“Fuck time,” I’d said. “You think it’s moving you forward, moving you closer to something, but it’s really just happening without you.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Charles had said, like I’d finally seen reason.
Milton had found me in the same stairwell where we’d first met at orientation.
“Oh, hon,” he’d said when I told him. That’s all. He didn’t say he told me so, or that he hated Will—though he said both later on, the former to my annoyance and the latter to my vague and petty satisfaction. He’d just held me while I cried and then taken over my life for the next week, making sure that I ate and slept and went to class.
He dragged me bodily from the dorms one night to go to a movie with him and Gretchen that I didn’t pay attention to and didn’t remember after. I sat between them in the darkness, my friends, and I imagined I was still in the planetarium with Will, and I cried. And then when I got back to my room I YouTubed the planetarium scene from Rebel Without a Cause that Will had mentioned, and I thought how James Dean actually looked a little bit like Will—the sharp angle of the jaw and the eyes that shifted from bravado to uncertainty a little too easily.
Two weeks after the night I’d walked in on Will, he called me to ask how I was. I’d left him a drunken message the night before that I only remembered cringingly when I saw his name appear on my phone. I answered but didn’t say anything at first. Will talked like things were normal between us. He told me about a client at work (screaming fit when he told her she couldn’t have an entirely black cover no matter how edgy her book might be) and about the new Vietnamese place he’d tried in the neighborhood (great bún but bland spring rolls). He told me that he’d been rewatching Firefly and wondered if I’d seen it (of course I had; what kind of tasteless moron did he take me for).
And, finally, when he petered out and lapsed into silence, I took a deep breath, sat up straight, and told Will what I’d realized.
My friends had weighed in. Milton was loudest, as usual. Will is bad for you. He’s a drug and you’re an addict, and you can’t be trusted to make logical, healthy decisions around him, so you should stay the fuck away. But, barring that, just don’t make yourself vulnerable to him. Be as remote and untouchable as he is.
Gretchen was practical and generous: If he’s taking up space in your head, then he’s a part of your life, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how you feel about him. It blended a bit with something that Tonya said in yoga when we were in challenging poses: Find the place where you’re doing work you don’t need to do. Soften your jaw, your eyes, your hands. They aren’t helping you lunge so you don’t need to expend energy on them.
The truth was that Will was a constantly tensed muscle, using energy even when I wasn’t actively engaging with him.
I took a deep breath and told Will, “I guess I kind of thought if I just waited long enough you’d realize that you wanted to be with me.” My voice sounded small and pathetic, but I forced myself to go on. “I know you didn’t promise me that. I know. We really do want different things, I guess. And I’m just making myself pathetic now, so I need to stop.”
Will started to say something, but I didn’t let him. I needed to get it out now or I never would.
“The thing is, I can’t see you. You take up too much… everything. I don’t know how to, I guess, feel things halfway. If you’re always there in the back of my mind—if I’m always so invested in you…. See, I want to give you what you want. You know? I want you to be happy because I—I care about you so much. But I can’t really because giving you what makes you happy makes me so… so fucking miserable.” I took a deep breath, trying not to cry and failing.
“So I get that you won’t change, but I don’t think I can either. I can’t stop wanting what I want—so. So I need to stop. I need to like get a fucking life, I guess. Of my own. Yeah. I need to get a life.”
Silence, but I knew he was still there.
Finally, his voice as small as I’d ever heard it, Will said, “Okay. I understand. Take care of yourself, babe.”
He ended the call.
And I broke all over again.
I THREW myself into Project: Get a Life with as much enthusiasm as Charles undertook his Project: 36-Hour Days, and a level of manic desperation that I acknowledged and accepted.