I Loved Him So Completely That I Eventually Had to Burn It All Down

"I didn't want him to suffer. I just wanted him to feel, for once, what it had been like to be the only one holding the whole thing together. Understanding, I think, is worse than suffering." (overheard, somewhere in Brooklyn, 2019)

The coffee was cold by the time I noticed it. I'd been sitting in the Costco parking lot long enough for the seat heater to cut off twice and then cut back on, which is how I knew it had been a while. The clock on the dash was blinking at me in that awful neon green, the way a microwave does when you've been staring at your reheated pasta too long. Outside, a man in a red vest was helping someone wrestle a giant bag of dog food into the back of a hatchback. The dog food looked heavier than the woman driving. I watched all of this like it was happening to someone else. I watched it because looking at anything inside my own head felt like it would finish me off.

His name doesn't matter. What matters is the years I spent learning how he took his coffee. A splash of oat milk, no sugar, the cup always in his left hand because he'd broken his right wrist falling out of a tree when he was a kid. The specific rhythm of his breathing when he was about to lie to me, that little half-second pause before the swallow. The way he could be cruel in that careful, almost gentle way, the way a mother is cruel when she tells her daughter she looks tired in that dress and then kisses her forehead afterward.

And then one unremarkable Tuesday, in that mild, flat weather that makes a rupture feel worse because nature refuses to dramatize it with you, he was gone. Not dead. Not in an accident. Just gone. He moved on with the unhesitating fluency of someone who had been practicing leaving in his head for months while I was still talking about us like it was still Tuesday.

I keep thinking about a café near the Taj Mahal, staffed by women who survived acid attacks. Some were attacked by former partners. Some because they had simply, at some point, been desired and then un-desired by someone who couldn't tolerate being refused. Some for reasons that have nothing to do with love at all, just the ordinary cruelty of men who wanted to own something. The café exists so the women can stand behind a counter and hand a stranger a cup of chai and watch the stranger drink it, and in that tiny transaction, feel the ordinary world treat them like they still belong in it. There is a flavor of devastation that doesn't have a clinically respectable name.

I hated him. I'm forty-two now and euphemism is a cowardice I can't afford. I hated him the way you hate a country you used to live in that won't take you back. Like a season. Like pollen in your eyes. I hated the sound of his name in other people's mouths. I hated the smell of his laundry detergent on a stranger in the canned-goods aisle at Trader Joe's, and I stood there, frozen, holding a can of black beans for so long that an employee asked me if I needed help finding something. I once crossed a street in San Francisco to avoid a man wearing the same boots, and when I got to the other curb my hands were shaking and my vision had gone a little sparkly at the edges from not breathing. I composed letters I never sent. They got longer. I deleted the second one four times before I gave up. They did nothing.

From inside, the swing from love to hate feels less like a pendulum and more like a window you've thrown yourself through in the dark, not knowing if there's a garden below or a parking garage or just more concrete. I remember one night, specifically, standing at the sink washing a pot he'd left crusted on the stove, and my hands went still under the water for no reason I could name, and I just stood there, and I stood there, and the water kept running, and I couldn't move. All that hatred had been building beneath the surface for so long that by the time the breakup arrived, announced over a Thai restaurant table, over a bowl of tom yum neither of us touched, it was already fully assembled. It was just waiting in the parking lot for someone to walk out and acknowledge it.

I had spent three of our four years being the one who noticed things. I noticed the dry skin on his left elbow that he was embarrassed about. I noticed the email tone shift from his mother. I noticed, eventually, the infidelities, not the dramatic ones, but the slow drip of attention toward other women that he disguised as friendliness, that he disguised as being "good with people," that I kept translating into something he could live with. When he forgot my birthday I translated it into a busy work schedule. Once, after a fight, he called me "too much" and I turned it into him being tired. When he made me feel like the unstable one for having any reaction at all, I translated that into my own deficiency. Into shame. Into the kind of shame you can wear for years before you realize it's not even yours anymore, it's just the shape someone cut for you.

Hatred felt like the only door I could find. If he's the monster, then you're not the woman who begged. If he's the villain, then you're not the woman who noticed the small cruelties and pretended, with elaborate courtesy, that she hadn't. I chose that exit. I would choose it again. I'm not sure I had another door.

In the months after the parking lot I tried to do the responsible things. I told my therapist, a kind woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, that I was struggling with what she called "intrusive thoughts about a former partner." She said it again, slowly, the way you say something to someone you suspect isn't hearing you, and I just nodded. I went to dinner with my friend Margo, who had also been through a version of this, and we sat across from each other at a corner table and talked in low voices for three hours and ordered a second bottle of wine we didn't really want. We did not say anything that made us feel better. We did not need to. I read two books on codependency and recognized myself with the sickening pleasure of being diagnosed. I downloaded a meditation app and listened to a woman named Marisol with a voice like warm honey tell me my thoughts were not me, they were just weather passing through, and I thought, okay, the weather is a Category 4 sitting on top of my chest. I didn't feel better after. I closed the app and ate crackers in bed at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday. None of it unknotted it. You don't heal out of love-hate. You wear it down. Like a stone in your shoe that you eventually stop noticing, not because the stone has gotten smaller, but because the skin on your heel has gotten thicker in exactly that one spot.

I don't know. I've been sitting in a lot of parking lots lately, which is to say I've been sitting in a lot of unresolved things. The coffee gets cold. The red-vest man is loading bag after bag of dog food into hatchbacks. Somewhere in India, a woman who survived the worst thing her ex could think of is sliding a cup of chai across a counter to a stranger, and I want very badly for that to mean something clean. That you can come back from the worst thing and still be okay. That there is a café, and a counter, and a transaction, and some small proof you are still here.

But the lesson is probably uglier than that, and I think she knows it too. You come back from the worst thing. The radiator is clicking in the other room and the cat is asleep on a stack of mail you keep meaning to sort. You make the coffee anyway. Your hands are a little less steady than they used to be. The cup is warm in your hand. You haven't dropped it yet.