And yet there was something about this text.

“You aren’t breaking up with me, are you?” I asked as I walked up, employing the logic that said asking this would ensure that he wasn’t.

His expression was just sad.

“I’m sorry, Sandy,” is all he said.

We were standing on a street corner next to a jewelry store.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

He nodded. Said he never meant for things to be serious.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said to him, over and over again. Because I couldn’t. Because that he could opt out of this was preposterous; I had no such option. I insisted we talk about it. We sat on the picnic table in my backyard, picked at buckeye leaves and chain smoked. The thing was we got along so well. Maybe we were supposed to just be very good friends. Jerry and Elaine. We walked downtown, got hamburgers. He went out after without me, got really drunk, friends later reported, because he was upset we’d broken up. That didn’t feel fair at all, I said.

On the phone that night, nicotine manic, I told a friend I was totally fine with what was happening.

We were supposed to just be very good friends.

I cried for the next several months. I didn’t stop seeing him. I went out of my way to go where he’d be. I went out of my way to avoid him and run into him anyway. He’d drink too much and come onto me. I’d drink too much and sleep with him and feel rotten for being the girl he was just sleeping with and then feel sick realizing that’s all I ever was. I once left a bar where we’d been and crawled into his bed and when he awoke confused I pretended as if we’d gone home together and he believed me, I think. 

Sometimes we tried to be good. We made a standing date to get dinner, just dinner, each Wednesday, watch late season baseball on the television and the whole time it stung like elastic snapping into your eye. He saw other women. He even had the gall once to ask advice about restaurants in Minneapolis, where he was meeting up with one of them, and, smiling I was so shocked at his cruelty, I told him he was fucking insane.