“Thank you!” He finally let his face go and took a step closer to me.
“I’m glad I was walking past,” I said, pulling my eyes away from him.
“Me too,” he said. “I was busy contemplating whether or not I needed to call 999.”
“Just don’t use samples from magazines again.” I wagged a finger at him.
“Trust me. I won’t. Thanks again! I owe you one. Please shout if you have an emergency.”
I chuckled. “I will.” I started walking away but bent my knee a little too vigorously and winced.
“What’s wrong?” he called after me.
I turned. “I scraped my knees.” I shrugged my shoulders as if it was no big deal. I didn’t want to explain how I’d gotten them like this. In fact, I’d rather this stranger thought I’d gotten them from carpet burn than the alternative. I turned once more and continued to walk away again.
“Hey, are you staying here?” he called after me.
“Yup!” I shouted over my shoulder.
“Maybe we’ll see each other around then?”
“Uh . . . sure. Maybe,” I said dismissively as I continued to walk away. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I didn’t really feel like making friends while I was here.
1 Jan. 2018
Dear Diary,
It’s a new year. And I am making new resolutions.
1.Lose weight—at least seven pounds which I am sorry to say have all decided to hang out on my hips. Where is the equal distribution, people?
2.Get out of active wear—I have no excuse to wear it other than laziness. I am not a mom of three and I do not go to the gym. (Maybe I should. Go to gym, not become a mom.)
3.Drink less this year—goes with number 1. Suspect the extra pounds are all the beer and pizza evenings with Matt—which brings me to 4 through to 10.
4.Stop spending so much time with Matt! Get a tinder profile and start dating other people. But not if they are gross and creepy—you are not that desperate. Yet.
5.Get a hobby so you are not always with him. Matt is not a legitimate hobby.
6.Get over Matt!
7.Get over Matt.
8.Fucking get over him! Okay!
9.Just do it. Get over him.
10.Matt! Get over him. ASAP! Must. NOW.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I woke in the morning feeling physically exhausted, emotionally bruised and battered, not to mention feeling a sense ofdregetthat was so great, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get out of bed today. Dreget was a word I’d come up with many years ago. It’s the all-consuming combination of regret and dread. Usually in that order. I first discovered this horrific emotion back in my first year of university in my English lit class.
We had this guest lecturer, a semi-famous poet. Of course, in my seriously naïve nineteen-year-old brain, I had thought him to be the most brilliant, enigmatic man I’d ever met. And when he’d started reading his poems out loud in that angsty, emotional way, his long hair falling into his face, his hand clutching his heart, I’d almost flown off the chair and into his lap. And later that night, after several glasses of red wine (I didn’t drink the stuff, but I was just trying to impress him by how sophisticated I was), I did land up on his lap. But halfway through the sex, he’d started doing some kind of weird tantric breathing and humming and whispering lines of poetry in my ear and saying things like, “open your Yoni and your soul for me.” I’d lain on my back looking up at the ceiling with dregret. Regret for where I was, followed by the dread of what was about to come—I hoped it would be him, and I hoped it was going to be soon!(Yoni, I later learned, is the tantric word for vagina—let that sink in, that someone would actually say that to you in bed.)
But my dregret this morning was even greater than that. I felt almost crippled by it. I wished so badly that I could go back in time and stop myself from making such a public fool of myself. I was never going to live that incident down, and I was sure it would become my story. I would forever be “that girl who publicly confessed her love to her best friend at his engagement party.” I dreaded what people thought of me,what Matt thought of me.
I rolled over slowly and pulled my phone off the bedside table. It was time to check in with my friends—no doubt they were worried—so I left a message, requesting an urgent Skype conference. We did this fairly often. We’d become rather good at these, with Annie in LA, Jane in Greece and the rest of us in South Africa. The only person who was unable to figure the whole thing out was Stormy, whose suspicion and disdain of technology were infamous. Messages immediately started flying back and forth between us all and a time was arranged for the call in six hours.What the hell was I going to do until then?
