Page 114 of Let It Be Me

I could go to Ruby’s parents and tell them they’re fucking up her life and see if they have a shred of understanding of who their daughter is. I could be brutal to Ruby and tell her that if she thinks she’s proving anything with this move, then she needs to grow up. I could get her aunt and uncle’s info. I could find a way to fuck this up for her.

Or I could propose to her. How’s that for forever? Or I could forget the NFL and go to Canada. There’s a Canadian league. Canadian football. I’d probably be a legend.

It’s amazing how many choices I have, but not one of them will get me what I want and get Ruby what she needs. I spent so many years thinking I could make things okay for her, that I could be the one to save her if I got the timing right. But just when I thought I was close, it all blew up.

The only thing keeping me sane is football practice. I still can’t participate in most of our drills, but at least I’m out on the field working with my team. It feels like the only forward momentum in my life.

“Just let her go,” Cash counsels me in the locker room on Wednesday after a sweaty morning practice. I’m not sure whether that means he doesn’t understand the way I need Ruby or if he understands perfectly.

It’s not loneliness that I feel without her. It’s more like sickness, the weighty feeling of being unwell, because seeing her every day was simply part of what I did to stay alive. The same way I take showers and sleep and eat the big fucking salads Ruby always made fun of in order to just feel human, I talked to Ruby or sat on the couch with her or shared a meal just to feel like myself.

“I am letting her go,” I tell Cash grouchily. “Do you see me chasing after her?”

“Let her go in your head, dude. Acceptance. That’s all you can do.”

“Not a fucking chance. I’m not like Ruby. I can’t build my world around something and then just move clean on from it when it’s not perfect. There’s a sickness to her, honestly. The way she cuts things out of her life and never looks back? It’s not normal.”

“Eh.” Cash shrugs. “That’s hobbies. Interests. Not people.”

“She does it to people too. She loves to act like she has no friends except me, but that’s her choice. She’s had more friends throughout her life than anyone I know, but the life cycle of her friendships is complete in a matter of weeks. She moves on and never thinks about it again.”

“All right, look, I don’t blame you, because I would never stay friends with an ex, but aren’t you the one who refused to be friends with her? She didn’t cut you out.”

“Because there’s no going back to being friends. I’m not letting her soften the blow by acting like we can just take a step back and be what we always were. That’s a lie and she knows it.”I close my locker. “She killed everything we had. I’m not taking the blame for that.”

So I say. But what if I did rip away what was left of us? What if going back to being friends was just her hitting the pause button while she worked her shit out? Maybe we could have worked our way back to happiness.

“You want to grab some food?” Cash looks me over carefully. I must have a miserable expression on my face.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I can tell. Dude, you need to eat.”

“I eat.”

“Not enough for the weight you lift, apparently. You’re getting skinny, and sorry, but I don’t have it in me to cook and feed you like Ruby does.”

“Fine, let’s go grab some food,” I say to get him off my back.

Cash brightens, seeming to take this as a good sign. As we walk out the door, he slaps me on the back. “Proud of you, man.”

“For eating?”

“For letting go of the hand-wringing, must-control-everyone thing you do. Things’ll get better if you let go.”

“So far it’s not working.”

“Like over a lifetime, not a couple days.”

I rub absently at a mosquito bite on my arm. “I don’t want to think about what could happen to her over a lifetime.”

“Do I have to pull out that butterfly metaphor?”

I look at him. “No clue what you’re talking about.”

“You know it ... if you love something, set it free or some shit?”

I smile for the first time in days. “Please go on. I could use a laugh.”

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