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5
Grace
Once I’d finished writing, I felt better, cleaner, but exhausted and hurt. It was like re-breaking a bone to set it straight. It was like re-opening a cut to squeeze the pus out, ridding my body of the infection.
Because that’s what these residual feelings for Grayson really were: an infection I needed to dig out with mental surgery and therapeutic exercise.
It had been months since he cut me out of his life. But I was an addict, and any addict will tell you that the worst part of getting clean is recovery.And recovery was mostly about waiting; handing over your sense of control to the clock.
You need to give yourself the time your mind needs to heal,Dr. Silk told me.
Well, I lacked patience. Unlike my life outside my head, internal healing wasn’t something that could be tracked and doodled about in a bullet journal. Every day was unpredictable; a surprise. I never knew if I’d wake up under the weight of Disgrace sitting on my chest, suffocating me. Right now, she seemed to be sleeping, but I knew it was only a matter of time until she woke up and started harassing me again.
Then there was the other element of randomness in my life: Grayson. I never knew when thoughts of him would show up out of the blue and scribble black, loopy lines through my day. Though, I knew it was the memory of him that haunted me, not the real thing. We hadn’t exchanged a word since Effie and I had gone over to our house—no,his house—and collected all of my things. I remembered the look of sadness in his eyes…
Was it regret? Or was that just wishful thinking?
Either way, even though the man wasn’t a physical presence in my life anymore, he still took up a considerable amount of real estate in my head. Like it or not, I was still obsessed.
I was still in love.
My resolve broke and I opened Instagram, dying to get my next hit. It had been a whole hour since I last checked it, after all. Ideservedto check again…
But this time, something heavy loomed in my gut. An uneasy feeling weighed on me as I tapped “G-” into the search bar.
@graybae popped up instantly. Instagram already knew what I wanted to see; I’d trained the app to see me for the psycho stalker I really was.
The image next to his handle had changed colors.
The sinking feeling in my gut deepened, plummeting through my soul.
I knew I wasn’t going to like what I saw, but I couldn’t resist.
I clicked into the account.
The first square on the grid was his new profile picture—a photo of him with his arm wrapped around the slim waist of a gorgeousbrunette. Superman gazing down adoringly at Lois Lane.
My mouth went dry and the wind left my lungs.
He’d found a replacement.
Someone better.
I couldn’t help myself. I clicked through her profile and looked around, feeling more and more inadequate with everything I learned. She was perfect for him in all the ways I wasn’t. Like him, she was a lawyer. Like him, she seemed too effortlessly beautiful to be a real person. And like him, she had her life in order.
She posted much more than he did. I could lurk through her profile and scroll back in time, looking into their perfect life illustrated in Instagram squares like I was peering through the windows of their house. It felt like trespassing, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
My hand began to shake.
They’d been dating for a while, it seemed. The first picture of them together was only a month after Grayson broke things off with me.
I let myself marinate in my misery, desperately obsessing over this perfect stranger, thinking of them in bed together. Did she feel like me, I wondered? Was she wild in bed? Did she do all the things I didn’t like? Maybe setting hard limits with him was a mistake. Maybe if I just let him do what he wanted with me, we’d still be together.
I could have stopped this from happening. I could have intervened. If only I never made that mistake, that terrible mistake, he’d have never met this woman. We would still be together.
I could be lying next to him in his bed right now. Everything would be right in the world.
But I’d ruined it.
