Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

Hours later, I wake up, the sun is yet to rise and he’s straight as a board next to me. Barely moving. Staring straight ahead. Panic strains, floods the sheets. He has to leave; he can’t be here; he can’t breathe; he can’t handle this. Daylight comes and the words are the same. He has to leave. I know he has to leave. I know that he can’t stay but I can’t speak to tell him this. I know if I open my mouth, I’ll gag or scream or any of the things that my body feels compelled to do. The life I’ve been finally given, the life that should have been mine all along is being ripped out of my arms.

I can’t breathe. I want to ask him to stay. I want to beg him to stay, on my knees, hands on his thighs, but I can’t. Instead I dress, stand, back against the roll-top bath, fingers gripping. He tells me he can’t, he’s sorry, he won’t. He must go back to where he must be. I grip harder and harder until my pink fingers go white. Staring at the carpet, the swirls start to dance as spots blur and bend, becoming a dancing, writhing mass of bodies and brains.

As he’s speaking – sounds that are noises, but not words – I feel part of me splinter and float up to the ceiling. She watches both of us as the scene plays out. She thinks I’m pathetic. The way I look at the floor, tears burning my eyes, the way I swallow and grip, try to drill my emotion into the ground so that it sinks into the concrete and escapes him. She watches as the shutters go up, keeping me safe from what is happening around me, from what will certainly kill me.

I don’t look as he shuts the door behind him, nor do I move. I stop feeling anything at all and I’m grateful for the numbness. I want my insides to be scooped out with a cold, steel spoon and dropped down the drains for the rats to ravage. Minutes pass, maybe hours. I don’t move. I’m scared if I do I’ll start to feel again.

Eventually, the sun starts to dim and there’s nothing else to do but move. One foot, one hand, stretches out in front of the rest of me. I’m incapable of moving my body in one smooth motion, a movement that I recognise. One step and I’m on my knees, towels in my fist and then in my mouth. I’m choking but that’s better than crying, than begging, than screaming his name.

When I’m dry, I pack my overnight bag, refusing to look at myself in the mirror as I move around the room and bathroom. I walk out of the door, unable, unwilling to turn around and take one last look at the room where we spent one night, the sheets still tangled and balled.

I walk down the hall, walls guiding me. I get in the lift, just big enough for two, press the button for the ground floor. I get out and approach the desk.

‘Hello,’ I think I say. We have a conversation, though I can’t remember the words that pass between us as I pay the bill. Just seconds later, I’m out on the Soho street staring at the sky, at the lives being lived behind each tiny window. I feel it. He’s gone.

Two days later, I’m on a plane to New York. I cry the whole way. The next morning, I’m up at four a.m., my sleep taken, too. I walk the streets of the Lower East Side as club kids fall, laughing, into yellow cabs and bodega owners in thick hats and vests cut through the twine holding stacks of newspapers together. He’s 3,000 miles away and I’m more stuck inside him than ever. And now, without him, I don’t know who I am any more, what’s left. I wish I’d never met him. I can’t imagine my life without him. I can’t believe I existed without him. What do I do now?

CHAPTER 21

I know that my only salvation lies where it always has: with work. With this job that I’ve spent my life dreaming of. The career that has saved me every time I’ve been sucked into the sticky depths. It’s also a chance to right all the previous wrongs, to prove that the city didn’t defeat me. And that I’m good enough, smart enough, that I’m enough. For something, for someone.

It’s a job working with a big, talented, suspicious, hard-edged team. I stand before them, the Empire State Building stacked in between buildings out of the window to my left, to tell them how great it will all be, how great I will be, as they stare hard in my direction. I’m in the office twelve hours a day, then tapping, chest tight, from home, or a bar, for several hours more. I pour every bit of my brain and energy into it. This will save me. This is who I am.

I pray that the pressure and constant thrum of stress will take my mind away from him. That I’ll find sanctuary in the strung-together seconds when I no longer carry him around. I wait for the smallest sign – an email, a message, a picture, a word – a hint that I’ve spread inside his life like he has mine, that he too is altered. I hunker down in the dark, under the covers, scrolling, looking, waiting.

I write the first of many letters that I never send. Full of longing, lust and utter, desperate sadness. I write each one on the same paper, in the same blue ink, tearing the pages off when I’m done, folding them four times until I can’t see the words, in the hope that they won’t touch me. When that doesn’t work I put them inside a plastic bag and turn