now as I go upon my way / so let me go upon my way

short fiction no. 4 (TW: SA)

*

I know I’m probably giving you exactly what you want by messaging you, but it’s kind of fucked up that you’re writing about dating my ex like right after we broke up.
I’m laying in Morgan’s bed, listening to him whistle atonally while he does the dishes in the other room.
Haha what do u mean?
I don’t send it. I stare at the cursor blinking. I delete the “Haha.” I capitalize the W. I delete everything. I type it again, I delete it again, I call Vivian.

“I thought you were at Morgan’s?” she asks by way of greeting.
“I am.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because he can’t hear what we’re talking about.”
“What are we talking about?”
Morgan is still bent over the sink. “The ex messaged me.”
“His ex? About what?”
“About the stories.”
“Oh, shit. How did she even find them?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m like actually crashing out right now, what do I do?”
“I mean, right now, you’re not gonna do anything. You can’t reply when you’re all jacked up on adrenaline. Just take a deep breath. What does it say?”
I read the message back, tasting bile on the back of my tongue.
“Okay, first of all, where does she even get off? She’s only in the first one, and just barely.”
“That’s what I’m—”
“And you didn’t even say anything bad about her, just that you look alike.”
“Right, like it’s totally—”
“I mean. Can’t you just block her?”
The water stops running. “Shit. Viv, he’s probably about to walk back in. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Don’t reply to her, she’s probably screenshotting everything. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t, I won’t. Okay. Love you.”
“Love you.”

Morgan comes to bed. We talk about his thesis. He was supposed to go to upstate New York to chase a lead about a Dutch creole that’s allegedly been extinct since the 1900s, but his grant request was denied. We debate the merits of him paying out of pocket to go himself, the veracity of the claim he’s following in the first place, whether or not it’s about the money at all or if it’s the principle of his department deprioritizing his research now that one of his colleagues has a social media following that far exceeds the listening audience of his podcast. We discuss the podcast. We discuss the likelihood and also relative comedic impact of various celebrities coming on the podcast, regardless of their interest in linguistics. Finally Morgan falls asleep, so I can return to my true destiny, which is staring at the ceiling in wide-eyed terror, my heartbeat saline and acrid in my throat.

**

Her name is Leona. I have avoided learning this for as long as possible, and now I can never un-know it. The only photo of Leona I had ever seen was a photo of her next to Morgan, where he faces the camera head-on, smirking, and she has her back to it, her head leaning on his shoulder. He never tagged her, and I never allowed myself to look for her. Now she is everywhere.

Leona posts almost as much as Elliott does, albeit to a wider audience. There is a vast online archive of her lore, through which I comb for hours. Leona’s mother is a socialite, her father a banker, both of them in conspicuous ankle bracelets, imprisoned in their Hamptons home. Leona grew up pin-balling between Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side. She spent several years devoting her online presence to virulently awful Mixed Girl poetry before pivoting to her true calling, which apparently is to get canceled every month. She is, by trade, still a writer, running an extremely popular newsletter that is nominally about progressive politics but almost always veers into overly personal anecdotes about her life and frequently gets in hot water for casual transphobia and anti-Semitism. Leona is friends with many children of celebrities and is often photographed handing cigarettes to A-listers ten years her junior. But perhaps most galling of all is that in spite of her manic, obsessive need to document her life for the internet, Morgan is almost nowhere to be found in any of it.

Four years they spent together, and the only references to Morgan are the occasional shot of his hand—only recognizable to me by his watch—or the sound of his voice in the background of a video. Since their breakup, her newsletter has alluded to a string of torrid affairs, but previous dispatches show almost no indication that she was even in a long-term relationship, let alone in one with Morgan. Is this the root of her ire—that I was too preoccupied with narrative intrigue to leave Morgan out of all of this?

I began chronicling the thing with Morgan as a way of making sense of it. I was tired of talking about it so much with Vivian, with my family. I figured that even though no one was going to read it, expelling it from my system was a healthier alternative than, I don’t know, binge drinking, or showing up on Morgan’s doorstep in a secondhand wedding dress (a joke I made to Vivian that she did not find funny in the slightest). I know my family reads what I write, that it occasionally finds its way into the lap of a stranger. It never occurred to me that anyone I knew, other than Vivian, might stumble upon it. How did Leona find the stories? Had Morgan found them? Had he shown her? Are they talking? Are they talking about me?

“Do you think I’m a crazy person? For writing about Morgan in this way,” I ask. I lay on my bed, holding my phone above my head in such a way that I will almost definitely drop it on my face.
Vivian considers this. She’s doing dishes. “I don’t know. I mean, you are using his real name.”
“His first name,” I say. “I use yours too.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. You know I consider it an honor to be your muse.”
“You are not my muse. None of you are my muses. This is nonfiction, this is memoir, this is…I mean, it’s journalism, almost.”
“Okay, Christiane Amanpour.”
“I use Elliott’s real name, I use everyone’s real name. Does it matter? Nobody knows who we are.”
“You asked me if I think you’re a crazy person. I think it crossed into the realm of crazy when you decided to use his real name.”
“Okay, but do you think he knows about it?”
“Boys don’t read.”
“He’s literally a doctoral candidate, Viv.”
“Exactly. He does enough of it for school. And grading horrible undergrad papers. Why would he read your stories?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s what I would do,” I say.
“You’re special.”
“And he’s not?”
“God. No.”
“You haven’t even met him,” I say. Vivian loads her dishwasher, sits down at her kitchen table, props her phone against a vase, leans her head into her hands.
“You’ve described him sufficiently. The returns have come in. He did not flip Florida.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.”
“Okay, bad analogy. My point is that he’s not as special as you. There’s just no way. You’ve yet to tell me anything about him that makes him stand out from the other guys you dated.”
“You mean like Elliott?”
“Elliott can rot in hell. He’s not special, he’s fucking vile.”
“So what should I say to Leona?”
“Do you have to say anything?” she asks.
I consider this. “I mean. I think so? She still writes that blog. What if she pivots to character assassination?”
“Fair point. So just say something non-committal. Say you don’t know who she is. Say you’re a master’s student and it’s part of your thesis. Say something that’s at least partially, plausibly true.”
“Okay,” I say. My stomach is still roiling.
“You’re not gonna tell Morgan about this, are you?” she asks.
“Are you fucking crazy? Of course not.”

***

Vivian distracts me by taking me to a tea house in the arts district, where we have also met up with her friend Tatiana. Tatiana was at the Halloween party, and since then we have fallen into a comfortable rhythm of sporadically texting each other poetry we find intriguing. This is our first time hanging out together on purpose. The remarkable thing about Tatiana is how clean she is. Her hair, her clothes, the skin on her neck—she glows and effervesces with an innate, almost religious hygiene. I wonder what it would take to feel, or at least look, that fresh and silken and polished.

Our conversation is halted by an unspoken, urgent need to eavesdrop on the people next to us. A broad, flushed woman is speaking, clearly above the recommended decibel for the space, to a gaunt, tattooed man with stringy hair to his shoulders. At first it seemed like a date—“I’m so glad I found you,” she said at one point—but incredibly, it becomes clear that they are long lost siblings of the same sperm donor. The woman is prone to peals of nervous laughter and crying jags in equal measure; the man is more inclined to stoic silence. And isn’t that always the way?
“This is incredible,” Tatiana whispers.
“I know,” I whisper back. “What are the odds?”
Their conversation turns to cooking. The woman pronounces shakshuka with a jarring and contextually dissonant accent.

“So how are things with that guy?” Tatiana asks. Vivian hums her disapproval.
“Less than ideal,” I say. “He was debating going on this trip to upstate New York, and now he’s there, and I haven’t heard from him in a week.”
My last correspondence with Morgan was me telling him to call me so I could tell him a funny story. I ran into Callum at a reading and we’d talked at length about a person, Anastasia, who Morgan and Callum knew intimately, and with whom I’d had a comical interaction in passing, and Callum relayed an incredibly detailed anecdote about Anastasia that I knew would play much better over the phone than it would as a text message, especially because I do an impression of Callum that makes Morgan laugh, and found I could also do an impression of Callum doing an impression of Anastasia, and the whole comedic ouroboros really deserved to be told in real time. Morgan gave the message a thumbs up, then hours later sent a picture of a bush that looked kind of like a nose. There was no plan made for a phone call.
“Are you gonna text him again?” Vivian asks.
“I don’t know. I kind of haven’t decided,” I say. “I thought things were going better, after he cooked me dinner and I told him about the Elliott stuff.”
“Who’s Elliott? What’s the stuff?” Tatiana asks. Her tone is excitable, salacious. I feel instantaneous guilt about the nature of the stuff.
“Elliott is her ex-boyfriend. He was an abusive piece of shit,” Vivian says.
Tatiana pales. “Oh, God, I’m so—”
“It’s fine, of course. I’m fine. And you didn’t know. It’s fine.”
“You’re not gonna push back on that?” Vivian asks.
“What, that he’s abusive? He was.”
“You’ve just never agreed with me before. Don’t tell me that Morgan convinced you.”
“I mean. He’s a straight white guy, and I was telling him all this stuff, and he called it abusive, like, unprompted. So.”
“Are you saying because I’m not white and I’m not a guy, that my assessment holds less water?”
“I’m saying that you were always gonna worry about me, because you’re a caring and empathetic person, at least in part because we’re not white and we’re not guys,” I say. “And the fact that Morgan was worried about me makes the whole thing a lot scarier.”
Vivian and Tatiana sip from their mugs in silence.
“Sorry to…agh. I mean. Anyway,” I say. “I told him about the Elliott stuff, and it seemed like…I don’t know, like we were having some kind of breakthrough with everything. But then he didn’t call me for a while, so I had to text him and initiate again, and so he came over but he only stayed for a couple hours. He didn’t want to stay the night, or even stay until it got dark. He said he had too much work to do.”
“So? Isn’t that good? That he’s so invested in his work?” Tatiana asks.
“It’s mostly fine,” I say. “Most of the time, it’s mostly fine. But I don’t know, I’m just wondering, like, if telling him about the Elliott stuff is making him pull away. Not like he thinks I’m damaged or something, but like it made him realize I’m a person who has emotions that sometimes require external assistance to be managed, and he doesn’t want to do that.”
“God, that kind of sucks,” Tatiana says. “Are you, like. Okay with that?”
“Yeah, like. I have friends and family who I can confide in about stuff, you know? I don’t need him to be, like, this emotional pillar for me.”
“But you’re upset about something. You said things were less than ideal.”
“I don’t know, honestly. I’ve just been feeling all this anxiety about him. It was fun, at first. Easy. No pressure. And now it’s like all at once…I don’t know, it feels like really intense that he’s not calling or texting. Like I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Did you tell him that?” Tatiana asks.
“I can’t tell him that. He’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Well, either he’s a person you don’t feel safe talking to, so you should dump him, or he’s driving you crazy, in which case you should dump him,” Tatiana says. Her locket shimmers against her clavicle with sterile righteousness.
“Much to think about,” Vivian says. She takes our empty mugs, lopes to the counter, slides them across to the barista and asks for more.

****

“Well. It’s been a while,” Elaine says.
“I guess so,” I reply. In the years that have elapsed since lockdown, she has given up her office space and pivoted only to remote sessions. Her background on our video chat has changed only slightly since I last saw her over a year ago. She makes no motion to apologize for the noise or intrusion of her elderly cat, who I can only assume has died.
“So. To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asks.
“I’ve been having, um. Well. Chest pain, for the last several days.”
“And I’m assuming you’ve gone to a doctor for this?”
“No. I mean, I know it’s from anxiety. It’s like definitely anxiety.”
“Anything in particular we can pin it down to?”
“I’ve been seeing this guy. Morgan.”
“Ah,” Elaine says. “And your last significant relationship was…
“Elliott.”
“Right, yes. And so this guy, Morgan, this is a serious boyfriend?”
“No. It’s…casual.”
“So casual that it’s causing you chest pain.”
I laugh. “Exactly.”
“What’s the problem here? Does one of you want a relationship and the other doesn’t, is that the issue? Is that what’s causing you so much distress?”
“Kind of,” I say. “I mean, the thing is, like. I don’t know for sure if I want a relationship with him. I actually feel like I could handle it decently well if he told me he wanted to stop seeing me. But he hasn’t said that.”
“Okay. I’m not following.”
“He went away to upstate New York to interview some centenarians about a possibly extinct Dutch creole.”
“So he’s another grad student.”
“Yes. At a different school, but yes.”
“Okay, so he’s off doing research in another state,” Elaine says. “And…what has he said to you, exactly?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t said anything to me in over a week.”
“Ah. So you’ve contacted him and he isn’t answering you.”
“Not exactly,” I say. I pull on the edge of my shirt, tuck and then untuck and then re-tuck my hair behind my ears. “Technically I ignored his last text message.”
“So…is it possible he’s waiting for you to contact him to resume communication?” Elaine asks.
“I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not…I’ve made it very clear to him that I want to talk to him. Our last messages were me asking if I could call him to tell him a funny story, and then he sent me a picture of a weird-looking bush without addressing that part of my text.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“I feel insane.”
“What do you mean? Because insane is not an emotion, so to speak. Where do you feel it in your body?”
“Mostly the aforementioned chest pain.”
“Right, okay. So can we breathe through that a bit? Are you feeling the chest pain right now?”
“Look, I know you want me to do, like, exclusively somatic therapy, but—”
“I never said exclusively.”
“Whatever. I just. I’ve been avoiding texting him and I need to know if I’m doing the right thing or not.”
“And what do you mean when you say ‘the right thing?’”
“I mean I need help interrogating my motives. I can’t tell if me not texting him is, like, the anxiously attached protest behavior, or if it’s me giving him the appropriate space.”
“Did he ask you for space? Why do you think he needs space?”
“Because he said he doesn’t want to rush into anything.”
“And how long have you been seeing him?”
“A few months.”
“And is this the first time you’ve felt like there have been rules or constraints around your communication?”
“…No.”
“Are those rules and constraints communicated to you by him, or are you assigning them independently?”
“He’s not…I mean, he’s not making rules, per se. Like directly. But indirectly, it feels like there are rules. Like he answers if I text him, he would never just not answer a text, but…sorry, is this making any sense?”
“You’re a great communicator. You’ve never said anything to me that didn’t make sense,” Elaine says, and the pain in my chest spreads like a hand. “Tell me if this sounds right. The way that I see it, if your behavior is feeling constricted in this way, it’s either because the person you’re interacting with is making mandates about how you should behave, or because something about their behavior is causing you to put those constraints on yourself. Would you agree?”
“Sure.”
“And you can recognize that if a person was telling you that you weren’t allowed to contact them, or you weren’t allowed to express your emotions, that those kinds of rules would be grounds for leaving the relationship?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, while you are in a relationship, even a casual one, with a person who is triggering those kinds of limitations in yourself, you don’t see this as grounds to leave.”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I say. “Are you telling me to leave him?”
“If you want my actual advice?” Elaine says. I nod furiously.
“Yes. I think you should.”

My throat tightens. The thought of Morgan finding someone else more pliant, more forgiving, more capable. The thought of them on the trail we hiked, of her eating the food he cooked me, of his satisfied smile, of her kneeling at the foot of his bed. This woman wanting nothing, needing nothing, and thus being gifted everything he denies me, all because she was able to pass through his gauntlet of pride and deprivation. I become dizzy, like I’ve been struck by a blunt object. Leona. Is this how it began for them? Did she earn him through pure ascetics? Did she do the opposite, did she charm him with the transparency of her appetites, did it exhaust him, is that why he treats me like this now? Is his silence a test? What would it mean to pass?

“You’re not saying anything,” Elaine says.
I’m crying without having a proportional feeling attached to the tears. “I don’t know why this feels so…it just feels really big.”
“Okay. Where do you feel it?”
“In my chest, again. And in my…lower back? Like my hips? Like I feel like I can’t relax my hip muscles.”
Elaine pauses. “When did you start to feel the most pronounced anxiety about your relationship with Morgan?”
“I don’t know. It’s been kind of low-grade stressful the entire time. But the last couple weeks have been the worst.”
“Do you think…is it at all possible that talking about what happened with Elliott is bringing all this to the surface?”
The crying has caused my eyes to burn. I squeeze them shut. “I don’t…Morgan hasn’t done anything like that.”
“Of course, I know that,” Elaine asks. “But the fact that you discussed all of it with him—”
“He said it sounded abusive,” I say. “Vivian used to say that. I always thought she was exaggerating. But then Morgan said it. And maybe it’s shitty that it took a man saying, but. I think he was right. I think Elliott was abusive.”
Elaine pauses, sets down the pen and notepad she’d been holding just out of frame. “I think that would be an accurate characterization of what he did to you.”
“Did you ever say that? When I was telling you about it,” I say. “Did you ever say it was abuse?”
She pauses again.
“Sometimes my patients really struggle with that word. ‘Abuse.’ People have ideas about what it means. They think…it would have been very easy for me to say that to you, that I thought Elliott was abusive, and for you to shut down, because in your mind, it could have been worse. Removing a condom during sex without consent is sexual assault. It’s rape. And he did that to you, countless times. And the way you described his fits of rage…you would say they weren’t directed at you, but all that anger, in close proximity, when you were alone…you had no way of knowing whether that was going to land on you at some point. Verbally. Physically. He created a dynamic in which you were always in fight or flight. You never knew if he was going to violate your boundaries, or if he was going to have some kind of emotional eruption. You lived like that for a year and a half, and then—incredibly, might I add—you got the courage to walk away. And even now I can see you bristling at the word ‘incredible,’ at the word ‘courage,’ because of how your mind has framed the word ‘abuse.’ You think because he didn’t hit you, because he didn’t hold you down and force himself on you, because he didn’t make every single day a living hell, that it wasn’t abuse. But you were unsafe. You suffered emotional and medical consequences due to his recklessness and neglect. That was abuse. And you made the decision to walk away from it. That was courage.”

I keep my eyes squeezed shut. “But what does that have to do with…with Morgan?”
“Let me answer your question with a question,” Elaine says. “All this has been brought to the surface. What happens if Morgan leaves now? Where does that leave you, with all of this?”

*****

Lulu and Matthew are in the park, having a post-run picnic. Their flushed and healthy faces make me crave activity, even though I haven’t run in months, haven’t even been doing yoga with Vivian. Lulu spreads cheese on a dense and dark bread, feeds it to Matthew as he lays with his head in her lap. It’s four-thirty, and the sun is drifting dangerously close to the horizon line. I pull my coat tighter around my body. It’s light brown and at least two sizes too big for me, too-wide sleeves and cuffs that swallow my hands, scratched silver buttons with some inscrutable insignia. I bought it with my father in Portugal at a flea market. The man who sold it to us seemed unsure about whether or not he was licensed to do so, and only asked for forty euros. A few hours later we were in a department store so my father could purchase a monogrammed pocket square, and I saw a very similar looking coat (albeit much cleaner) being sold for ten times the price.

“I sent it this morning, by the way,” I say.
“Sent what?” Lulu asks. Matthew reaches up and puts a fistful of raspberries in her mouth. She laughs and lets a few drop onto his face.
“She broke things off with that Morgan guy,” Matthew says.
Lulu’s eyes widen. “Really? Aw, he sounded great.”
“He wasn’t that great,” Matthew says.
“You say that about every guy I date,” I say.
“Yeah, ‘cause none of them are that great. You have to start dating people as good as Lulu.”
“Aw, baby,” Lulu says.
“You’re so right, Matty. This whole time I’ve been going to the emotionally unavailable guy store when I should have been going to the soulmate store. My mistake, I’ll head down there right now.”
“I’m just saying,” he says.
“The smugness is tacky,” I say.
“What did Morgan say?” Lulu presses.
“Didn’t respond.”
“He didn’t say anything at all?” Lulu asks. “What did you say?”
“I kept it brief. I just said he’s great but I think our arrangement has kind of run its course and I wish him the best.”
“How do you feel?” she asks.
I lay back on the blanket and squint into the cloudless November sky. I came here with Morgan once. We walked Spud around the reservoir and then sat on the grass with these question cards my mother got me for a birthday years ago. We took turns pulling them, asking each other to describe our perfect day, our first kiss, our death row meal.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think it’s gonna come in waves. Right now, I’m proud of myself for doing it. But I’m also scared.”
“Scared of what?” she asks.
“Matty, does Lulu know about the Elliott stuff?”
“Do I even know about the Elliott stuff?” he asks.
“Well, I never got specific with you about it. It was kind of…graphic.”
“Bro, what are you even talking about?”
“I just mean…you know Elliott was a bad guy.”
“Elliott was the literal worst,” Matthew says.
“I don’t just mean he was annoying. I mean he was kind of dangerous. He hurt me. He did…bad things. To me. Things I asked him not to do that he did anyway.”
“Oh, yeah. I did know that,” Matthew says quietly.
Lulu puts her hand on my leg. “I didn’t know that. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, I’m okay, really,” I say. I pat her hand, and she leaves it for a moment before pulling it back. “I just mean like. I talked to Elaine again.”
“Elaine! Love Elaine,” Matthew says. “Elaine is my sister’s therapist.”
“Love Elaine!” Lulu says.
“It sort of seems like the Morgan stuff is connected to the Elliott stuff.”
“Oh gosh,” Lulu says. “Did Morgan—”
“No, no, no, nothing like that, no,” I say. “She just pointed out like…you know, it’s all connected. When you’re mourning one thing you’re kind of mourning everything.”
“Very profound,” Matthew says. “You should be a writer.”
“Very unnecessary,” I say. “You should be a consultant.”
He chuckles from somewhere deep in his gut. “Touché.”
“What are you gonna do when he responds?” Lulu asks.
“Not sure yet. Kind of left it open for us to talk more about it, if he wants. I mean, it felt kind of weird to do it in a text, but I really just wanted to get it over with and off my chest.”
“You think he’s gonna fight for you?” Matthew asks.

A group of friends sets up a blanket not far from ours. A blue-haired member of the group pulls out a portable speaker meant to look like a vintage guitar amp and starts playing Sufjan quite loudly. Their friends meet this decision with immediate panic, insisting that they turn the volume down. Absurd, the idea that any of the barely-employed set at the Silver Lake Meadow would have a problem with listening to Sufjan Stevens.

“No, I don’t,” I say.
“Do you want him to?” Matthew asks.
“Of course I do,” I say. “What am I gonna do, lie? Of course I want him to fight for me. I want everyone to fight for me. Even the people I had to scrape and crawl to get away from, I wanted them to fight for me. Elliott was the fuckin’ devil, but he fought for me, and some twisted part of me was relieved he did. He’ll be cursing my name til the day he dies, and I’m glad about it. Isn’t that humiliating? That’s how deep this thing goes for me. My worst nightmare is the indifference of a person I once loved. Even if we don’t love each other anymore, I need my name to cause a pang in their chest for as long as they live. I need everything I ever touched or talked about to remind them of me, forever. Isn’t that insane? I’m insane for that. It’s not supposed to matter. Morgan and I only dated a few months, it was never that deep, it’s not supposed to matter. But I want it to matter to him, at least a little bit. I don’t want it to torture him, but I want people to ask him how he knows me and I want him to say that he could have had me but he fumbled at the one yard line. Of course I want him to fight for me. Of course I do. I’m a human being. I’m just a girl.”
“That is humiliating,” Matthew says.
“Thanks.”
“I’m kidding,” he says, “of course I’m kidding. It’s not humiliating. It’s just not healthy. You can’t go through life hoping you still occupy real estate in the mind of some guy who didn’t even give enough a shit about you to send you a text message.”
“Everyone gets a vice,” I say. “I don’t drink much. I’ve never smoked. I eat healthy, I help the old lady in my building with her groceries, I give money to the homeless guy outside my bank every time I make a withdrawal, I take vitamins, I don’t swear in front of our parents, I don’t have sex with people I don’t like. I get enough sleep, I drink enough water, I’ve devoted my twenties to studiousness and intellectual rigor, everyone gets a vice, this one is mine.”
“Fine. Dibs on microdosing shrooms,” Matthew says.
“You’re a head case,” I say.
“That’s exactly what someone who hasn’t rewired their neurons would say.”
“Those quack doctors from those podcasts you listen to are going to jail one day.”