There's a part of me that isn't coming back. I know it. But even in my understanding, a part of me won't let it go. For some strange reason I keep checking the nightstand, the top shelf of my sister's closet, the divots in between the couch cushions –– over and over I search for it, sure of myself when I think, I've only misplaced this. Simple as a chapstick or the house keys, this thing is missing. Moreover: This thing can be found.
But I know I'm wrong. It's gone. Maybe I've only decided this because I actually need this part of me again, more than I've needed it for a while now. I mean, it was so much easier to ignore its absence -- or the absence of anything, really -- back when the world ended at the edge of my balcony, and all outward correspondence was sequestered to chatrooms and texts and video calls where you never had to make eye contact, they wouldn't know the difference.
Nowadays, though, the world stretches on and on and on, and I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm not sure how to make myself fit within it. I watch coworkers chat from cube to cube, and the conversation is so easy, so natural. It's hard not to feel like a fool eavesdropping from my own little box, not taking part, but taking diligent notes of good things to say, better ways to phrase myself. Because it isn't easy for me. It doesn't feel natural. The part of me that belonged and felt belonging is gone, and I don't know what to do without it. All I can do is feel like an extra-terrestrial of sorts, relearning everything about the world and the humans that live within it, doing everything I can to convince them that I'm one, too.
I think that Aiden is partially responsible for all this. How could he not be? For all I know, he took the part of me I'm missing with him when he left me; snuck it into his closet like I did most of his hoodies. And while I'd go banging down his door asking for it back, I know I wouldn't be able to put it to words. You took something from me, I'd want to say. You took something, and I can't get it back.
The trouble with Aiden, I've decided, is his very refusal to see it––the actual, definable, solvable trouble of the way in which he operates. He's a selfish man. He's competitive. I wish we'd never had the same dreams, otherwise I think we'd have a fighting shot. But in every argument we've ever had, he's pointed elsewhere and pretentiously named it the root of it all. Society. His afflictions. Concepts too broad to be fully wrong. Yes –– Aiden prefers to view his struggles not as changeable behaviors, but larger world issues of which he has no earthly means to master or control. He might even say, in pretentious cocktail conversation, that if his flaws were to be placed on a canvas and presented in a gallery, the result would look something like John Latham's full-stop, single black dot. It is the one overarching thing, the one thing above all else, that every single misgiving and messy friendship and bad night out could be attributed to in Aiden's eyes. One thing which all restaurant switches and schedule changes and sleepless nights can find their inception in. It is an unavoidable, unmanageable, inextinguishable fire, a true conflagration of a thing, which Aiden seems both to fear and love as his parents do God.
Personally, I hate this outlook. I just wanted him to hear me sometimes. See, I rarely ever perceive the root of our problems to be something so large and irrevocable. Society and pain and the world is not the centerpiece, but the frame, rather, of an entirely different painting. To me, Aiden was something like a Seurat: Not one dot, but countless smaller ones you'd only really notice if you got close enough to single them out. And as Aiden would remind me constantly, in a way that always felt curiously like a dare to prove him wrong, he'd never felt safe enough to let another person get close to him until me.
No one else, then, had ever gotten the chance to put their eye straight up to the canvas and squint. No one else had ever held the opportunity to know him, and judge him, quite like I have.
The beginnings were quick. Aiden was in love with me the moment he met me –– before he even knew her name. We met by chance in a school cafeteria; until then, we'd somehow managed to take the all the same classes and fraternize with the same people at entirely different times (afternoon trips to the café for me, designated driving at the parties for him) for two entire semesters. He'd later tell me, the very fact that a girl like me existed at all at his school came as a sweeping surprise. Ask him now and he'll tell you how I was wearing all blue: denim pants and a denim jacket, buttoned. My hair was longer, then, too, flat-ironed and everything. He might even tell you there was a small burn mark from the iron on the edge of my cheek, the shape of a rectangle, light pink like my blush. Every last thing about me from that night, Aiden had memorized. Aggrandized, even. He could barely believe the universe could allow them to exist in proximity for so long without so much as a wavering hint. It felt like a cruel joke.
"I don't think we know each other," he blurted out as he walked into the room. I'd picked a seat far away, in the upper left corner, so he had to nearly shout to be heard. "I'm Aiden."
Like he did everything else, Aiden elevated me to godlike standards before I could even begin to try and stop him. By the time we'd known each other a couple months, he's already started writing me two scripts ––the first a sci-fi where I played an alien haunting his protagonist's dreams, and the second a coming of age where my name had been changed to Mercury. "A name as otherworldly as you are," he told me.
He'd assured me early on that I was no manic pixie dream for him, but I knew better. The moment I grabbed his hand at breakfast and read his palm over the hashbrowns and shitty diner coffee, he'd been a goner. So I knew whatever I did or said from then on would hold weight for him. Toeing the line of compromise and cruelty was imperative, and in the case of Aiden and I, and the latter came with an ease and fervency other couples might find in love.
His actions, more often than not, were reactions. Whenever we watched a film, I would notice how he never stirred unless prompted to. I tested the theory once in a comedy, choosing only to laugh at the lowest hanging fruit. Only a quick laugh –– an exhale and a hum. More often that not, he would join, disproportionately loud and booming. In the tender moments of a romance, if I reacted with a smile, only then would he punch his hand to his heart and say, "My god," at least three seconds in delay from the moment in question. In this way, it was hard to tell if he was ever being real with you. And there was nothing I disliked more from Aiden than his fakeness.
Well, that's a lie. I disliked his meanness. God, could he be cross with me. Always observing, keeping a mental score of how many good deed's he'd done and how I never matched up. The final months were the worst of it all, because by then any splendor about me had worn clean off. I wasn't a god, of Mercury, or anything. I was a girl crying in his front seat, fighting fire with fire, and we hated one another for it.
There are many reasons we fell apart, and many pieces that fell alongside us to grab. I collected a few girls from his friend group, all of whom joke to this day, "She won me in the divorce." I got the neighborhood –– drove him right out, in a way: He'd curiously moved home a few weeks after it was over. I got the nice job in the big building I know he'd been secretly gunning for. In all due respect, I should be feeling resplendent.
But he took too. And for the life of me, I can't figure out what's gone. For the whole last year since we've split, there has been an irrefutable presence of absence in my life. A part of me is gone and I can't ignore it. It's an itch that needs to be scratched and I can't find the damn spot. It's a phantom text message I keep checking for, but nobody's reaching out. But it is.
And I just don't know if it's coming back.
xxx
This is melodramatic and might not fit in the larger story so enjoy for now but I might delete it lo.
