“I can’t stop loving you,” he told her, unknowingly performing a song forty years older than he was. He’d never heard it, or Ray Charles, and he thought he was being original.
“Yes. Yes, you can,” she said back to him, making that face. The one where her dark eyes tell you how bad she feels about what you’re forcing her to spell out for you, but the lines around her tightened mouth say fuck you. “You don’t even try. I did try to make things work with you. I’m done.”
She turned to walk away, with Gail right next to her.
“Emily! Tell me what I can do! Tell me how I can change for you, please!”
She stopped walking and said the last thing he ever heard from her. “Let me make it clear to you: James Edson, I do not now and will not ever feel about you the way you feel about me. Move on, James, for God’s sake!” She left for real this time.
James was silent. Not the kind of silence that precedes a burst of non-silence, where he chases her down, pours out his heart and for once says exactly what he’s feeling. Just silence, full stop.
He was getting nowhere.
He pushed his plastic chair back with a squeak, got up, and left the dining hall. Outside, he jumped on a scooter and rode. He had nowhere to go, really. He’d let everything else in his life slide while he’d tried to win Emily back. Mikhail and them had stopped reaching out, and he didn’t even go to rehearsals anymore. He was weeks behind on his thesis. Collins was on his case to show some progress, but he wasted most days daydreaming about his life with her, how good it could be for both of them. At night, he’d wander the busy campus, looking for her.
That had to stop.
“Mom?” He needed to hear a friendly voice. He’d parked the scooter and sat down on a wooden bench on the quad. “Can I come home on Friday?”
“Honey, hi. No, James. I’m sorry, kid. We’ve got the weekend away with the Hiscocks, up at the cabin. Remember? I’m pretty sure I told you. How about next weekend?”
Silence.
“OK, Mom. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine here. Have a good time with Mary and Pete. Tell ’em hi from me.”
“All right. Bye, you. Eat something.”
James was alone most of the time. By choice. His entire life. That’s just the way he was born. When he and Emily were a thing, her presence was a novelty every minute, a fact his brain stumbled over constantly, like a lump in a rug. He’d had to remind himself to speak his thoughts out loud to her, to show her he knew she was there. It had been a constant source of tension between them.
“You always do that, James! It’s like I’m not even here. I mean, do you even want me around?”
“Of course I do! Emily! I love you, and I love having you to talk to. I want to be with you all the time. I’m just not used to this. I’m all wrapped up in myself, and it’s gonna take some work for me to change. But there’s nothing I want more. I can change.”
But things never did change. He was a fully formed creature, two arms and two legs of self-absorption and introspection, and he was stuck being him. Emily had gotten tired of that and moved on. It was a simple story. It happened millions of times a day, to countless couples around the world, but it was the first time for him. He couldn’t get past it.
[More to come]
