I’m scared I’ll never get over my ex,I typed.I’m scared of repeating the same patterns, over and over again. I’m scaredof never growing, never changing, never moving forward. I’m scared of feeling like this forever.
I deleted the last sentence in the end. It needed a lot of context, after all, and if I started trying to define what ‘feeling like this’ actually meant, I’d still be sitting in this room in another ten years.
But it was true. And it was the reason that I hadn’t been able to articulate, the reason I needed to do this.
If I stayed here, in this place where everything had Jac written all over it, I might actually feel like this forever. I just needed to be somewhereelse.
I finished my application two nights later. I teared up when I hit the send button, and for once, I let the tears fall down my cheeks instead of blinking them back or wiping them away. It might be a small step, it might be a stupid step, it might be a step that never came to anything, but it was a step I’d taken on my own. It felt like a win.
It felt like another win when a producer named Carrie called me a few weeks later to tell me they wanted to see me for an audition. ‘We loved your application,’ she told me.
‘Really?!’ I asked.
‘Really,’ she said. ‘You’re exactly the kind of contestant we look for onMarry Me, Juliet, Amanda.’
I knew that probably just meant ‘you’re blonde and pretty’, but I let myself have it anyway.Be kind to yourselfwas a very common theme in all the ‘how to get over your ex’ articles I was reading, and I was trying my very best.
The audition was in the city, about two hours away from our town by train. I told Mum half of the truth: that I was going to visit my friend Bec and that I was going to stay the night. I hadn’t talked to her about applying forMarry Me, Julietsince that night at dinner.
I felt guilty as hell when Mum dropped me off at the train station. ‘Are you sure about going?’ she asked. ‘There’s that virus everyone’s talking about. I don’t want you catching it in the city.’
‘The virus isn’t even in this country, Mum,’ I said, desperate to get out of the car as quickly as I could before I chickened out. ‘I’ll be fine.’
She pressed a brown paper bag into my hand. ‘Some lunch,’ she told me. ‘Don’t go getting hungry. Say hi to Bec for me.’
I can tell you one thing: if you’re already feeling guilty about lying to your mum, getting lunch in a brown paper bag intensifies it about fifty times over. My lunch was my tell-tale heart, mutteringwhat are you doing what are you doing what are you doing, over and over again.
‘Are you all right, Amanda?’ the psych asked me in my mandatory evaluation. ‘You seem a bit down, and a bit distracted.’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, and then immediately felt even more guilty for lying. ‘Sorry, what was the question again?’
‘What are you looking for in a romantic partner?’
Even though I really didn’t want them to, a million images of Jac immediately flashed before my eyes. Her smiling. Her laughing. Her face when I’d told her I loved her for the first time, the long, deliberate pause she’d taken before she looked me in the eyes and said it back.
‘Someone who…’ I bit my lip.
‘It’s all right,’ the psych said. ‘Take your time.’
‘Someone who knows what they want,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t care what it is, as long as it includes me.’
They gave us lunch after the psych evaluation and the medical and group exercises – some sad platters of soggy sandwiches and trays of fruit which were ninety-five per cent honeydew melon. I took my brown bag outside into the sun instead and sat on the steps of the building, hoping that if I ate the lunch, it’d stop tell-tale-hearting me.
The first thing I pulled out of the bag was a note.Have a great day, darling. I love you. Mum xoxo
And right there, sitting on the very public steps, on a very public street, in the middle of the very public city, I burst into extremely public, extremely embarrassing tears.
‘Hey,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I sobbed.
‘No, you’re not.’
She sat down beside me. ‘Come on, the audition wasn’tthatbad, was it? I know the group exercises were like fingernails on a blackboard, but I’m not sure this is the most proportionate reaction.’
A few of my sobs turned into laughs, before regressing back into regular old sobs.
‘Anything I can do? Anything I can say? I could give you a hug, or I could go away, or whatever you want.’
