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She didn’t have the mental energy or desire to make space for other people.
This was both because she refused to let anything fall through the cracks with the store, and because she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anyone even remotely related to the shul.
Everything reminded her of David. Everything.
Her silly floof-monster of a cat reminded her of that man. She wanted to be angry with him. That night, she’d been livid, but it had dissipated quickly. Mainly she was just confused. The fight--if it could be called that, it felt like more of an attack, had come out of nowhere. And it seemed so completely out of character she was flummoxed. Part of her wanted to reach out, but she wouldn’t. He needed to know he didn’t get to talk to her like that.
She’d gone so far as to remove the “hot” from his name in her phone contacts. That lasted exactly thirty seconds. She put it back almost immediately.
Sometimes her finger hovered over the “block” button.
She told herself she wasn’t ready to make that step because she was too busy to think it through.
All that she could bring herself to tell anyone else if they asked was that she didn’t have time for a relationship, so she’d told him so. She couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone about the full conversation, though. Not even to her friends. Not even to her therapist. Not even to Deev, and he’d been a witness.
She couldn’t shake the feeling he was right.
That she was foolish to think she could rejoin the community, in any capacity, even with baby steps.
Of course, she knew that was horse shit.
The part of herself that had started working under David’s touch, that long forgotten, rusty part of her soul, was unafraid of this predicament. It said that whatever he’d said was on him, not her. Yes, she could have handled things differently, she could have foreseen that he would want to know she was interacting with his child, but she hadn’t done anythingwrong. Certainly nothing that merited that kind of anger.
She was proud of herself for recognizing this, even when she had the daily argument with herself about calling him to check that he was okay. Because clearly something had been happening to make him react that way.
But no, that wasn’t her job.
He’d made it known he wanted a boundary drawn so she’d drawn it for him. Devastating as it was.
In her head, she called him an asshole. That was sheer self-preservation, she knew. But she couldn’t find the resolve to be truly angry with him. She was just sad. Worried. Concerned. Tired. So tired.
Things couldn’t continue this way. She understood that.
She was spreading herself much too thin. Eventually she was going to break under the pressure she was putting on herself. Every day she made the promise that she would listen to her body, she would check in with herself and do what she needed to do to take care of herself. And every day by the time she got to the store, she’d forgotten it all.
Shoshana was becoming a compulsive list maker.
Not because she found lists soothing, in fact they made her anxious--they made her worried she was forgetting something. But she was convinced if she didn’t write every single thing down, shewouldforget. Better to worry you were forgetting something, and see to everything, than not worry at all and forget something big, right? Right.
Her office--the tiny one, she refused to go into the larger one unless it was to retrieve a file--was littered with post-its. She would recall something, and pull a post-it pad from her pocket, write down whatever it was, and slap the post-it wherever there was space. This meant that the wall of paned glass that made up the outer wall of her office was covered almost completely in brightly colored squares as far up as she could reach.
It couldn’t go on this way.
But then, it did. It had to. What choice did she have?
She groaned, staring blankly down at the stack of papers in front of her, trying to remember what she was supposed to be doing. The store wouldn’t be open for three hours, this was the time when she should just be waking up for the day. But she’d already been here for at least forty-five minutes and she still had no idea what she was supposed to be doing. Her mind felt fuzzy, and she couldn’t decide if it was exhaustion, depression, or that she’d just reached her saturation point and she needed a break.
There was a loud banging coming from somewhere. It was rhythmic and she didn’t bother to investigate because the owner of the shop next door had a ten-year-old who liked to toss a basketball against the wall of her store. When the music was being piped into the large showroom space, it wasn’t noticeable. It was just during times like now, when she was the only one here. She sighed, reaching into her desk drawer for a bottle of aspirin.
Her phone pinged. She glanced at it, saw it was a text from Leah and put it back down.
She didn’t have time to chat right now. She had to do… something.
The banging stopped abruptly, then picked up again. Less rhythmic, more frantic. She glared at the space where she guessed the boy would be throwing the ball. She couldn’t see anything on the other side of the glass because of the post-its. She should get up and put on some music to drown it out. He probably had a friend with him or something.
But getting up required energy she didn’t really have at the moment.
Her desk phone rang, the sound sharp. She glared at it. If she let it ring out, whoever that was would just get the store’s recorded message letting them know that the store was closed, and the hours of operation. She considered it, but she’d purposely programmed that phone to have the most annoying ring she could think of, because under normal circumstances she despised a ringing phone and would pick up more quickly.
