going to get better. One day, about a month and a half after the breakup, when she was walking to class and I was back in the apartment, she texted me, “Even if I’m not totally over the Andres situation, I’m really happy I’m staying in Minnesota.” I read that message, and then I involuntarily squealed, and then I locked it so I could keep it for as long as I have this phone, because I wanted tangible proof of the first time she’d ever said something loving about Minnesota to me. There was also the grief progress chart I’d drawn on her whiteboard after an especially long crying session of hers. It was a loop pattern that mimicked what I’d heard or read somewhere about progress looking like a spiral more often than a straight upward-sloping line. (I looked it up just now and it might have originated with a potty-training book? Seems appropriate.) There would be times when she started to feel better, but these would be followed by little periods of feeling worse. The thing to remember, I said, was that the periods of feeling worse would still be higher up than previous periods of feeling better. At the bottoms of the spirals Rylee drew cartoons of herself filling up various bodies of water with tears—bathtubs, pools, oceans. Sometime in late March, I walked into her room with her and noticed that the chart was gone. In its place were written her assignments and daily schedules on the board, just like she always used to do. Just like normal.
I kept waiting for the anger stage of the grief cycle—my favorite part of my friends’ breakups, when we can be hyperbolically angry and shout-y together, a team of two against everyone who has ever wronged us—but it never came. She never said that she hated him, or that she wished his extremities would all fall off, or that he’d get caught in quicksand but that what would kill him would be the swarm of flesh-eating insects that attacked his head. And a few months later, when he came back around (like they always do, with her), asking if she thought they could ever get back together, and she said no, she just felt sorry. There wasn’t any glory in it. There wasn’t any reason to want revenge, or to hold that over him, because she didn’t need it. There wasn’t any fury to feed, no anger stage to get through on the way to acceptance. There weren’t going to be any vindictive stick-figure comic strips made about him, or any tearing up of things he’d given to her, nights spent slandering his character. It wasn’t that kind of breakup. We are getting older (and, allegedly, wiser), so maybe the relationships and the recovery aren’t always so clear-cut. Sometimes you just love someone for as long as you can, up until it makes less sense for you to keep trying than it does for you to stop. You lose each other, and that is the end. There isn’t really anything funny about it.
A couple of weeks ago I asked Rylee what the turning point was—the thing that made her know that she could get past this and not only live but maybe do better than she was doing before—and she said it was when she realized that she could do whatever she wanted, work wherever she wanted, and live wherever she wanted. She could live in Minnesota because it was best for her career and her happiness and because she wanted to be near her friends (Me! She meant me!). She didn’t have to think about anyone else’s goals or desires and then try to make them work with her own, or sacrifice opportunities she wanted because there was a future family to consider. It’s not that she wouldn’t do those things. It’s just that she didn’t HAVE to. She could live for herself and herself alone, and if what she wanted to do happened to match up with what someone she cared about wanted to do (like, say, me), then that was just great. When she was saying all this everything went sort of slow-motion for me, or maybe I was just only partially listening to have an inward epiphany at the same time (I would apologize to her, but she does this to me ALL THE TIME). I was somehow only then understanding that this freedom Rylee was describing was totally new to her. To me it sounded normal—a description of what it feels like to be not only single, but (relatively) unconcernedly so. This is the same freedom I’ve always had, for my whole entire life.