Dishes. Laundry. Cleaning bathrooms. This was the monotonous drudgery of being an adult and for her, it was surprisingly freeing. For the first time in her life, she was living for herself, not beholden to her parents’ unreasonable expectations or caring for a man-child that fled from responsibility at every available opportunity. It was just her now and her dishes and laundry and dirty bathroom. When she stared at the tiny room, off the tiny kitchen she felt empowered, emboldened. For years when she had visualized her future it was vague and uninspired; awash in charcoal smudges under gunmetal grey skies. Now she felt the color creeping onto the canvas, cautiously around the edges.
There was a remnant that continued to hold her hostage. A phantom limb that ached and throbbed in the absence of the skin, muscle, and sinew that used to occupy the space. A void left open and vulnerable and no matter how she attempted to fill it, only momentary relief would be the result before it opened again, pulling her down with it.
Him.
She felt him, sometimes at the most mundane of times and it would catch her off guard, threatening to knock her off the precarious platform of independence she had created for herself. The mention of his name. His coffee cup in the cabinet. A man in line in front of her who wore the same aftershave.
She would swallow down the misery; the vibrations and echos of him that seemed to be written on her. The connection with him that, even in a crowded room, felt as if they shared some secret they weren’t telling the rest of the world.
“Uh, hey.”
An utterance that washed away any progress she had made with its two syllables, and she hadn’t realized until that moment how another person’s voice could simultaneously cause her heart to race and her stomach to drop.
His intake of breath, the way he exhaled a chuckle, the smile she heard in the inflection of his voice; she could visualize him on the other end with painful accuracy. She sank down in her chair, resigning herself to the backward progress and allowing his voice to fill her the way it always had. She knew the way he held the receiver and the way his long hair would flip out slightly at the ends behind his ears. She knew by the tone of his voice whether he was leaning back or sitting forward and the way his tie would be looser by this time of the day, revealing the top of the white shirt beneath it. She glanced up at his former chair and for a brief moment they weren’t separated by states and telephone wire and he was five feet from her desk. Again.
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She sat in the quiet, hollow, reverberation of her car, pressing the button to illuminate her phone again for the thousandth time as if having it lit up would somehow make the message come faster. The same way sitting in her car, instead of walking to her apartment would also ensure some sort of reply.
It was a moment of weakness, she knew that and she scolded herself at the frailty of her countenance that made her think that because of their chance, hour-long fall back into the comfortable cadence, that he would want to hear from her. Or even care, for that matter, that their boss had failed so spectacularly and publicly.
She stared at the pixels on the screen that formed his name, immediately regretting the impulsiveness that drove her to text him. A flaw in her that somehow relinquished control of her rational mind and thought he was the only person she wanted to share it with and acted on that thought. Billions of people on the planet and there was only one she cared to hear the reaction of.
The blank screen looked back at her mockingly. If this was a message, she heard it loud and clear.
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It was like one of those days she had read about that happened in someone’s life. A literary device. A trope in a movie. Not something that happened to real people and certainly not to her ordinary existence, only punctuated by trips to the grocery store and sales at the mall. The best and worst day happening simultaneously. The moment his arms wrapped around her for the first time in months encasing her fully as he always had; the timbre of his voice, the warmth of him she felt through his clothes as he held her tighter and longer than necessary, the way his eyes lingered on her when he spoke of how good the place looked. All at once counteracted by the moment the slender, elegant hand caressed his back with a familiarity that caused her heart to fall into her stomach and dreaded panic to wash over her in realization. Both of them happened hours apart and both had her staring into scarlet liquid in her glass, spinning the delicate stem in her fingers.
Of course, he had found someone. Free from the tethers of Scranton, he had moved on; away from her and onto another. Another that was confident, well dressed, and whose beauty was just this side of exotic. Everything she wasn’t. Her opposite in a grey pantsuit. She took a long sip, savoring the notes of oak and floral briefly before forcing it down her throat to combat the ever-present nausea that had plagued her since the parking lot. She had barely made it to the restroom before the tears fell and as she stared at her own reflection in the mirror, her red-rimmed eyes, her mother’s knitted sweater, the smooth curls she had so carefully spent far too long on, and she felt like a fool.
"I’m so stupid.” She whispered harshly to herself as she looked into her own eyes. She gripped the edge of the faded pink Formica countertop until her fingers started to ache as she tried to gather herself enough to make it through getting air in her tires and getting home. She heard her voice through the paper-thin walls, distinctive to her now from the others as one would descry a threat, and she felt a wave of nausea build up inside.
She had not moved from her place on her second-hand couch since she had arrived, grabbing the bottle and one of only two wine glasses she owned. She had gone through several of the stages of grief, some more than once, often circling back to anger. When he had walked up to her again, ambushing her cold resolve, she allowed herself to hope, for a flicker of a moment, which had proved to be a grievous mistake. She replayed his words to her before she finally made it to the sanctity of her car, the blood rushing in her ears so loud she felt like screaming. ‘Seeing someone’ repeating like a mantra in honor of her failures; what was so easily in her grasp, now replaced with an aching sadness. She had held on to ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’ like fragile glass, only to find it shattering in her grip.
He was gone. Lost, distant, unattainable.
Gone.
She reached for the bottle, tipping it and watching as the berry flavored numbness filled her glass again. For the first time in her life, she felt truly alone. There was always a flip side to every coin and this was hers. She was free but lonely. The resigned feeling fell heavy over her and she saw the darkness of it vignette the edges of her mind bleakly. Her one-room apartment felt suddenly large and the sounds of her neighborhood suddenly quiet.
As the wine flowed freely in her veins now, she pressed on the bruise of her pain masochistically, imagining what they were likely doing at that very moment. Allowing the anger and envy and torment to wash over her once again. When her mind supplied her with a visual image of what loving Jim Halpert might look like, tears fell fresh down her cheeks, raining on her hand gripping the glass.
The clock on her DVD player flashed 2:01, an electric blue reminder that she had work in a mere seven hours.
He would be there. With her. And this was her purgatory.
