How things fade in On loves.

On the third night of my brother’s wedding, I kissed a friend of the bride’s.

So here’s the thing,” he said to me on the dance floor. “You’re super cute but we live really far apart, so I don’t know what to do.”

We’d been hanging out for a few days. I didn’t find him attractive, really, but he was fun and witty and very likable. That “but” on the dance floor ought to have been my first indication that something was amiss, that things had the potential to linger beyond the wedding weekend in India, but I was too happy, having too much fun, and so I said, “Well, I could get a breath mint and then you can go up to the roof with me.”

The final day of the wedding took place at a farmhouse adorned with twinkling lights and a spiral staircase. I grabbed a mint from my mother’s purse (classy) and he trailed me up to the rooftop, where we found a barbell loaded with weights, which I drunkenly hoisted up to my waist (also classy). And then I put it down and our mouths found each other’s.

I scrunched my eyes shut, tried to ignore who he was and my lack of attraction to him and tried instead to focus on how good it felt to touch another person and be touched. If I’m being honest, I used him. But it was a wedding, I thought, kissing a guest is par for the course.

Since arriving back to the west coast, four of us have watched a tv show together several nights per week and group texted comments and jokes and banter throughout. This has been going on for several months. The wedding guy, and my girl friend in San Francisco, and a guy who also lives in San Francisco whom I met on Hinge (but haven’t actually ever met; I told the wedding guy that I knew him through a friend). Things have happened over the past few weeks, and I’ve been busy and not texting the wedding guy much, and now I’ve been trying to rekindle “Tiger Time” (we started with the Tiger King, and the name stuck). And the wedding guy has been oddly not responsive, though last week he texted to ask me if he’d done something to make me stop talking to him as much, and I assured him absolutely not; I’ve just been working non-stop on a project. But he has still fallen off the planet, not engaging in Tiger Time group texts, WhatsApp showing he hasn’t been online in hours and hours. He reads the Tiger Time texts, but no longer engages. The guy from Hinge got together with my SF girlfriend last week and they sent a photo to the group and the wedding guy didn’t respond.

“Are you ok?” I texted him today when he hadn’t responded to any Tiger Time planning texts. “Are you peacing out of Tiger Time?”

He bails on Tiger Time tonight, and shortly after messages me to ask if we can talk tomorrow. I say sure.

And this, this is what I wanted to write about: about all of the things I want to tell my ex boyfriend.

It has been a month since we last communicated, when I’d been at my parents’ house for maybe three weeks, and nothing brings about self awareness like moving home does. Nothing makes you regress more quickly. Nothing challenges you in the same way. I felt myself sliding, reverting, sending out texts, baiting him to give me attention and validation and reassurance, and when he didn’t, anxiety bubbled up in my throat. I spoke to my therapist, and then I emailed my ex and said I was having some shit come up and I needed to ground myself again and asked if we could resume no contact and I’d email him when I felt more…capable, I guess, though I didn’t phrase it that way.

I want to tell him what I told you yesterday, that I now measure time in body counts. I want to tell him that the country is spiraling into darkness, that my grandmother keeps microwaving nothing, that I spent two weeks and eighteen hour days working on a video response to the unbelievably stupid Bakersfield doctors’ press conference, but that perfectionism won out and I abandoned it. Or, maybe I don’t want to tell him about that part. But I do want to tell him that I’m making armloads of masks. I want to tell him that my parents’ dog makes me sad, because he isn’t affetionate and snuggly, and also because he likes my grandma more than me and I’m legit low-key jealous.

I want to tell him that I hope he doesn’t think that I don’t care because I’m not reaching out as the world is falling apart. I want to tell him that I can’t stop rolling my eyes about the anxiously attached guy from the wedding and that it is peculiar to be on the other side of attachment issues, to recognize the anxiously attached actions as things I used to see in myself: what I am assuming are attempts at playing hard to get, to turn off notifications, to try to get the other person to wonder what you’re doing or why you aren’t talking or to miss you, and how they are all so familiar and how bored I am. I wouldn’t tell him any of that, of course, but I want to.

I want to tell him that I miss traveling, that I miss sipping egg coffee in Hanoi, that I miss trudging around in our backpacks, that even when our relationship was crumbling and toxic and destructive, I miss the fun we stil had, the jokes, the dogs, the way he would say, “Oh god” and roll his eyes at people’s idiocy. I want to ask him how he is, where he is, what he’s doing and how he’s feeling. I want to tell him that I miss him. I want to tell him that I want to see him again, but that I carry around a hollowness that aches, the fear that this is how it all ends, that the post-breakup dating we have been doing is burning out, that I’m afraid the pandemic is marking the end of the way life was, and the way we were in it together.

It has been a month and I keep thinking that it is time to reach out to him, that I should send him an email, hey how ya doing, but I don’t feel ready still. How could I get to a place where he could be with me and I wouldn’t have the constant pull to ask for validation, approval, reassurance. Give me a cookie, pat me on the head, tell me what to do next.

I imagine he is still in the woods with his three friends, removed from society. But I don’t know anything for sure. And longer we are apart, the more he starts to fade.