Page 158 of The Love Haters

“This is why you wouldn’t tell me about your beauty list? Because you’re so insultingly nice to yourself? Do I have to spend the rest of my life resenting you about this?”

“I mean, you could, I guess,” Beanie said. “Or you could just do the same thing.”

Would I do the same thing? Unlikely.

But she could have been talking about ceiling paint right then, and I wouldn’t have cared. It felt so gloriously good for a minute for things to just feel normal. I knew I should tell her I was shipwrecked. I knew I should level with her about my dire situation. But, second by second, I just kept putting it off.

And that’s exactly what I was still doing when theRue the Daymade a funny groaning sound—and then tilted further, froma little bitto a full 45-degree angle.

One side of the roof shifted up. The other side shifted down. And my cell phone, which had been resting on the roof deck beside me, went skittering off, past the railing, and plunked into the ocean.

George Bailey and I also slid, but we caught ourselves on the railing.

For a second, in the aftermath, I wondered if Beanie would intuit what had just happened. But of course she’d just assume my battery had died. The most hollow, gaping loneliness came over me then, as I lost my last connection to civilization. And panic, too.

George Bailey and I both panted at each other.

But that’s when I looked down to see, tucked between George Bailey’s paws, Hutch’s jar of pennies. Still standing.

“Nice catch,” I said.

I reached over, took the jar, unscrewed it, and transferred all the pennies to my jeans pockets. Every last one.

IN THE WAKEof my cell phone’s untimely demise, I entered, shall we say, a dark period in my life.

It seemed pretty undeniable that I was going to die.

Sooner rather than later.

Braced against a roof railing at a 45-degree angle on a sinking houseboat with no remaining connection to civilization, and only a bandaged, bleeding dog and his pet toad for company, I felt—maybe for the first time in my life—true despair.

It was the silence, I think.

Or possibly the empty sky.

Or the way it kept getting harder and harder to imagine a version of this moment where the dog, the toad, and I wound up surviving.

Time compressed down and stretched out at the same time.

What happens when you drown? What does it feel like? Is it peaceful—or full of thrashing? Does it hurt when the water fills your lungs? I remembered, years ago, when I was a kid, not wanting my grandmother to be cremated because I just couldn’t accept that it wouldn’t hurt. But now, being cremated seemed like Swedish massage compared to whatever awaited me in the deep ocean. A school of piranhas, maybe—feasting on me like a charcuterie board?

A visual that I couldn’t push away took over the movie screen of my mind: of tiny fish nibbling away every single thing about me that made meme. The earlobes? Eaten. The eyes? Consumed. The kissable mouth? Devoured.

What does that old song say? “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”?

The very real, very immediate prospect of my body—the one I’d picked on and complained about and disdained so hard for all these years—suddenly just…not being there…

It saturated me with a sadness so deep, socellular, I’d never felt anything like it before.

Grief.

Grief for a body that, it turned out, I’d loved all along.

I’d taken her for granted, this soft, tender, undemanding self—all these years. I’d criticized her, and ignored her, and scorned her, and denied her. And she’d just endured it. She’d stayed with me and taken it all—because she had no choice.

And now it was a love story—but a tragic one. Because now it was too late.

Tears streamed from the corners of my eyes as I watched the sky. I regretted how mean I’d been. I regretted how relentlessly I had refused to show myself any kindness. I felt the most doomed and hopeless protectiveness. I wished beyond anything that I could save her.

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