Page 95 of My Unfinished Heart

West looks at the floor and inhales. His shoulders rise and fall with the movement of his breath. “You've been with Jayne for more than three years.”

“Jayne and I are over.”

I watch him puzzle through this new information. “Well, from the outside, it looked pretty fucking convincing. It looked like you chose her.”

I had, hadn’t I? It just wasn’t for the right reasons. It was for literally no good reason at all.

“Have you spoken to him since the party?”

“No. No, brother. It was clear that night what you thought I'd done. I'll never go near him again.”

“What I thought you did? I saw you, West. I saw both of you. From the yard. I could paint you a fucking picture.”

That’s news to him. He averts his eyes and clears his throat to try again. “I was in prison for three years…”

I bark an unforgiving laugh. “Oh…is that what this is about? Getting your needs met? Gettin' some ass?”

“Go fuck yourself, Archer. Everyone was drinking that night. He made the first move, and it wasn’t subtle. Were you watching long enough to see that part?”

I wasn’t, but it doesn’t surprise me, and it explains Tristan’s complete lack of shame. He never claimed to be mine. And he was certainly never my best friend. “I saw enough to see you weren’t struggling.”

We meet each other’s glares. He better not say one more fucking thing.

He doesn’t.

“Get out, West.”

Without another word, he leaves.

It’s the injustice of it all that has me up half the night, depressed and ruminating. That everyone else gets to have Tristan in their lives, but I don’t. He floats in my periphery. West gets to kiss him and touch him, Jayne gets to read his journal, Connor gets to live with him, and what do I get?

I get whiskey and emptiness.

I get bad timing.

I get screwed.

And the worst part is, I did it all to myself.

SEVENTEEN

Fireworks

For better or worse, I take Helen’s advice and don’t contact Tristan yet. She’s right—I need to get my shit together first because right now, I’m bad company. Once again, my world has shifted on its axis. The things that once held me in place—West, Jayne, Liam, the bar, the dissertation—those things were my gravity. With all of them gone, it’s easy to let myself go.

To be completely transparent, I did not expect getting my shit together to take as long as it actually did. If I’d known, I might have done a few things differently, but it went a little like this.

I started drinking. A lot. I nearly stopped eating altogether. I lost too much weight. My hygiene became questionable. I grew a full beard for the first time. I turned down dinner with Helen week after week. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t get called by anyone. I ceased to exist. Physically and, you know—existentially.

It was your basic downward spiral, and I’ll spare myself from describing most of it. I’ll just say there was very little self-reflection and a lot of wallowing. In a way, it felt sort of inevitable. Like this thing that was chasing me for so long finally caught up to me. It was more than apathy, and that seemed like a good thing at first because at least I was feeling something, I wasn’t numb. But when I realized what I was feeling, I couldn’t shut it off anymore.

Self-loathing.

February passes with day after day of brown lawns and bare trees. Gray skies and rain. I think constantly about the years since I came back to Austin and everything I should have done differently. Every choice I made that was wrong. That hurt someone. That hurt me.

Literally no one is better off since I came back. Even West. He wouldn’t have gone to jail if I’d gone home with him that night instead of leaving the bar with Jayne. And Helen? She was worried about me when I was gone, but now she’s seen up close what a colossal disaster I’ve become.

I stop painting. I watch a lot of TV. I look for another city to live in. One where I don’t know anyone and might be able to start over, but then I realize I’d still have to take myself with me, and I don’t like me very much, it turns out, so what difference does where I live make? I eventually come to a few conclusions about myself.