It’s well over a year later. I love someone else. I am beginning to accept that I may always miss this in November.

The day after the breakup itself was even worse, which is also how it always is, and which I’d also conveniently forgotten. I lay dumbstruck on Jourdan’s bed, and was just beginning to wonder if I’d actually survive, when a song I hadn’t heard before came up on shuffle into my headphones.

Leonard Cohen — Undertow

I skipped back to it. And skipped back. And then I looked up the setting on my iPod I’d never used: one-song repeat, so that it would just keep playing over and over and over until I told the damn thing to shut off, which I didn’t for two days, because it was all I wanted to listen to. I laid there next to a mountain of pillows and Kleenex and thought “okay. It’s going to be okay. You know how to do this.”

I first met you during a typically spacey/humiliating moment. I’d mixed up my schedule and was an hour late to my first day of Computer Science I. I’d opened the door in horror to see a professor mid-lecture, thirty other beady eyes staring back up at me. There were no free desks. I was ready to stand in the corner like the dunce I was, but the professor told me to find you in your office.

You were tall, your hair was long, you wore glasses. In my memory that day you had a sneaky grin on, which you continue to wear in nearly every memory I have of you. Sparkly-eyed, devious about something, big-smiled. You sailed confidently into that crowded classroom and the sea of students parted, chairs squeaking; you disappeared into a back storage room and returned to me, holding a desk over your head, grinning. “Here you go,” you announced, setting it down at my feet.

I would have a crush on you starting then. I told all of my friends and they told you, as was fashionable at the time.

They said you said, “Adrianne looks good in that yellow t-shirt.”

So I wore it as often as possible when filling out my time-sheets in your office. Boss.

Important Memory #2: We are dancing in Skiff’s lecture room to A Tribe Called Quest, you are holding a drink above your head and singing along, a projector beams magenta and gold light against the wall. You aren’t wearing a shirt under your lab coat, I find this amazing.

Later you would take me outside under the cherry blossom tree. “Isn’t it beautiful out tonight?” you asked, leaning.

In your office near the fridge, I turned to you abruptly. “Two things. One, I’ve had a crush on you for three years. Two, the thing is, I currently have a boyfriend.”

You were incredibly embarrassed. You shuffled outside without even grabbing the beers we’d come in for, paced in front of Stone Row with a cigarette. I watched you from a dark window inside.

Important Memory #3: Right, I broke up with that guy months later in Boston, cried for a while, etc. Then you visited for a weekend. No big deal, we thought we’d go roller skating. Is this even a date?

“That was just as nice as I thought it would be,” I said after our first kiss. We made out for the rest of the weekend on my borrowed futon. Sunday night I walked you sadly back to your car for your drive back to upstate New York. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.

I still smile when I think about how you’d forgotten to turn your headlights off, that whole time. You turned to me. “I guess . . . I’m staying another night?”

Your mother, opening her arms to me in your family’s dirt driveway. “She’s so talllll!”

The way we slept, the way we woke up, tangled in knots with each other’s limbs.

A disgusting slimy eggpouch thing found in a pond, rural Connecticut. I sat on the dock, legs dangling in the water, while you and your high school friends flung this thing at each other, grossing everyone out. He inched in front of me, and you paused with it held over your head, and then lowered your arm. “Oh,” one of your friends said, “of course, he would never throw it near Adrianne.”

Every wedding we went to, holding your hand. Once, on the placecards, you wrote “loves” under your name, placed it aside mine.

A late night drive through upstate New York, you think I am sleeping. You play every version of “Hallelujah”, and then repeat them all, occasionally singing along. I am safe and warm, curled up in your passenger seat, stars overhead, dark blur of pine trees at our sides.

We decided to move in together late at night, to avoid the Boston September 1st rush. It was around 3 when we finished, arms shaking with exhaustion. I went into the bedroom to put on the sheets, and when I came out, you’d arranged a living room for us, turned on a lamp, thrown a red silk blanket over the couch. “I thought you might want it to feel like home,” you said.

Anxious, I would call you. Always.

The other night, after over a year of emails, anguished conversations, potential reconciliation, talks on the phone, therapists, I suggested to Jurvis that we officially close the door on trying things again. He asked that we not speak for a while. We assured each other we’d eventually be friends.

I trudged into my bedroom, put on headphones, and gave that beautiful song one more listen.

I set out one night / when the tide was low. / There were signs in the sky, / but I did not know.

And then, without even intending the symbolism, I let shuffle move on to the next song.

And my heart the shape of a begging bowl.

Something that became unexpectedly important was where I slept afterwards. A hotel room (smoking) with its paneled elevator, 3am, on the phone with my parents. A day spent in a friend’s studio apartment while she went to the craft mart: I gasped numbly into my fists. The spare room in another apartment during those weeks before the new roommate moved in: we would drag a futon mattress up a flight of stairs and I would curl up here at night in the big empty room under the big open window under the big leafy trees, wrapped in a new down blanket from mom and slipping DVDs of Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 into my laptop. I had my own key and bought it a ridiculous duck keychain; every so often the button would get stuck and it would quack insistently in my purse until hit.

When her new roommate arrived, I moved to a storage room, which just fit the air mattress I slept on and a framed print of Clint Eastwood pushed against the wall; she and I would make sandwiches from the farmers’ market and I’d remove part of my finger with the bread knife (still numb). When that friend’s husband returned from his travels, I crashed on a couch of our mutual friends. They pinned up a blanket for me to use as a door, and at night I would sneak out for the sake of sneaking out, wandering along the bike trail and listening to the same song on repeat like a teenager.

Break-up lesson #6: sometimes, the wonderful world will catch you.

There was a period of my life during which I watched either Wayne’s World or Wayne’s World 2 every single night, I could say later. I wasn’t happy or sad in the days directly after you. I was just passing time. Iced coffees.  Self-help books. Is it strange to say I miss it.

Walking around someone: “sorry.” The sound of your cough: “sorry.” It becomes a part of you, it’s immutable, until the night in the Hannaford’s parking lot when you’re pressing the lock button to a friend’s borrowed car to hear a gentle “beep” and flash of the lights. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you say.

Image by Janaka.

It seemed like the most immediate and appropriately drastic solution at the time, and its potential reality — the fact that every day, any day, I could just do it — allowed me to stay, breathe, deliberate, for one month.

Three months ago I went to our first Slutcracker cast meeting, where everyone was smiling and excited and giving high fives. And in retrospect, if I hadn’t been open to staying, why would I have subjected myself to that? Could I have possibly thought “the people here will convince me to leave”?

I said “okay. So I’ll stay through December.” and I dragged my Aerobed to a third floor I couldn’t really afford as a sort of promise: I will eventually leave you.

Two months ago my friend Sara visited for a few nights with her baby. They slept on my air mattress, and I slept on a different air mattress, because when you want to keep your options open and live in the moment it usually involves lots of uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.

Anyway, so in this fashion a child was temporarily in my life. Days spent with a parent and child are different from the four-hour babysitting stints I’d once known so well. In a matter of days, things start repeating themselves. Baby goes to sleep. Baby wakes up. Baby crawls around. Feed the baby. Baby goes to sleep. Baby wakes up.

And I know they grow up so quickly or whatever, but in a couple of days a child’s existence and needs acquire a sense of cyclical endlessness. That was fun for a while, but. What, we can’t party now? You want to go see some movie about murder or something? And with this re-evaluation of what it meant to be a parent, I began to re-evaluate a lot of the presumptions I had about my alleged future.

“I’m going to wash Miriam’s hands,” Sara said. “I’ll be right back.”

I sat down at my computer. Sara re-entered the room, baby cooing. “You know what I’ve always meant to do,” I said, “is apply to Salt. And I just decided that I’m going to do it today.”

“Sheesh Adrianne,” Sara said. “I was gone for like one minute.”

One month ago, I wrote you a letter. I love you in the most casual sense of the word. I love you so that if there were a tornado coming, I would usher you into a basement. I love you if it would cheer you up.

We clarified, this doesn’t change anything.

Three weeks ago, I got the acceptance letter from Salt.

I cried, “Hurraaaaay!” Then, “Ahhhhhhhhggghhh!”

Last Friday, after I’d convinced myself Wells Fargo would make this entirely fiscally irresponsible/impossible, and I’d come to terms with what now seemed a gloomy return to Minneapolis — another loan suddenly worked out. My dad called at eleven at night to let me know. I went to Portland the next day to sign a lease.

I asked my new landlady, “so while I live here, can I borrow one of your 14 cats?”

“We used to just include a cat with the apartment, actually.”

“Yessss.”

On the ride home, I turned to you. “Visit me?” I asked.

Yesterday, I mailed in a check for my full tuition. I move at the end of the month, and start classes as a photography student (!) one week later.

I.
Flying upwards into space or
pitching downwards, it’s all the same

Midway each dream the doors open:
Everything stops.

Suddenly the decision must be made: do I get out? Step freely
into nothingness?

Or remain, blind to the rushing air
the elevator / my protector
and casket?

I know, right.

The subconscious is sophomoric
in its metaphor.

II.
Before I left you I thought it was impossible.

I’d heard
that if you slept through some fatal, nonexistent accident
you’d simply never awaken –

Just die like that,
however you’d
inadvertently imagined.

Always wake up before you land. Always.
Or else.

Well.

Each night, my life ends in elevators
The body contracting
bones splintering,
goring some regal floor / ceiling
(depending on direction of force)

Lungs jammed between lips, liver lapping spleen, everything thick, wet
tonguey and lolling, skin bursting
a fractal of fractures, my
china plate ribs

And I wake up calmly, without a start, I am splayed like a starfish in our old sheets

heart all exposed.

III.
It is a dark wood, simply engraved
the buttons crackling white

And I press 8, because 8 was where I wanted to go but as soon as the doors chime shut,
I have a sinking feeling about the whole thing, and

sure enough we begin plummeting
down deep into the earth
the elevator and I

until

there is no earth left at all:
mantles, cores,
everything shredded around the edges, obliterated

Ladies and gentlemen we are approaching maximum height, in fact we are
now entering the thermosphere,
now entering the exosphere, oh heavens
we are
completely outtasphere, ha ha

darkness, and infinity
my elevator and I.

IV.
The other night I didn’t dream about anything.
The other night I was sleeping under the Milky Way

This was Rockport, Maine:

Insects rubbed their arthritic legs
in the tall fading grass
And across the way, a giant wooly dog slowly kicked a curved paw behind his giant wooly ear,
his faded collar swinging,
ringing
sweetly into the night

Somewhere, in all of this space
I lay sleeping

A satellite soared
brightly overhead.

But I had locked you out. You were standing at the foot of the stairs, searching for your key. How could I have taken this from you? How would I possibly explain, when you came in the door?

What. My ex wants to know how compatible we are, so I answered some questions (87%) and uploaded a picture of myself as zombie Baby Spice. Take me out.