Page 7 of Winter Break Up

What if I am now? What if I always have been?

Her teeth gnaw on her bottom lip, and my gaze zeroes in, wanting to take that plumpness with my mouth and suck on it until she says my name. Moving with all the caution of a wild animal stalking its prey, taking care to stay quiet and not spook her, I begin to lean forward. This may be the dumbest thing to do right now, but my brain won’t work, and my heart doesn’t care to listen.

A slamming sound from just outside the door invades my irrational thoughts, and suddenly, Emily is ducking around my body and scooping up her cold-weather gear once more.

With her hand on the doorknob, she turns to meet my eyes one more time. For a split second, I think she might come back. I think she might say something, say anything. But her mouth opens then shuts, and before I can try to gently grab her elbow, she’s out the door.

Only now do I realize how impossible working with her day in and day out is going to be. There is a real chance I might spill my guts and confess to exactly how I want her in my life moving forward. For some reason, I’m completely tempted to make us all or nothing.

4

EMILY

A quiet morning in the Palmer house is so rare that I cherish it when I spend time at home these days.

My mom and dad are both early risers and seem to have instilled that in Charlie and me, whether we like it or not. By six a.m. most days, Dad has the juicer going in the kitchen, Mom is doing a Pilates class in the living room, our dog Sparky is playing fetch by himself, flinging a tennis ball all over the first floor, and my brother is blasting music while trying to pump out pushups like a moron.

I roll over, sleep hazy in my eyes and brain, as I curse this family-wide habit of being early birds. Typically, I’ve already gotten a two-mile walk or run in. That’s the way I like to wake up. But this morning? I can barely drag myself to sit up in my sheets.

And it’s all Mercer Russell’s fault.

I’m surprised there aren’t two eye-shaped holes in my ceiling from how hard I was staring up at it until three a.m. Sleep evaded me, replaced by an anxiety I couldn’t shake until I gave in and took an emergency pill to help my brain shut down.

Turns out, my haircut isn’t the only thing that’s changed about me in the last couple of months. No, the beginning of the fall semester this year feels decades in the past with what I’ve been through since then. My brain and emotions feel like they’ve survived a war, my own private battle being put on in my head.

Dating in college has been a bunch of random relationships, quick to heat up and fizzle out, until I stumble on the next guy who I think might fill the spot of a person who is irreplaceable. I’ve been a bit flippant and flaky, as my roommate and best friend, Zoe, likes to remind me. At first, I’ll be all about the guy I’m seeing. I want to put real effort into getting to know them, will talk to them via text all the time, and agree to go anywhere and everywhere to hang out. But then the first week ends, and I become a little less enthusiastic. My schedule gets in the way, or I’m too busy hanging out with friends. These are excuses I use because something inside me just fizzles. The guy I’m seeing will show up, and I know, deep in my heart, that I have zero spark with him. Zoe says I like to try to power through, but it never works. And by the end of about three weeks, I’m leaving the poor bastard behind when he’s done nothing wrong.

I wish I weren’t like this. I wish that my heart could latch onto these men who are, for all intents and purposes, really great candidates for boyfriends. It’s not like they did anything or hurt me in any way. Simply put, my attraction to anyone seems to vanish. The candle flickers out so quickly, and there is nothing I can do to reignite it, no matter how hard I want to.

Which is why Rich had surprised me. For the first time in three and a half years, my interest in a man outlasted that three-week period. By the end of September, we were full-fledged boyfriend and girlfriend, and I was so into him it was scaring me. In a good way, though, because I wanted to be around him all the time. The world seemed to focus back into view a little bit for the first time since I’d broken up with Mercer. They say love makes you see colors more clearly, right? Well, I wasn’t in love, but it was the first time while at school that I could see myself getting there.

Until mid-October, when I walked into a bathroom at a Friday night party and found my boyfriend with his fingers in another girl’s pants while his tongue was down her throat. They’d been going at it so sloppily with all that alcohol involved that it took him three full minutes to register who was standing in front of him.

My heart felt like it dropped out of my butt. I’d been on the verge of tears, and my fingers and thighs started to go numb. My extremities tingled like they weren’t getting enough blood flow, and then the breathlessness came on. Zoe found me huddled on the front porch, trying to gulp air into my lungs, and took me home.

The next day, I woke up and thought I’d dreamed it, but no. The ugly reality was that my boyfriend had cheated on me, and I was oddly devastated. Naively, I’d assumed that since I’d finally been able to connect with a guy for more than that initial meeting period, he’d naturally be super into me as well. Never once had I thought that Rich would betray me like that, but then I guess I was so focused on breaking through my issues that I wasn’t focused on who he was inside. Who was he? A player, apparently. A typical college fuck boy who wanted to eat his cake and then some more cake. And some more, from what I heard after we broke up.

The lasting impact Rich left on me, though? Anxiety. I wasn’t as upset about the breakup as I was with my own blindness to it. How could this be going on under my nose, and I had no idea? I felt crazy, like I couldn’t trust anything I was thinking or my instincts, which I’d never doubted before. My thoughts would spiral out of control until I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like all the feeling was being sucked from my arms and legs. I’d never been so unsure of who I was, how I was viewed in the world, or what I was supposed to do with all the negativity I was feeling. Discovering Rich cheating was a knock to my fundamental makeup, even if his philandering had nothing to do with me.

Yes, the haircut was one way of coping. Of trying to take control when I felt like I had none. Getting medication after consulting with the school health center was another change, one that only my mother knows about. When the anxiety attacks started to get so bad that I felt my heart might give out from the strain, when I couldn’t sleep and would go days without it, I knew I had to do something.

The university doctor I saw did a full workup, talked me through what was going on, and then prescribed me a low-dose medication to take daily. She also prescribed medication to take when the attacks became unmanageable so that I could calm down enough to function and sleep and not end up walking through life like a zombie.

So, on nights when things got really bad, when I couldn’t seem to shut my mind off, and the thoughts were making me want to sink into a hole in my mattress, I took one of the pills to calm and make me drowsy. They worked well, and I was trying to use them sparingly, but last night called for medical intervention.

Mercer was going to kiss me in the break room, of that, I’m sure. We were too close, our bodies were too warm, the chemistry was nearly a living being standing right there with us. Those brilliant blue eyes had been glued to my mouth, and I saw him lean in. I’d begun to flutter my eyes closed, had been practically chanting in my head for him to lay one on me, and then the spell had broken.

What if he had? What if we couldn’t stop? What if I admitted I’d made a horrible mistake all those years ago? What if he didn’t feel the same about me anymore and just wanted a hookup? What if I fell further in love with him and then he left?

Those questions, all the scenarios running around my mind, all the futures I was trying to predict, they wouldn’t leave me alone. My brain wouldn’t shut off. No matter what I did, whether reading a book, watching a show, or playing a stupid game on my phone, none of it would help me get to sleep.

So I took a pill, passed out, and now I feel like I’m being dragged earth-side from under the water trying to get up this morning. My limbs feel heavy, my mind foggy, my eyes keep shutting because I don’t want to get up. Except the people I love the most in this world are making that very difficult right now. Since I only got to sleep at three a.m. and my phone clock reads 6:17 a.m. when I roll over to read it, that means I haven’t given the drowsiness the pill delivers enough time to wear off.

Knowing I won’t get back to sleep, I throw my feet over the side of the bed and roll my shoulders while trying to summon any of the energy my family seems to be demonstrating.

The first thing I see as I pad down the stairs are the clear plastic tubs of Christmas lights and decorations sitting in the front hallway. And the first thing I hear is my brother groaning about them.

“You do realize you make your kids practically work for free on a tree farm, right? Now I’m supposed to do labor at home, too? And don’t even say you won’t make me climb up on the roof to hang the icicle lights, because I always end up being the one who has to do it.”

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