56. On day-to-day monotony and its associated ghosts
Every day is another day.
I’m at the Brooklyn Heights SoulCycle when I make eye contact with a man, as he enters the building, for just a little bit too long to be accidental. Ostensibly, he’s there for the same class that I am—a ride soundtracked by a Lady Gaga megamix scheduled for 5:30 PM—but my glance at him has turned into a stare because there’s something familiar about his face. He resembles the guy who unknowingly seeded what would become my most consequential romantic dissolution.
I catch myself and I look away, hoping that nobody has noticed me. It would be kind of awkward, wouldn’t it, to be in such proximity to him? Awkward for me, at least—I sincerely doubt he remembers me, if it’s him at all. It would distract me throughout my workout. I’m here because I planned to kick-start my metabolism after a few weeks of rest since spraining my ankle, and I don’t want to make it weird. I just want to be done with it.
I try to shake it off. It’s not a perfect match, this man’s face and the one that I picture in my mind, and I’m doing my best to not jump to conclusions despite recalling that he had lived just down the street from this SoulCycle spot. Our one-night stand had taken place months before I began dating the man who would be my next ex-boyfriend, and I remember his apartment being furnished with the idiosyncratic kitsch of a gay man who possessed the aesthetic tastes of an eccentric great-aunt. Post-coitus, he’d explained to me that he was a Korean adoptee into a White family residing somewhere on the southern East Coast, and that he worked as an interior designer. Fitting, I’d thought as I examined his home decor. Then, I had bidden him farewell with all the customary invitations to see each other again for a repeat experience and stepped out of his building into a light drizzle.
Of course, years have since wedged themselves between our hookup and this moment in time, and I have no way of knowing whether he still lives in that apartment. I find myself realizing that there’s a part of me that wants it to be him, simply out of morbid curiosity. We had texted on and off over the subsequent months with no real intent of, well, anything, but it was one of those errant texts that my then-boyfriend had seen and caused him to doubt.
Most of the class passes without incident. In the darkened cycling room, I catch glimpses of his face in the mirror that spans the entirety of the wall in front of us, but by this point I’ve almost convinced myself that it’s not him. Adrenaline and exhaustion alike race through me like lightning across clouds and I also just don’t have the spare energy to care. I’m focused on the sweat dripping down my face, trying to establish an optimal cadence of allowing enough to accumulate before I absolutely have to interrupt myself to grab my towel and wipe it all away.
As the session finishes, our instructor makes her customary shout-outs to attendees for reaching certain milestones. Some of them are here at SoulCycle for their very first time; others have hit three-digits. She goes down a row of cycles and pauses in front of his, congratulating him for having just completed his two-hundredth ride. In the process, she names him, and I’m struck with mental whiplash. It’s him.
During the final conversation I had with my fourth boyfriend as we broke up—although in that moment I was hoping against all odds that our talk was a step towards reconciliation—I asked him to be honest. I needed to know why I’d felt for the preceding few months that he had withdrawn from me and removed his half of the intimacy that had grounded our relationship. There were no more stakes, there was nothing left to lose and everything to gain from being forthright, and I just needed him to tell me why. It was the text message, he said, and he asked if I remembered receiving it as our flight touched down in Maui for our Christmas holiday. Of course I did, I answered, because I’d made no effort to conceal it from him. He had been sitting right next to me and I had nothing to hide. From that moment on, he assumed I was being unfaithful.
At the end of every SoulCycle ride, instructors talk participants through a series of post-workout stretches. I was trained as an athlete growing up, so I’m quite accustomed to doing it, but I hurriedly detach myself from my cycle after following through the first couple exercises and rush out of the room, determinedly not looking his way. I get to my locker, change into some clothes, and hasten outside as the other attendees begin to head towards the locker rooms. If he and I pass by each other in all the commotion, I don’t notice. As soon as I step outside, I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
It wasn’t his fault. My breakup, I mean. It was an awkward situation that bloomed into a terrible circumstance on the basis of an erroneous assumption by an insecure man. I spent years self-flagellating in penance, as if it would rewind time, to no avail. On the flip side of those sad events, if there’s any blame to be assigned, I’m finally ready to place it squarely upon the shoulders of my ex-boyfriend.
Coincidentally like that night all those months ago, it’s raining again in downtown Brooklyn and I trudge through the dampness to get home. I’ve been working on becoming better acquainted with my dishwasher, after a lifetime of using it as a drying rack, because my depression has manifested in an endless stack of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink and I want to combat it however I can. It’s not only that my parents (perhaps incorrectly) taught me that dishwashers waste water and electricity; it’s also that I’m a control freak who doesn’t trust the machinery to scrub away every bit of grime. But I’ve been learning that that can be mitigated simply by manually scrubbing my dishes before placing them inside for a wash, that dishwashers are supposedly more energy- and water-efficient than washing by hand, and that the cleaning technology includes anti-bacterial heating. I’m hoping to enlist it in my crusade against executive dysfunction, especially because I’ve been living in my own mire resultant of my stalwart robot vacuum recently dying a sudden, unexpected, and extremely inconvenient death.
I don’t mean to be judgmental when I point out that my ex-boyfriend was insecure. It’s not intended as an indictment of his character. Rather, it’s a somber reflection on the challenges we had faced as a couple as well as the reason why our shared endeavor failed. He began to lose faith in me but he wasn’t forthcoming enough to surface his doubts to me, so instead our love slowly asphyxiated over the course of months. He should have told me; he did not, and could not even if I had asked. How could I have fixed it if he wouldn’t let me?
I’m scrolling through Instagram and the algorithmic feed has decided to serve up Rama Duwaji’s account, so I decide to click into her profile and riffle through the content that she has publicly posted. An illustrator in her own right, her account populates image after image of her drawings, and I find myself feeling equally charmed and wistful. Her husband has only just emerged victorious from New York’s mayoral election and I’m a stranger, twice- or thrice-removed from them through my own political peers, looking at a picture of a photo strip featuring the two of them together on Eid and there’s a vague pang in my chest. What they have, I know that I don’t.
The night that Zohran won, I sat on the open kitchen-side bar stools of Ayat, a local chain of Palestinian restaurants that had just opened an outpost in Astoria, and wolfed down a simple meal of chicken over rice. Eating her own portion next to me was a woman who complimented me on the Mamdani campaign apparel that I had chosen to don in anticipation of the election results, gained through my own canvassing shifts. She expressed her regrets at not having been able to join us in volunteering, but it’s because she had busied herself with protesting against ethnic cleansing at the United Nations buildings near Tudor City. We exchanged admiring words, although in truth I did (and do) believe that her work has been much more seminal and consequential than my own.
When love is in the process of dying a slow death, when it turns to dread—I’ve felt that too many times to be unable to recognize its reappearance. It’s a sort of numbness made poignant if only for the knowledge that it occupies the same space within me where warmth once resided, where fire has become a void. It’s birthed from the same mistake that I’ve been making over and over again, taking men for who they could be and not for who they are. I’ve been placing undue expectations upon them without conclusively knowing whether they could ever meet their own potential, and suddenly my life has completed yet another circle three years in the making. Breaking my own heart is a sort of annual tradition, at this point. Idly, I wonder if I should make a new account on Hinge. I haven’t used it in over a year, but it’s where Rama met Zohran. Are they a proof of concept or an exception to the rule?
It’s the week before Thanksgiving and I feel like I’m back to where I used to be.
When the fallout first began, I began sending my ex-boyfriend flowers because I was sincere about wanting to make amends. My friends eventually stopped me, thankfully. They told me I was wasting my efforts, that I should redirect them to myself because I was the one most in need of my own tenderness. Nowadays, I buy them when I want to have hope. Sometimes, they even come to me as a gift from my chosen family. Each bouquet is a pop of color and freshness with all of life’s vibrance, and the brightness they lend my home leads me to believe that things aren’t so bad, that circumstances will improve. One by one, I’ve been watching them wilt.