The Breakups
I.
Slim starts to say how he’ll always be there for me, how he’ll always care. He wants to play the game where we’re still friends. Stop, I tell him. He’s trying to say all the right things for a mature and mutual breakup. I tell him I wish I’d never met him. I suddenly see no way of doing this without hating him.
I’m stuck in a nursing home where the plan was to teach me how to walk again following an MS setback. Before I came here, I felt almost normal and truly in love. Slim once said that this was more than he signed up for, but he also once said that he had never been so happy. Now, he is giving up. I am giving up. Three years of loving the wrong man, I tell myself. Any man would have been the wrong man. I don’t know if I will hate him or beg him to come back. This was just supposed to be a phone call to say goodnight.
I hang up on him or he hangs up on me. We end it through text messages. He still wants to come tomorrow. He says he wants to do this in person. It’s confusing, the way he drags things out by holding on. Or maybe that’s me. My visitors are few. Slim is here more than anyone, but he’s told me he doesn’t like coming. No one does. I’m the youngest patient in the nursing home.
I’m sick of suffering. Do I have a standing DNR? I’ve changed my mind a few times, but don’t always make it official. It’s the same with Slim — I don’t know what the standing order is or where I officially stand. In fairness, even I don’t want to stay with myself until the end. I want to stop everything from ending. Laying in a nursing home bed, losing control over everything, I just want to hurry up and be out of love.
II.
The next night we break up again. Outside the nursing home, in the visiting area, there’s a semi-circle of benches and an ashtray. Slim stands at the top of the stairs that leads to the parking lot. He knows I can’t follow him down.
Every breakup feels real. I call out for him. Please, I say over and over. I don’t know how to fix this. You broke my heart, he yells with his back to me. I want to tell him I would never do such a thing. The same promise I’m sure he would make.
Sometimes we make up. He comes back. We kiss passionately with wet faces. Every time he leaves I’m not sure he’ll come back.
III.
Then it’s my turn to leave him the following night.
I throw my cigarette to the ground and wheel back into the nursing home. I stop when I’m through the double sliding doors. He’s not coming after me. The chase is over. I make a clean getaway to my room and cry for hours into a pillow.
No one comes to check on me.
IV.
You always do this. We can never just have a good visit.
You don’t have to be here.
I have a daughter who needs me.
I’m not keeping you from her. I’m not keeping you from anything.
Except that I’m here almost every day.
And I’m here every day, all the time. I’m the one who’s sick.
That’s not an excuse for everything. This isn’t worth it anymore. I’ve been missing work. You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself. Not even your own son.
How dare you. I want you to leave.
And now you’re crying because you feel sorry for yourself and want everyone else to, but you need to deal with that. Selfish bitch.
Get out. Just get out.
Sorry, you were dealt a shitty hand, but I’ve had enough.
I’m the one who’s had enough. It’s over. Get out.
V.
This becomes our nightly routine. We stretch out our breakups. There isn’t always a chase or making up. The ease of hating each other comes more quickly than the intense labor of our love. We are losing each other. I am sicker.
Am I still who you want to be with, Slim? He doesn’t understand my world, and the world he’s in kept going without me for two months. On nights when Slim doesn’t come, I realize how used to being lonely I am.
I’ve got an older friend here in the nursing home who calls himself a lifer. My friend walks. He wears sweatpants every day, but gets his hair cut regularly. He hands me the lighter for my second cigarette. This is the last of our outside time for the day without any visitors coming. Before we finish our cigarettes, he tells me I’m too young to be in here, and asks if I caught the final question on Jeopardy.
He says my boyfriend seems smart like he went to college. He says it never works with them and us, not when we’re in here. The divide’s too great. He’s approaching eighty, and says he knows more about things not working out than working out. He’s got kids who don’t visit. An ex-wife or two he speaks very little about. Dead ends. Anyway, he says, I’ve got nowhere else to go. You’ve got to get out of here, he says, like he’s said several times before.
We smoke our cigarettes down to the filters. And our break is over.
VI.
Following threats to move me to the long-term care unit, Slim calls my social worker at the nursing home for a meeting where he practically demands my release. He does most of the talking. He says he wants me home. It will take a few days to put everything in place. Nurses and physical therapists will be coming to the house. A woman who will help me shower. A social worker. An occupational therapist. So, that’s the plan. I’m almost free.
He has to go back to work after the meeting. Slim kisses me and says everything is going to be okay. I wonder what we’re promising each other.
Slim once asked me if I would still be with him if I wasn’t sick. It’s hard to really know what I would be like if I wasn’t sick.
If I’m not sick, it’s a decade ago. I’m working on a story in Montenegro when all my sources fall through. I go hitchhiking through Albania with a French girl. I miss a deadline, get drunk, and the French girl kisses me in the rain. It means nothing. I write the Montenegro piece when I get back there, and become Facebook friends with the French girl. My story is serious. I believe I am a serious person at this time of my life.
I can’t imagine I would have stopped being a journalist or going to the Balkans. Last time I was in Belgrade I toured an apartment I would have shared with two other journalists. The room that was open was really tiny but luringly perfect. A life that almost started, excited me. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as long ago as it was.
Each time I fantasize about another life I feel lonely and guilty. I told Slim, of course, we’d still be together. We never played the what-if game again. And now I want to go home with Slim. This is a love story.
Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.