I Played Love Like a Chess Game — and Still Lost Everything

Three in the morning, give or take. Engine off — I must've left it in accessory an hour ago and forgot to switch it off — so the radio clicks off but the dash lights stay on, and the interior has this faint green glow like a hospital room nobody bothered to clean. Porch light across the way flickering behind a half-dead ficus. The ficus looks worse than I feel, which is saying something. My passenger seat is buried under dry-cleaning plastic and a smoothie I bought at some point today and never opened. The plastic crinkles every time I breathe.

I should go upstairs.

I used to think I was good at love. Not in the wholesome way. In the strategic way. I had a folder on my phone labeled "evidence", quotes around evidence, lowercase, like I was being ironic about it, which is the kind of move that should have been a warning to myself. Screenshots of texts he'd sent in the middle of the night, half-drunk and a little raw. I had his timing down to a formula. Too available and I became wallpaper. Too unavailable and he started rehearsing his exit lines. I was proud of knowing all of this. That's part of the problem, I think.

I'd read the essays. I'd listened to the podcasts. I had the vocabulary. Attachment styles. Four horsemen of a relationship apocalypse, I'd read about them, could recite the names. I could name what Mark did. I could name what I did. None of it touched whatever was actually going on, which was that I'd forgotten how to be in a room with another person without running a parallel commentary underneath my skin the whole time.

The first time I met him, at some gallery opening in Chinatown where neither of us actually knew the artist and we'd both just shown up because the free wine was rumored to be decent, I made the calculation so fast I almost laughed at myself. He had a laugh that made me feel briefly like the only person in the room. I watched him for maybe ten minutes across the room and decided. Just like that. The whiskey one. The obscure-novels one. The one who was a little haunted, a little above it all, who didn't text back right away because she was busy living, even though the living was mostly me in my apartment in Koreatown refreshing my inbox with one hand and eating dry cereal with the other.

I wasn't performing cruelty. I was performing intimacy. The cruelty part, at least, would have had a vocabulary.

That weekend trip I invented. I drove to Big Bear alone and read in the parking lot of a Starbucks for three hours because I'd committed to the story. The ex-boyfriend I mentioned in passing. His name was Aaron. Mark got an eight-paragraph monologue about Aaron that made him sound like a character in a French film, and I delivered the monologue on a Tuesday night at exactly the right speed, and Mark looked at me like I'd handed him something precious, and I took that look and filed it away.

There was a perfectly calibrated vulnerability I let slip one night, and it turned out to be exactly the vulnerability Mark had been waiting for, because he was running his own playbook and my tears were the cue he'd been rehearsing for.

I knew I was performing. I sort of knew he was, too, or maybe I just wanted him to be so I didn't have to feel like the only sick one. We had this whole thing built on the unspoken agreement that neither of us would say the real thing first, because the first one to say it lost some game whose rules we'd invented together at a bar in Echo Park years ago. We broke up twice that year. Both times by text. The first time I let him see me cry at exactly the right beat, not at the beginning, only after he'd said something that would make a normal woman cry. I waited a number of days I'd calculated and second-guessed and stuck with anyway before responding to his I'm sorry. I went back. Going back was a strategy too, and I did it right, and it tasted like glass every single morning of that year.

I gained weight that winter. By spring I'd lost it, or told myself I had. I started grinding my teeth at night so hard I cracked a molar in October and didn't tell anyone, not even the dentist, just got the crown and left.

Mark moved out in March. I helped him pack. I made a joke about his obsession with the espresso machine and he laughed the kind of laugh that used to make me feel like the only person in the room. We had sex one more time. I hadn't planned it. I also hadn't tried very hard to prevent it, because at that point I think I had genuinely forgotten what sex was for if not to postpone a conversation.

He left. The fridge humming in the empty apartment. There was a fork in the sink. I washed it. I washed it again. I put it in the drying rack and took it out and washed it a third time because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

I want to say this as the woman who did the wrong thing and has not been redeemed by it. Know our worth. Never settle. Treat vulnerability like a card you play strategically. That's the script, and I've been a really good product for a really long time, and I don't know what else I know how to be.

You get the boyfriend. The weekend in Mexico. The boyfriend who pays for it because you spent months letting him believe he was the only person who ever made you laugh. And then one day you're in a museum in Lisbon because he had a conference, and he's in some session you didn't want to attend, and you're standing in front of a Rothko in Lisbon, just enormous rectangles of red, and you realize that you cannot remember the last time you told him something true. Not curated true. Just the ugly, embarrassing truth of what was actually happening inside my chest that day, which was mostly that I missed a dog I had when I was nine and I hadn't let myself think about that dog in probably fifteen years. The light in the room was bad. Someone's kid was yelling two rooms over. I stood there until my feet hurt.

Thirty-four, sitting in your car, unable to walk into your own apartment because you're not sure who lives in there with you. There's just me and the smoothie and the plastic crinkling.

I texted him from the café across the street. Something about Rothko. He sent back a winking face and the word bored, and I sat there with my coffee going cold and stared at his message until the screen dimmed, and then I stared at the black glass of my phone reflecting my own face for what felt like a long time. I think a woman at the next table asked if I was okay. I said yes in a voice I didn't recognize.

The napkin on the table had a water ring on it from somebody else's drink. I kept looking at that too.

I kept going. Because stopping would have meant sitting still with myself and I wasn't ready for that, I'm still not ready for that.

Mark is seeing someone new. She's, by all reports, an actual human being. I imagine her phone has folders for things like recipes and photos of her mom and not much else. I imagine she says whatever she's feeling out loud, lets it land, lets it be ugly if it has to be.

I don't know what to call what's in me when I think about her. It's not jealousy, exactly. Some cousin of jealousy that won't sit still long enough for me to name it.

I've been writing texts to Mark I don't send. I've started noticing when I begin composing a story about my weekend instead of just having a weekend. Maybe the woman Mark fell in love with is someone I have to grieve in order to become someone who might, someday, be capable of a love that doesn't need a run-through first.

Maybe not. Maybe some of us get good at this and stay good at it. Maybe I will die alone in a beautiful apartment with a curated playlist and never let anyone see me sitting on the kitchen floor because I can't remember what my face looks like when I'm not arranging it for somebody.

The ficus across the street is still dying. The smoothie is warm now. My phone battery is at 11% and I'm not going to charge it because I don't want to see if he's texted, and I also don't want to see if he hasn't.

The plastic will crinkle when I finally breathe. I'm still here.