Sometimes we played a game. She would set a timer on her phone, sixty seconds.
"You have one minute to tell me what I found," she would say, clutching my laptop to her, the white light from the screen setting her face aglow. "What have you been lying about?"
If I guessed wrong, she would say, "EHHH," loud, like the buzzer in a basketball game.
I was always wrong, could never guess right, but I would throw out everything I could think of.
One time that I remember, I'd gone out to pick her kids up from school. I remember that drive, it must have been last September, and I felt delirious from lack of sleep—that was the season when all we did was stay up discussing why, and the many ways in which, I was a piece of shit—and driving felt dreamy in the worst way. I walked in the door, and she said that I hadn't told her something I'd done.
She was sitting in her bed, which is where she always was, my laptop on her thighs, which is where it often was. What was it, she asked me. She set the timer. I had one minute to tell her what it was, otherwise she would yell, "Time's up!" and make me leave the room unless I started talking.
I always failed, but I never had to leave, the desperation kept me glued there, kept me talking, afraid of what I had done that I didn't remember doing, terrified I was lying without realizing it, thinking I really was maybe delusional or evil, definitely a bad person. Terrified of her leaving me.
That time, it was because I didn't tell her that I had looked at my ex-boyfriend's Facebook page while she and I were in a relationship, even though I'd told her before that I didn't.
It was a good game, from her perspective. I always panicked, and I never knew what the "right" answer was, so I just volunteered everything I could think of that I'd ever done or searched or thought or said or felt that was regrettable or worthy of shame or that she could store away as evidence of how bad I was. I never felt sleepy when we were playing it, that's for sure.
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