I thought aboutnot everyone does.
I thought aboutbecause I,
I sat there for a long time.
Then I got out of the car. I found the side entrance , I had a key, I always had a key, this was not unusual , and I went inside and I laced up in the dark and I got on the ice alone and I skated until the version I'd been running for two years finally, completely, irrevocably ran out.
It took a while.
When I came off the ice, I sat in the dark of the empty rink and I took out my phone and I looked at Shay's name for a long time.
I did not text him.
But I sat there with his name on the screen and I let it mean what it meant and I did not put it in a column and I did not file it underdo notand I did not run a version.
I just sat with it.
The ice was quiet.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will,
I stopped.
I looked at the ice.
I put my phone in my pocket.
I drove home.
Chapter Thirteen
Shay
I didn't sleep.
This was not unusual, lately. What was unusual was the quality of the not,sleeping , not the restless, managing kind, the kind where you lay in the dark and ran the accounting and arrived atfineand adjusted your position and tried again. This was different. This was the flat, clear, wide,awake stillness of a man who had stopped pretending he was going to sleep and was just lying in the dark being honest with himself for the first time in a long time.
I had kissed Kieran.
I had stood in a cold parking lot and saidthat was nothingtwice and meant it both times and watched Felix not say the thing and get in his car and drive away.
I had walked back into the party and saidI'm goodto Kieran andgreat nightto Reeves andtext meto Mivo and I had gotten a car home and I had sat on my couch with the throw blanket still on the floor and I had looked at the ceiling and I had thought:
Enough.
Not angry. Not even sad, quite. Just , done. The specific, structural done of a person who has reached the end of aresource and found it empty and has to now decide what to do about empty.
I lay in the dark until four.
Then I got up.
I made coffee. I drank it standing at my kitchen counter looking at the dead plant on the windowsill. The dead plant had been dead since August. I had been optimistic about it in September and realistic about it in October and in denial about it from November onward, and somewhere in the last week I had stopped looking at it entirely, which was its own kind of information.
I poured the second cup.
I thought about what I was going to say.
Not the performance version. Not the version where I was funny and light and handed him an exit and protected him from the cost. The real version. The one that had been true for two years and that I had been dressing in other clothes because the real version was exposed and specific and cost something to say out loud.
