Grief Diaries 7 for July 12th
The Writer messages me on Instagram via some burner account he clearly unearthed from a years-dead attempt to be funny on the internet. I wonder flatly if he had to pony up for a VPN-dodger to contact me. He wants to apologize for everything in person, the missive reads, but I should “feel free to block here too” if I’m not interested. How generous of him.
It’s 4 am at my father’s house, and I’m too angry to sleep.
Earlier this evening I helped extract Dad, clutzy and wan, from the passenger’s seat of his Acura after three rounds of Chablis at a local steak joint. Dad was shirty to the 16-year old hostess, Dad ranted smugly about politics, Dad told me he was proud of me, which is a new martini-soaked tick I’m ashamed to lap up like a starved puppy. When we get home, my boyfriend retires to bed in a haze of aches, sick as a dog from travel, unable to comfort me or chat much beyond a dry cough.
Today, I threw a lunch for Dad’s friends, because I am a woman and the oldest daughter to a guy who beat bladder cancer, a guy who lost his wife. As I serve the Sperry-wearing boomers an opulent spread I lifted from TikTok, I am peppered with questions about my boyfriend, M, who is a partner at a huge and well-respected law firm. This is both his and my least favorite quality about him, but the boomers are incredibly impressed. M hasn’t arrived at the house yet, and no one has met him before except Dad and me, but even the fictive specter of M’s presence—normie on paper, white collar, wealthy, successful—grants the guests some phantom comfort on a porch replete with touchy topics.
No one asks what I do for a job, or where my art practice is going, or how the fuck I’ve managed to slow my life’s erosion under the dogged waves of my father’s grief.
I try to talk about a work trip to Aspen, an upcoming residency, anything. Nobody bites. I bagged this attorney, after all, and I made such good sandwiches, and aren’t I a beauty, coos a cousin of mother’s. My face burns as I mentally scroll through book deal and solo show announcements from my peers on social media. Tragedy has reduced me to a creature that covets survival, and I have fuck all to show for it.
Now I sleep, or try to sleep, in a separate room than M, the hero, who caught something gross on the flight from Seattle, or maybe the Amtrak from New York. As I listen to him snore, I think about how his mom texts him every morning with little emoji hearts, and how my Dad asks after M, not me, when we have dinner together.
“Okay.” I type back to the Writer. “Let’s do this”.
The Writer’s been blocked for eighteen months now—our relationship, such as it was, burnt out after nine chaotic weeks of bickering over Facetime. We only had sex once, the night before he went to rehab. That night was also the first time we met, our inaugural Tinder date, I guess, although “date” feels too small to carry the crooked weight of our interface. He told stupid lies and bugged me so much and struggled with keeping his word when his word didn’t get him what he wanted within forty-five seconds of wanting it. He wanted me, of course, bad, in the craven, internecine way so many men have wanted me before—talented ones, specifically. My gifts don’t make me hard to love, a condition that drives a certain kind of guy insane. The Writer is no exception.
I liked The Writer, who is fascinating, witty, and smarter than most other people. I loved that he, a rockstar memoirist and editor, thought I deserved a big career. When I started dating someone who didn’t smuggle me into halfway houses by pretending I was a lesbian friend from AA, The Writer melted down, however, despite numerous former protestations that he and I could not date for “at least a year” after his matriculation from rehab. He got mean over text, and I cut him off. My mom died a year later.
I sit across from The Writer at a horrible faux-indie coffee shop near my boyfriend’s apartment. M knows I’m here; he’s somewhat amused by it. As my anger towards M for daring to have a dick and a job and a cold simultaneously dissipated a little, so too did my interest in this meeting. I’m also acutely aware that it’s not recommended to do the “amends” bit of a 12-step program with agents of collateral sex damage, a fact that The Writer uses to preamble his apology after a few minutes of easy small talk. He looks okay, if sweaty— it’s 84 degrees outside. I’m wearing a too much makeup in an attempt to offset my subtle but enervating weight gain (everybody sends cookies with condolences, it turns out). I find myself embarrassed that I haven’t published my book yet, not that he’d ask about it.
“You look great for a grieving person!” he chirps with a warm grin. I grin back.
He unfurls a serpentine contrition tapestry—he was incapable of love, but I was the closest he could have ever approached to loving someone during that chapter, he projected too much onto me, he treated me “like a pacifier”, he is so, so sorry he broke my heart. His sponsor told him not to do this, but he was afraid of running into me in the city. He thinks of me often. He Googled my mother’s name every week since we fell out of contact to see if she died yet. He thought it best not to extend condolences once he found out. We should never, ever try to be friends.
After he’s finished, I thank him, and push back gently on the '“broken heart” rhetoric. It was never that deep, I insist.
“Good”, he replies stoically, almost deflated. I wonder if he’s projecting again. I can’t tell.
I let him know which publication I work for, and he congratulates me sincerely. I let him know I’m happy in my relationship. I tell him about my visit to Dad’s. He is kind and thoughtful. I wish I were at M’s apartment. I wish M was bringing me a cold Diet Coke from his fridge, or telling me a funny story about his kids.
“I always feel like I’m playing emotional whack-a-mole”, sighs The Writer as he updates me on his shiny but frenetic life.“I’m trying, but it’s always something with me”.
“Well, you’re the kind of guy who needs friction for content”, I explain. “I think I used to have more of a stomach for conflict and stuff, but since mom died, I just…can’t. I just want things to be gentle.”
“God, you’re right”, he thinks aloud. “I am that sort of person”.
“I mean, our time together was just, like, you making me emotionally throw a lunch for five people”, I laugh. I get one in, right?
“True”, he giggles. “Do you cook, other than for your dad?”
“Sometimes. I’m okay. I know you’re a great cook”.
“I’m just a hopeless Francophile”, he defers. “We always had this, you know. We were always really good at taking to each other”.
“Oh, sure”, I acknowledge. “Talking worked!”
“So, will you unblock me from your fucking Substack?” he asks as he thins his eyes mischievously.
“HA! Absolutely not.”
I jovially award him a grade of A on his apology, which prompts him to detail other apologies to other women that didn’t go as well. I chuckle; he’s infuriating, but a fabulous storyteller.
“What exactly did you want out of this?” I ask with a smile. He can tell my question is genuine.
“I just—I really, really like you. Like, really like you. And I treated you shabbily” he stammers. “You deserve the world”.
As I scan his dark, quick eyes for flashes of sincerity, I realize, shamefully, why I had consented to this meeting in the first place. I wanted someone, anyone, to be sorry. My ex boyfriend, the man who spent seven years whittling away at my heart, will never apologize. My dad will never apologize. My mom can’t, not that she ever would. Selfish family, idiot friends, ungainly former flames—no one will commit to the level of groveling I hope could sew this deep need shut. There’s no such thing as closure, I know, and the past is long over. The best I can hope for is a warm seltzer with a man who only recognized my personhood once my womanhood was no longer blocking his view, and my readiness to accept, to forgive, leaves a pathetic aftertaste.
I wish this whole interaction mattered to me. I hope it matters to him.