Authors Note: Obsessive love. It can be a barricade. A chain. It doesn't let you move forwards or backwards. It keeps you stranded in one place until that place can no longer accommodate you and your stubbornness. The protagonist of my story is obsessively in love with someone who is not available to them and it's made them a prisoner of their own emotions, unable to establish or maintain new relationships or even set up a home of their own. While reading, consider this, when does one's love for another cross into the realm of toxicity? When does the only place really become the only place, like a trap?
You let your hands rest in your lap as the bus bounces along. You admire your freshly manicured nails and the softness of your translucent white hands. You haven’t been to work in four months and for once, they’re not stained with house paint, or grimy from picking through records at the vintage shop, your favourite pastime. Beside you, on an empty seat, your red plastic suitcase slides about.
You’ve got a mask on. So does every other passenger. You feel like it’s Halloween. You’re ten years old again and costumed as a ninja. You’re clever and sneaky, darting behind trees to pounce on your fellow, unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. Your only worry then was how many Kit-Kat bars you would get, and whether or not your Mom would take them away from you, because when it came to sweet, forbidden things, you just couldn’t control yourself. You still can’t.
On the bus, everyone is suspicious of each other. Everyone eyes one another warily. People have learned to masterfully command and wield their own space, to make themselves smaller by curling up, tucking their limbs away, becoming invisible, making themselves disappear. You are part of a generation of contortionists and magicians. Even before all this started, you already knew how to make something out of nothing. Nothing is new or challenging anymore. You know nothing will change when this is all over. You would go out without the mask if you could because you’ve lost the will to care, to pretend.
Glum and bored, and unimpressed by the bland, empty farmlands and loitering, grazing cattle streaming past your window, you check your phone. There’s still no message from him. No plea to be taken back. You never expected one, but deep down, you wanted one, just a little. Before the quarantine began there were hopeful glimmers of a future with him. You went with him to view an apartment that you might have shared with him, had the world not ground to a screeching halt and the potential landlord struck down with the much-dreaded and much-feared disease. There might have been mornings of waking up in the same bed, arms and legs entwined, breath and body odors mingling, sunlight streaming through the one window with the mauve-painted frame and the wispy lace curtains that he liked and you didn’t. You might have gone grocery shopping with him, filled the cart with bell peppers and cookies, and pretended you were two adults with a solid meal plan for the week. You might have sorted through the laundry, washed and dried dishes, bickered over money, talked about adopting children, and moving somewhere better, eventually. But now, at that moment, you only think about the prospect of seeing your best friend again. You want to be with the only person you think you truly love. You put your phone away.
The bus screeches to a slow stop. A few more people come aboard this brave vessel, ploughing through a pestilence-riddled province. You don’t think of pulling your suitcase off the seat to free up room, even for the hobbling older lady with creaky knees and hunched shoulders. You take advantage of the new rules, permit yourself to be a little selfish. The older lady has to sit away from you, just as you have to sit away from her. The red suitcase is your barrier, your Great Wall. You hide behind it.
The bus door swings shut. You’re moving again, closer towards your best friend’s house, your peculiar oasis. The couch you will sleep on that night and claim as your own is corduroy brown. You know it well, it was yours before your best friend bought it. It sags in the middle and squeaks slightly when you toss and turn, but you don’t mind. You always sleep well on it. It’s a second home for you. You close your eyes and think about what you told your now ex-boyfriend when you broke up with him, only a few days earlier.
“The only place I want to be right now is on his couch.”
You remember the look on his face when you spoke those words. A smooth succession of feelings. A dynasty of feelings. A wobbly card house of feelings. Confusion, understanding, betrayal. Then, finally, pity. Pity for you, the utter fool with the deck. He figured it out. The puzzle pieces snapped together, and he resigned herself then and there. You will never stop being in love with someone else. You have decided you will gladly forfeit having a life of your own to latch onto your best friend’s life, your best friend’s marriage, your best friend’s future family, his corduroy brown couch. Like a barnacle, you will cling to the underbelly of a cargo ship at sea, along for the adventure but never coming up to the surface to breathe the fresh, briny air. This is your fate. You picked it. It’s meant for you.
He felt sorry for you, and he left you to it. He drove off in his car and you watched him go. You remember how many times in the past he sped past your house in that car, forgetting your address, and the colour of your garage, until the day your brother put up a sign in the front window in support of the striking airport workers’ union, making your house distinguishable on the street of suburban clones. Making it marked for him to find so you could climb into the car with him, and spend the whole day with him. He would always defend himself, while laughing. “I’m directionally challenged. Thank God for that sign.” He’ll never come back now.
Your best friend is waiting for you at the station when at last the bus delivers you to him. He’s wearing a mask too. You force yourself not to jump into his arms, to dive headfirst into the safe refuge of him. It’s a public place. There are too many people around, and everyone’s watching. You’d be recorded in an instant, demonized on the news. Yet another mean millennial breaking the rules. No morals, no decency, no thought of the common good. Your life and his life were ruined by one carelessly human moment.
He's taller than you, a full foot taller. If you could get away with it, if no one had cameras in their pockets, ready to damn you, catch you in the act, you’d bury your face in his shoulder, while standing on your tiptoes. You would cry, you would sob into him, fill up his well, flood him. You’ve missed him so much, it felt like a withdrawal. His wife is not with him. This doesn’t surprise you, even though you were a groomsman at their wedding. You knew already she wasn’t happy about you visiting him and her. That didn’t stop you.
Your best friend tells you you have to carry your own suitcase, if that’s okay. You say, “Of course.” He looks tired, with his eyes, behind their rounded glasses, devoid of their usual sparkle. You’re in love with his slimness, his hair, dark like black coffee, twisted into a plump bun at the nape of his neck. You would lift that bun to tenderly kiss the spot on his neck where your ex once tried to kiss you. You refused then, feigning ticklishness, when in truth you felt nothing. Your best friend refused you when he got married to someone else. When will you learn?
The drive to your best friend’s house is awkwardly silent. Or silently awkward. Does it matter which? Now you begin to regret coming to this place. It’s a small town, where the rents are cheap, but it’s all a big, ironic joke when there’s nothing to spend all that saved money on. The movie theatre is closed, as are all the restaurants except for that sandwich shop that caters to the truck drivers, the true heroes, passing through. There’s nowhere to go dancing, nowhere to go bowling, nowhere to play games, nowhere to seek a thrill, an escape route. You thought you were doing your friend a favor, by being the break in the long, uniform days. You realize, as the car rolls into his quiet suburban neighbourhood, that you’re not so much a relief from boredom as a disturber of the peace.
To ease your flared-up guilt, you start to think selfishly again. You start imagining that you live here with him and that you’re both driving home from your jobs in a world where there are still jobs to go to every day. He’ll lean over and kiss you on the lips when you pull up in the driveway. You’ll joke about the dinner you’ll have, pasta again, maybe with a cheese sauce this time, instead of tomato. You sink into this fantasy world like you’re planning to sink into his couch. Beside you, his hands grip the steering wheel, his knuckles rigid and needle-like, almost ready to stab, and you don’t know what he’s thinking. You only know that you love him to the point of desperation.
At the front door of his house, his wife greets you, and takes your red suitcase from you. She smiles and welcomes you back, but there’s tension in the air already. There’s the tightening of her jaw, a certain hard coldness in her eyes. Her hostility chokes you like a sour-smelling perfume she’s wearing. And like a good guest, you can say nothing about it. She was wearing that scent when you were there helping her and your best friend, her new husband, move in a year earlier. Then, she accepted your help begrudgingly, holding out on a cousin’s plan to set you up with another guy.
She drops off your suitcase next to the couch where you will sleep that night, all the while wondering what the hell happened to that plan. You were not supposed to be there, in her house, crashing on her couch, distracting her husband, being so unbearably, disorderly you in what was by then meant to be a solid, comfortable, well-established us. You are supposed to have a boyfriend. You are supposed to be living with that boyfriend. It was all arranged for you, with careful, thoughtful precision. You were supposed to be on your own, at last. How could you have possibly botched it?
You tell the story at dinner, over slightly burnt sausages and mashed potatoes, made by your best friend with plenty of butter and salt, just the way you like it. You didn’t want to break up with him over a video call, you tell them, so you convinced him to drive over to your house. You walked with him for an hour, in your neighbourhood park, stepping over shards of beer bottles, stopping to read the optimistic chalk messages left by children on the picket fences. He was optimistic too, chattering on about how when all this was over, you could plan a trip to Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland, and stay in this hotel, or that one, or hike through some famous trail or another, the names unmemorable like illusions. He was floating away with ideas. He was a million miles away from you, in the future already, while you were sinking further and further into the quicksand of the present, mere inches away from being swallowed entirely by despair, real despair, the kind that makes people eye the deep end of the lake, the train tracks, the bottle of vodka. You almost reconsidered dumping him, because he might have saved you. But you did dump him, at the end, when you both stood in front of your house with the sign in the front window. Without bothering to meet his eyes, you told him you stopped missing him.
Neither your best friend nor his wife understands what that means.
“How could you…stop missing him?” your best friend asks you. He’s the jury, you’re the defendant. His wife could easily be the judge and sentence you to exile if your defence isn’t strong enough. Nevertheless, you offer what you have, which really isn’t much, you realize then.
“My brother cries about missing his girlfriend every night. I never cried over him.”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t miss him, though,” your best friend counter-argues.
You shrug your shoulders, a reflex gesture like the doctor tapping your knee. “I don’t love him.”
I love you! I love YOU! You would scream it if you could, throw it across the table, spill it on the floor if your best friend’s wife wasn’t there. She stands between you and your performance art. Where you stand, you don’t know. You only know that your knees are giving out under you and that when you fall, it will always be on their couch. You know no other way to land.
Dessert is vanilla-bean ice cream. You let yours melt into a cold soup in your bowl. You’ve eaten it like that since you were a child, waiting for it to be soft enough to spoon into your mouth.
You’re grateful for that ice cream. You’re grateful that your ex, a history buff, wasn’t there to tell you all about how Typhoid Mary had unknowingly passed on half her name to her unfortunate victims through her homemade ice cream. “The germs got killed while the hot food was cooking, but not with ice cream, or anything else that was cold.” He did that, a lot. Offer facts no one asked for, that no one wanted to know. You used to find it endearing.
Your best friend, pushing over to you the bottle of fudge sauce, tries again to make sense out of your parting-of-ways with the promising boyfriend.
“Do you think you’ll get back together with him when this is over?”
You shake your head, your mouth full of sticky sweetness. You’re bored of this conversation now. You don’t want to talk about it anymore. You broke up with the boyfriend and it’s a done deal. Irreversible. You ask for a second scoop of the ice cream and your best friend gives it to you. Again, you let it melt in your bowl. You let it become warm. That’s all you have patience for now.
Cordoned off in their bedroom later that night, protected by the walls that conceal the intimacies and secrets of their marriage, your best friend and his wife are free to whisper about you, their secretly unwanted and imposing guest. The displeasure has had its time to melt. She’s really not happy, and she makes that fact known.
“He can’t keep coming here.”
She’s chosen exile. You will leave. You will leave. She’s decided. But your best friend, your lawyer, your willing representative, stands up for you, more out of habit than any desire to implement justice. He’s as exasperated by you as she is. You’ve shipwrecked on his shore too many times, compelling him to play rescue team. Yet he plays again. He loves you back, but as a father loves his child. It’s not a good thing for either of you.
“He’s lonely.”
“He has a boyfriend!”
“Had a boyfriend.”
“He can get him back.”
In your best friend’s wife’s mind, that’s possible. She didn’t personally witness the cinematic finality of your boyfriend’s car driving away. Beside him, your best friend sighs and shakes his head tiredly as he reaches over for the lamp switch.
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he asks her. In the darkness, he slides under their shared covers, where you and the problems you bring can’t follow.
“I’m asking him to leave tomorrow,” she says.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. He can’t keep sleeping on our couch. That’s our couch.”
Our includes the souls of the unborn children not yet roaming the Earth. The children they will have when it’s safe to go into a hospital again. That couch is theirs too, for the future movie nights, the spilt juice and Cheerios, the pet cat’s hair, and every stern parental talking-to yet to come. The jumping up and down. The being told not to jump up and down. The sleepovers the children will have with their friends when they make friends, whom their parents hope won’t be like you. You’re infecting it with your germs. You need to stop, to think of the common good. The couch is not yours anymore. It will never be yours again.
Shuffling about under the quilt your best friend dug out of the closet for you, you almost feel a sense of contentment. The quilt is musty but warm. You pull it up to your chin, achieving momentarily that sense of yours, which you know will disappear in the morning with the rising of the sun and the vanquishing of the cold you’re sheltering yourself from.
In their bed, your best friend’s wife rolls on top of him, and he guides her to where she needs to be. She’s his blanket and she keeps him warm. They agreed beforehand not to do this while you were here, but in defiance of you, they will click together back into us for the few volatile moments it takes. There’s a sense of victory in it. You haven’t yet managed to separate them. Your best friend stashes away his cry of pleasure into his pillow, where it will stay preserved, but not for you.
On their couch, you settle into a comfortable sleeping position, and let your eyelids rest as the lumpy pillow parts its sea for you and accepts your head. For now, you’re just glad that you’ve made it here one more time. You feel better, just being near your true love again. You will not give him up until you’re ready. You are not done with being you yet.