A Life That Fits (3 page)

The second week passed much like the first. I
didn't cry quite as much, but that only gave me more time to obsess
and analyze. I found nothing about her, and next to nothing about
him, but I couldn't give up. I slept a little more, sheer
exhaustion taking me over, and my work ethic began to make me feel
guilty so I began spending more time on my job, but every free
moment still went to the desperate struggle to find an answer.

As my third week of unproductive hermitage
neared its end, I realized to my surprise that I could continue
like this indefinitely. Since I'd often worked from home two or
three days a week, Anna and Gary seemed to be all right with my
never coming into the office. We talked on the phone and over email
whenever they needed me, and as if by mutual consent we never
mentioned Alex. It looked like I could keep working from home at my
current pathetic pace until I retired. Only thirty-seven years to
go.

Things were stabilizing on a personal level
too. The messages, which I'd continued to ignore, had peaked in the
second week but now there were hardly any new ones. People had
moved on, back to their own crises, and Alex and I were no longer
of interest.

He was still of supreme interest to me,
though. I was briefly certain that he regretted leaving me, based
on the 'so shouldn't have done that' message he posted on Twitter
early in the third week. Though that later turned out to be a
reference to a burrito-eating contest, I still felt sure he also
harbored regrets over what he'd done to me. How could he not?

I knew I wasn't supposed to obsess over my
cheating ex. The right response, as I'd learned from years of
watching romantic comedies, was to go out and find a new man,
preferably either the ex's best friend or his arch rival, or both,
until the ex smartened up and came back. But Alex's best friend was
married with four kids, and he didn't have a rival that I knew of,
and I didn't want a new man anyhow. Though I hated myself for being
so weak, I wanted Alex and I
would
figure out what I needed
to do to make that happen.

I hadn't gotten far, though, by Friday of my
third week at home. Difficult to plan to fix your life when you
don't know what you did wrong. I hadn't eaten much over those
weeks, too busy crying and thinking, but I'd still finished all the
food in the house, and as I sat awaiting the delivery of the pizza
I'd eat for the next few days I again went through what little I'd
discovered.

From the sounds of things, he was going to
work and hanging out with his friends and doing all of his usual
activities, just without me. How come his life was going on as
normal and mine had stopped dead? Easier to be the dumper than the
dumpee, I supposed.

The intercom buzzed and I let the pizza guy
in. To my surprise, though, when he arrived at the apartment he
wasn't the usual guy. Alex and I had been ordering pizza nearly
every Friday night for the four years we'd been in this apartment
and it had always been delivered by the same short round bald man.
This guy was short too, but skinny with dreadlocks and a scraggly
beard.

He handed me the pizza box and I said,
"Where's the other guy?"

"Bob?"

I shrugged. "The usual guy. Short,
bald..."

"Bob." He clutched at his chest, making a
mock agonized face. "Heart attack."

My own heart skipped a beat. "Seriously? Is
he okay?"

"He will be, they think. Not going to be
around for a while, though." He shook his head. "He thought he just
had an upset stomach, and he happened to ask at one of his
deliveries if they had any antacid. The woman he asked was a nurse
and she figured out what was wrong with him. From the sounds of it,
if he'd driven off he probably would have died in the car."

"Wow."

"Yup. One tiny decision changes everything,
eh? Anyhow, that'll be twenty-two fifty."

I paid, but I didn't eat. Instead, I sat on
the couch and thought about what he'd said. One tiny decision. If
Bob had handled that 'indigestion' differently, he'd be dead. At
some point Alex had met
her
for the first time, and if he
hadn't let himself meet her for the second and subsequent times
we'd still be together. If I hadn't stayed home on that first day,
I wouldn't have become the tragic recluse I now was. The most
minuscule change could shake up every aspect of your life.

I needed to be my opposite.

I could do that, if I took every last one of
those little decisions in life and flipped them around. I'd thought
Alex and I were perfect together and I'd been wrong, so I clearly
couldn't trust my intuition. So I'd do the exact opposite of what
it told me. When I wanted to say no, I'd say yes. When I wanted
less, I'd ask for more. When I wanted to wear a sweatshirt and
jeans, I'd pick out a skirt and heels instead. I'd try everything
I'd never tried before. I'd become a whole new person.

And then Alex would come home.

I wasn't proud of how much I, a supposedly
strong modern woman, wanted Alex back, but I couldn't help it. He'd
been in my life forever and without him I felt weak, like half the
oxygen had been sucked out of the air I was breathing: I could
survive but I couldn't possibly thrive.

I picked up a slice of pizza, the same food
I'd been eating every Friday night for years, and realized I hadn't
been thriving for a long time. Alex and I had slipped into
something not so much a rut as a mile-deep trench. I hadn't noticed
since it had happened so gradually, but I could see it now and he
must have seen it too. He'd clearly become bored with me. With
us.

So. I would make changes, perk up my life,
and then Alex would take me back and everything would be fine. Back
to the way it was.

But what would I change first?

I ate my pizza and looked around the
apartment, figuring a physical change might be easier than changing
myself. I needed to do that too, but one step at a time.

Nothing jumped out at me in the living room,
so once I'd finished eating I took my dishes to the kitchen then
began touring the apartment in search of a place to begin. When I
walked into the bedroom and tripped over the laundry hamper, as I
did nearly every time I went in there, I knew my first change. We'd
put the hamper right inside the door so it'd be easy to get the
clothes out to do the laundry, but it partly blocked the doorway
and constantly falling over it frustrated me. Time for it to
move.

I tried various spots in the room and
eventually tucked it into the closet. It could have gone in the
empty section where Alex's clothes used to be, but instead I put it
under my hanging dress shirts so it wouldn't be in Alex's way
when
he came home and unpacked. Lots of room for it on my
side, and the few extra steps to fetch at laundry time wouldn't be
that taxing.

Besides, I'd handled the laundry since we
moved in together, so those steps would never have taxed him at
all. Funny that I hadn't realized that before. I had been stumbling
over the hamper, annoying myself, when I could have relocated it at
any time.

As I turned to leave the room, I saw the
place where the hamper had been, now open and no longer a hazard,
and though it was a tiny and stupid change my shoulders relaxed and
a little flutter of pleasure skipped through me. I'd made a change
and it had made a difference. He and I had actually fought once
about that ridiculous hamper, since I'd hated tripping over it, and
now when he came back there'd be no reason to fight.

I left the room, then went in and out of it a
few more times to enjoy the wide-open space again, then settled
onto the couch to plan my next change. That one had been so small
and yet it had made a significant difference. If I did something a
little more major...

I didn't want to rearrange the bookshelves
even though Alex taking his stuff away had left awkward empty gaps,
because when he came back I'd want him to fit that stuff right back
into those gaps. So it'd have to be something else.

The apartment was getting dark, though, which
made it hard to find changes. I turned on a light, and familiar
exasperation filled me.

Alex had chosen a dusky gray paint for the
living room because he'd seen it in a magazine and thought it would
look elegant. I'd agreed, and it did in fact look elegant in the
magazine's sun-drenched pictures. But our apartment faced north and
got hardly any sun. Turning lights on didn't add much warmth, so
even brighter the room still felt cold and unwelcoming instead of
elegant.

I could change that. I could make our living
room inviting.

But what color to use?

My immediate reaction was to ask Alex for his
opinion, but I grimaced and pushed that away. Kind of the point,
not
asking him. Not that I could.

I studied everything in the room, taking my
time. The furniture's dark brown upholstery and the light oak
hardwood floor looked nice with the gray paint. What else would
suit them? A pale green, maybe. Or a light brown in the same kind
of color as the furniture. Or I could splash out on a rich deep
purple. A shock, but maybe a good one?

I didn't know. My chest tightened in
frustration. I didn't know, and I
had
to know because if I
couldn't even make this tiny change I had no hope of changing
enough to get Alex back.

That thought forced me to my feet. The home
improvement place down the road was open until nine, and it was
barely eight o'clock. I would go get some paint and then spend the
weekend refreshing the living room and revamping my life. I changed
the fuzzy pants I'd put on after my morning shower for jeans then
headed out, filled with a teeny spark of enthusiasm and an
unreasonable amount of terror.

Once at the store, though, the enthusiasm
flickered and died, leaving only the terror behind. The wall of
paint chips loomed over me, taunting me. "You can't make a
decision, can you? Not even something as simple as this.
Pathetic."

It
was
pathetic but I couldn't. All
the ideas I'd had at home now seemed ridiculous, and the huge
variety of color choices paralyzed me.

The crowd paralyzed me even more. I would
have assumed people would have better things to do on a Friday
night than shop for home improvements but half the population of
Toronto seemed crammed into the store and after being alone for
weeks it was overwhelming. I was constantly bumped and pushed aside
as I picked up and discarded sample cards over and over, making and
breaking a thousand decisions, horrified at my inability to choose
and my desperate desire to call someone, anyone, to make the
decision for me.

Who could I call, though? Alex was obviously
out, and I'd discovered to my sadness that many of the women I'd
thought were my friends were actually
our
friends and Alex
seemed to have custody of them. None of them had contacted me after
the breakup and I hadn't bothered reaching out either. The few
women who
had
offered me their company and support were
possibilities, but I'd never responded and so couldn't imagine
calling them now to say, "So, what color of paint should I
get?"

I didn't want to anyhow. At twenty-eight
years old, I
had
to be capable of picking paint.

Didn't I?

What was my favorite color anyhow? I couldn't
even answer that. Alex had loved grays and browns, especially on
me, and I'd gone along with it. My wardrobe was full of them. But
now I wasn't sure that I'd ever liked them. I wasn't sure who I was
any more.

A vibrant aqua blue? A washed-out yellow?
Black, dull and lifeless?

Or wallpaper? Maybe I should--

No. The thought of trying to choose a pattern
and
color, of staying in the crowded store surrounded by
people for that long, was too much to bear. It would have to be
paint.

I scanned the paint chips until a soft pale
purple caught my eye. After all the brown and gray in my life,
purple would be a big change, and at the moment that was the
closest to a decision that I could get. I had the store clerk mix
me up the paint and fled.

I managed to get home before I burst into
tears, but it was close. I'd known Alex and I had interwoven our
lives to an amazing degree, of course, but how could we not have?
We'd been together through nearly all of high school, all of
university, and all the time since. But if someone had asked I'd
have insisted I was still my own person, still an autonomous
creature.

An autonomous creature crying over paint. An
autonomous creature who didn't know her own favorite color.

I had to rebuild everything. I couldn't
continue with what I had. Because I didn't have much of anything
any more.

After crying myself to sleep, I woke the next
morning feeling more positive than I had since Alex had left. Okay,
the paint choosing thing had been a bit of a disaster. More than a
bit. But I
had
bought paint, and I'd even thought to pick up
brushes and rollers. Sure, everything in my life had changed, and
not by my choice, but I could still take control. I could put
together a new life for myself. Better, stronger, more focused on
what I liked and what mattered to me.

My self-pitying thoughts of the night before,
my belief that I had nothing left, seemed silly in the light of the
new day. Of course I had lots left. I had my job, and my clothes
and books and CDs and DVDs. And...

Nothing else came to mind. I had physical
things, but barely anything in the social realm. No real friends,
no boyfriend, no family nearby...

I started to feel down again but rather than
let myself sink into the sadness I decided to paint. Knowing I
should lay down newspaper and carefully tape off the baseboards and
window frames first, I instead just got the furniture and a few
hanging pictures out of the way and launched into it. Another
reversal.