I’m the fire in your sun
One minute you’re here
The next you’re done
Baby, where’ve you gone?
— “Supernova,” Tate Gardener
I stared around the room. Ten months after checking out of rehab, I was launching the perfume I’d spent months creating.
But it didn’t feel like a celebration to me. It’d taken me most of my life to get to where I was, but at what cost? I’d lost Trinity, Jack, and almost my relationship with my parents. My mental and physical health had suffered in multiple ways for most of my life. Was that the cost of so-called success?
People were starting to fill the hall, gravitating to the open bar and staring up at the posters hanging from the ceiling. In them, I was smiling and holding a rose gold perfume bottle. They’d Photoshopped it too much, so my eyebrows were more angular, my cheekbones even higher. It looked unnatural.
Like with many things in my life, I hadn’t had a say in it. Way to support someone who came out of rehab a few months ago for an eating disorder and had control issues. Go ahead, imply she’s ugly. Round of applause for you.
When I’d questioned the cosmetics company I was working with, they’d said, “It’s just business.” Wasn’t it always?
I checked the time on my phone. Ryan should’ve been there by now. We were supposed to be celebrating the launch together. He’d helped me build the relationships, develop the perfume, work on the launch strategy. And our business relationship had become personal over the months we’d worked together, too. So where was he?
If he wasn’t there, after all the work we’d put in, what did that say about our relationship? Did I really mean that little to him? Was I just a project to him?
I was so not going to be some side project he got bored with now that the launch had arrived.
The room was so full I could barely move. Total strangers had turned up to celebrate my success. So where was my boyfriend?
I called him. It went to voicemail. He called back immediately. I let it ring a few times.
“Sorry, babe,” he said when I decided to answer. “Meeting ran over. How’s the party?”
“You should be here,” I said. I sounded pathetic, and I knew it, but I wanted to make him feel guilty for letting me down again.
“I know, and I’m really sorry. Let me make it up to you?”
“That makes it sound like you won’t be coming at all.”
There was an awkward pause. My assumption was correct.
“Again?”
“Work is manic. You know how it is.”
He could play that card, sure. But even for someone who loved her job like me, there was a line. At what point did work become more important than the people you were supposed to love? And if you didn’t love them enough to put them first, did you really love them at all?
I hung up. I was so over his excuses.
We’d been together for six months, and his absenteeism was getting worse. He always blamed work. My mom had suggested that he was cheating on me and using it as an excuse. Way to have faith in my relationship.
I knew better. He wasn’t cheating on me with another person. He was cheating on me with his work. Ryan was, by far, the biggest workaholic I’d ever met. Even in his younger days, my producer dad couldn’t have kept up with Ryan.
At first, his work obsession hadn’t bothered me. I’d found it endearing; motivating. Especially as I’d been in the middle of so many things when we’d met. It hadn’t been his job to support me during my time in rehab, so we’d drifted apart, but when I came out, he was there. He helped me grow my business, made sure I ate, and listened when I needed to talk about things. He was so, so patient with me.
It felt like now that I’d served my purpose of helping him grow another business, and I no longer needed someone to look after me, I was worthless to him. Maybe I was reading too much into things, but what was I supposed to think when I’d barely seen him lately because of his work?
Even when we hung out at each other’s places, if he got a phone call mid-anything—TV show, dinner, sex—he’d answer it. He was that obsessed.
And I was tired of it.
I’d ended up in rehab because I’d pushed myself too far with work. My body had suffered to the point where it had shut down and almost killed me. That may have been almost a year ago, but it didn’t change the fact that I was terrified of ever going back to that place again.
So instead, I’d slowed down. Worked slowly on my new album, focusing on growing my new perfume line. I was proud of both finished products. My fourth album, “Supernova,” had been number one in multiple countries in the several weeks since its release, and we were capitalizing on that to launch the perfume right before the holiday season.
But no amount of festive cheer could brighten my mood. Without the person who’d been there by my side the whole way, it didn’t feel like a celebration. It felt more like a funeral.