to the moon & to saturn | cate blanchett

chapter 24

After that first (and only) phone call with Cate, there was not a single night for the next two weeks that Elle slept without dreaming about the woman.

Her dreams consisted of flashbacks from their summer together, Sandy and Cate kissing while she stood frozen and couldn't do anything but watch and scream, and new scenes where the blonde left her stranded in every place imaginable.

It was too much to handle, especially with her final year of college lurking around every corner. The dread of starting a final year with no concrete plans after graduation made her nauseous. At least with Cate, she had the semblance of a plan: follow her to Australia and look for jobs there.

With that option no longer in the cards, she had to figure out her shit fast, and reality was not letting her out of its suffocating grasp.

During normal waking hours, Elle distracted herself by preparing for the semester. She went with Dylan to buy new notebooks and pens, but there wasn't much that she needed that she didn't already have. She printed out her schedule, pinned it to a board above her desk, and created folders on her laptop for her classes.

Cate continued to call—although, less and less frequently—and Elle continued to ignore it. She wasn't sure why she was still self-sabotaging. Even Dylan, who was furiously upset at Cate after the party, started to encourage Elle to pick up the phone and talk to her again, or at least listen to the voicemails.

"I decided that I simply cannot stand by and let this relationship end," Dylan had said last week after Elle asked her why she had a sudden change of heart.

Elle had responded with a shake of her head.

"Well, I can."

Although Elle continued to disregard Dylan's attempts to mend a relationship she wasn't even a part of, she did take one piece of her roommate's advice: she listened to the voicemails.

There were many of them, some only a few seconds, but some that lasted several minutes. Even though they varied in length, the message was cohesive throughout all of them.

Cate was sorry.

Cate messed up.

Sandy meant nothing to her.

She was going to Australia. She was in Australia. Andrew was fighting the divorce. She was fighting Andrew. She won. The divorce was close to being finalized.

She was sorry.

She was sorry.

She was sorry.

It physically pained Elle to listen to Cate apologize over and over again. Her voice sounded so raw in each message, like she had cried for hours before mustering up the clarity to call.

She was practically begging for Elle to let her back into her life.

And for some reason, Elle couldn't find it in herself to press the stupid button on her phone to call Cate back.

It meant facing a problem. It meant owning up to her own stupidity. It meant owning up to her stubbornness that cost them the loss of the relationship. It meant letting herself back into a relationship that destroyed her.

It meant gambling with the probability that this could all happen again.

She grew up learning that the best way to deal with a problem was to avoid it. So, that's what she did. She reverted back into the young Elle who had watched as her mother turned into a zombie, aimlessly rearranging and designing the house over and over and over again. Except in this scenario, she was her mother. Usually, that would terrify her, but she was allowing it to happen and she didn't have the energy to stop it from completely overcoming her.