Page 10 of A Lot to Unpack
‘Good morning,’ I say brightly.
‘Morning,’ he replies, looking up for a split second before whatever is on his phone screen pulls him back.
No need for me to push any buttons; we’re going to the same floor. As the lift starts moving, I try to relax.
I don’t know why I’m admiring a random man in a lift. Well, I do, it’s a distraction. I’m thinking about anything but my interview. Anything else would have been better, to be honestwith you, because my hunt for a man is going about as well as my hunt for a job. It ain’t.
The trouble I’m having is that, since Ben, I look at men in way more detail, and as soon as I put them under my microscope I realise I don’t like what I see. Obviously there are the big things, the dealbreakers, the red flags that put you off a person. I’m not talking about that. I suppose what I’m doing is comparing every man I meet to Ben, not in a good way, in a bad way. In hindsight, Ben did so many things that gave me the ick – his poor hygiene, his laziness, the fact he cared about sport more than he did me. Now that I’m looking for icks, trying to make sure no one has any, they’re all I can see. It’s like I have this ick alarm in my head and it always goes off, usually sooner rather than later, and then that’s that. Date over. I can’t deal with it.
I mean, take the sexy man in the lift here. He looks good – he smells amazing – but I bet I’d find something wrong with him, either something he’s doing wrong, or I’ll just home in on something that can’t be helped and let it ruin everything. Like, what if I hate his name? What if he’s called Ronald McDonald, or Homer Simpson, or Michael Scott? Seriously, Ben has done a real number on me, because I start trying to work out what is wrong with a person right away, and, frankly, he doesn’t have to have anything truly wrong with him, it might be because he has ice in his drink, or because he doesn’t, or because he uses a paper straw that weakens in the middle and breaks in half and that is obviously a personal failing on his part, right? Right?
It just always feels like the moment is coming, like it’s unavoidable. I’m starting to wonder if I should give up on dating for a while, because if I don’t go on them then I’ll never know what the thing was going to be that ruined it all. Sort of like a Schrödinger-type situation. I’ll only wind up feeling frustrated with myself, if I peep inside the box, so why bother?
Then again, maybe that’s how you live with regret. In the sort of words of Michael Scott, you miss all of the shots you don’t take. For that I need to keep trying, to turn up knowing that it’s going to be shit, but with the hope that this time it might not be.
That, my friend, is life until you die in a nutshell.
Hey, I already told you, Ben has done irreparable damage to me. I’m aware. But I don’t ever want to find myself in that situation again, so I’m not taking any risks.
All of a sudden the lift grinds to an unexpected halt. Then the lights go out. Like, properly out. It would be pitch black in here, were the man in here with me not still staring at this phone. It lights up his face, like he’s telling a horror story around a campfire. Two things – one, he’s still gorgeous, even with the creepy lighting. Two, he seems completely unbothered by what’s going on.
I, on the other hand, am very bothered.
‘Fuck,’ I blurt.
I think I hear him laugh, quickly and quietly. I turn to him.
‘The lift has broken down,’ I tell him, because I’m genuinely starting to think he might not have noticed.
‘Yeah,’ he confirms – still casual as you like. ‘It happens all the time.’
‘This lift breaks down all the time?’ I check, because surely not?
‘Yeah,’ he says again.
‘Then why would you get in it?’ I ask in disbelief.
‘Because it doesn’t happen often enough to make me want to walk up thirty flights of stairs every day,’ he says, amused.
It’s hard to tell if he’s an optimist or an idiot. Maybe he’s both?
‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t usually take them long,’ he (kind of) reassures me. ‘I think we almost made it all the way today.’
Sure enough the doors slowly open, letting light pool in from whatever floor we’re on – except we haven’t quite made it, we’re between floors, so we’re peering down at our rescuer.
‘Morning,’ she says.
‘Morning,’ the man replies.
‘Ladies first, I guess,’ she tells me, reaching up to take my hand.
So, what, I’m just supposed to jump out of the lift, into this random woman’s arms? Beats being trapped in a lift, I guess.
I take a leap of faith and land on my feet – but I roll my ankle in the process.
‘Ouch,’ I blurt.
The woman sort of ushers me to one side.
