I Cannot See You the Same Way
It was the first meal in the new apartment, and I had unconsciously made the foolish assumption that the configuration of the stovetops aligned with the stovetops in my previous apartment, so when I turned on what I thought was the top left burner and then distracted myself for eight minutes waiting for the pasta to boil, I was surprised and devastated to return to find the noodles soaking in cold water and the plastic grocery bag half-liquified and melting into the bottom left burner.
God, it was stupid. And I was also stupid. It was one of those mistakes so flagrant and avoidable that it makes you aware of how ill-equipped you really are, how often the logic and good sense that you rely on can just fail you completely. But then, here’s a thought: by calling your own self stupid, you are in a way splitting yourself into two different people—the one who is stupid and the one who is smart enough to recognize that he is stupid. The plastic was seared into the glass of the stovetop in layers. It had been so beautiful, shiny as marble. And now I had defiled it. It’s the type of thing Margot would have been triggered by. She wasn’t a neat freak exactly, but she liked things to be kept up well. Hated bits of dried food, lint left in the dryer filter.
It was a six-step process, according to the internet. Nothing was allowed to be easy.First, you coat the stovetop with olive oil and baking soda. Let it sit for a few minutes. Then wipe that off with a warm cloth. Then clean the stovetop with dish soap and water. Then coat the plasticky bits with rubbing alcohol. Let that sit for a minute. Then use a wooden spatula and a razor scraper to scrape off the plastic. Then clean it all again with soap and water. I tried all those steps, then tried them again in different orders. Barely got any plastic off. Eventually, I found some forum thread that said you have to heat the stove back off to melt the plastic a bit. I tried that, then scraped it off with my fingernails, which took maybe a good ten minutes. After all this, I couldn’t even say I was too hungry for pasta anymore.
The apartment was so quiet. It was fall, and the sun was already going down so early, so by seven, the slice of sky I could see was dark and slate gray. After dinner, I resolved to spend an hour unpacking and then reward myself with Final Fantasy until it was time to go to bed.
I called my mom to let her know how the move was going. She asked when I was going to get a dog.
“It’ll help you meet people,” she said, and I could hardly think of anything sadder.
~
The first time I saw Margot, the thing I noticed was her size. She was a small girl, smaller than anyone I’d been with. Six foot three and on the heavier side, I typically tended to attract bigger-boned women, as my grandma would say. Margot couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. She stood out to me because she didn’t follow any trends. Didn’t care at all what was fashionable, really. When I first met her at Cole’s pregame, she was wearing a lacy white tank top and grey jeans that weren’t tight enough to be sexy or baggy enough to be trendy. Her face was bare and shiny, and her curly dark hair was in a low ponytail. It sounds harsh, but she was the kind of girl who might be accompanying a much more glamorous friend, who becomes the object of your friends’ attraction until they get too drunk to remember her name. From the way she dressed, you probably would have thought she was timid. But she wasn’t at all. She helped herself to a seltzer from Cole’s fridge and asked me if I’d like to be her pong partner.
“I haven’t played in a minute,” I mumbled.
“That’s all right,” she said. She smiled broadly and her teeth had these strange little pointy edges to them that I found quite beautiful. She introduced herself.
“I’m John,” I said, holding my hand out for hers to shake, which, looking back, was idiotic of me, but she didn’t seem to mind.
We lost every game of pong. I was too self-conscious and too sober to ask for her number. Her friends slipped back into the conversation, and the girls all headed out to another party, and there was simply no good time for it. So, a few days later I followed her on Instagram, and she followed me back. She had been the first one to make a move, so it was my turn—I understood this much of the dating code.
Cole didn’t know much about Margot, but when I asked him about her, he said she was a “Smart chick. Engineering. Chemical I think.”
We traded messages on Instagram back and forth. I asked her what type of music she likes, and to my surprise, we had similar taste: MGMT, Beach House, Pond. She said she liked “basically anything but pop,” and that I could work with. I mentioned something about her coming over to see my synth setup and she didn’t respond for about an hour. I thought I’d ruined everything by suggesting something so niche and nerdy, but she responded that sounds dope! and it felt like I’d won the Olympics.
I had no clue what girls liked to do on dates. What do smart chicks do, besides study? Do they like romance, being treated to expensive Italian dinners, flights to exotic locations? I didn’t have too much to offer in that department. Our first real date was to my friend Austin’s show—he was playing in a new-age band called Zenith Zenith, and they’d gotten a gig at a local dive bar. It was 21+, and Margot said she didn’t have a fake, but she didn’t mind them just drawing the X’s on her hands.
You sure you want to go? I had messaged her before we met up. The self-saboteur at it again.
Yea!! It’ll be a good time :) she responded.
It was little things like that from the start. She made me feel like I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. She didn’t question why I sometimes paused between sentences or didn’t have a snappy response to her joke or looked down at my watch in nervousness when she asked a serious question. She had the power to make me feel like a real man, someone who could romance a beautiful girl, someone who deserved to be loved and taken seriously. I had never really felt like that before.
We met outside the door. It was a chilly night, and she was wearing a pink motorcycle jacket, grey jeans, and converse. She gave me a side hug, and I noticed she was shaking a bit, and I thought, good, maybe I am not the only nervous one. Or maybe she was cold. She bopped along to the music and came up with nice things to say about Austin’s bass playing.
“He’s a great guy,” I said. I wanted her to think I had lots of friends.
After the show, we went to the fried chicken restaurant next to campus that stayed open until midnight. I asked her about her major.
“Chemical engineering must be a ton of work,” I said.
“Oh, it’s miserable. Probably my biggest regret,” she said.
She explained that growing up, her older brother Patrick had always been the “smart one,” and she had been the try-hard little sister who could hardly keep up, even when she’d taken seven AP courses and gotten into MIT (though she hadn’t gotten a scholarship, and it was too expensive). She’d picked chemical engineering, in some ways, to make a statement against Patrick’s lesser but still impressive biomedical engineering degree.
“Only two more years to go,” I said.
She asked about my major—for the first time I was almost embarrassed to say I was a biology major. But I told her about my love for ocean animals, the first time I went to an aquarium back in Tennessee and seven-year-old me stared at the jellyfish for an hour until my mom dragged me out, how I would count down for Shark Week each year. They didn’t have a marine biology program at Georgia State, but it was the best college I’d gotten into, so standard-issue biology would have to do.
“That’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling. I think stingrays are so cool.”
“I’ll take you snorkeling one day,” I said. I meant it. Wherever she wanted: the Gold Coast, Maui, the Maldives. Suddenly, I wanted to be the type of man who could afford such trips.
We kissed that night in the parking lot after I walked her to her car. I didn’t ask her to come back to my place. I wanted to leave the night on a perfect and pure note. She drove away in her red Honda Civic and I began imagining a dream version of our future together. Two weeks and four dates later, we were exclusive. Another month, and it was official.
We had sex for the first time on our sixth date. She invited me back to her dorm room, turned the lights off, and sat on the bed.
“You can have all of me,” she said.
I kissed her very gently. I wanted her, badly, but I didn’t want to do anything that made her uncomfortable. In my mind, she was delicate, something to be touched with care and precision. She ran her hands down my back and began to take her shift off. Afterward, she’d been snuggling with me, her head on my chest, and I noticed her eyes were teary.
“Are you okay?”
I was terrified in that moment that I’d hurt her somehow, been so consumed by my own brutish pleasure that I had no clue she was in pain.
She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes. Sorry,” she said.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No. No, you did nothing wrong,” she said and wrapped her arm around my stomach, curling herself into a tighter ball. I didn’t bring it up again. Every other time after that, she was all smiles and gasps and moans.
As I got to know her, I discovered that Margot was actually a bit of a nerd. She watched Attack on Titan, Cowboy Bebop, shows my marching band friends from high school were always going on about. She liked card games and would excitedly research new ones for us to try, spend thirty minutes explaining the rules to me, and never let me win.
She didn’t care much for frat parties but had no problem downing tequila shots. Her tolerance was much lower than she believed, and I’d usually end up dragging her out of parties and helping her brush her teeth by 1 AM. One night, after accompanying a friend to a theater party, she stumbled home to my dorm and knocked on the door. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes glassy and unfocused.
“My love,” she said.
I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her inside.
“You guys had fun?”
“Not without you,” she said and kissed me before collapsing onto my bed. I laid down next to her and took her hand.
“I don’t care about anything out there. Not when you’re here,” she said. It was then that I decided I would marry her one day.
~
Three years later, we’d bought an apartment together in Marietta. Margot had gotten a stressful but well-paying job at an environmental lab, and I was a clinical research coordinator for a Veterans Affairs medical center. We kept busy. Margot had gotten quite adept at cooking—we both liked trying out new dishes and twists on recipes. I worked from home most days, so I kept the apartment clean and the fridge stocked. We lived well together, fit neatly into the unique puzzle pieces of each other’s lifestyles. We experimented with new board games, new restaurants, new plants to hang in the office, new sex positions. We spent Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and I was convinced her family actually liked me. My mom loved Margot, probably thought she was miles out of my league. I’d consulted my mom when I picked out the ring. She’d asked me a long series of questions, like if I got one detail wrong then the ring would prove I was not worthy of Margot.
“Does she wear gold or silver jewelry? Is her style always more modern? She knows about science—do you think she cares if it’s lab-grown? Do you think she’d prefer a natural diamond? I think she wears a lot of color. Does she maybe want a colorful gem?”
I’d decided on something simple, classic: a gold band, one-carat natural radiant-cut diamond. It was beautiful, shiny, authentic, like Margot. It cost me eight thousand dollars.
I had it all planned out—I would propose to her on our trip to Hawaii in June, on the beach at the sunset’s golden and glowing peak. It was the week after I’d bought the ring that things went wrong. Looking back on it, maybe the gleaming ring was like an omen: a sign that I had wanted too much, mistakenly let myself believe I deserved an easier, more perfect life than I did. I kept the ring in its box, tucked away inside a paper bag, which I stuffed at the bottom of our bins of extra clothes beneath the bed. It loomed under me like the pea beneath the princess’s pillow. I could never forget it was there.
It was a Sunday. Margot was stressed about a presentation at work she was due to give the next day. She was cycling through her PowerPoint again and again, entering a state of quiet focus that she often adopted during moments of stress. She wanted to have me run to the grocery store to get things for dinner, a risotto recipe she’d found online and wanted to try.
“I think I made a list in my notes app. You can text it to yourself,” she said.
So, I opened the app. It was on the home page with little snippets of all her notes. The top one listed button mushrooms, heavy cream—and just a few from the top, there was one that started. 1. Aaron. I opened it.
It read:
Aaron
Kendall
Rico
Thomas
Neil
Liam
Weston
Jonathan W
Ian
Andrew – I think??
Justin
Mal
Frederick
Neil P.
Bo
RJ
Kristian
Jackson
Jon R.
Ryan
Tyler
Sam - film class
Cory
Connor
Greg L.
Alejandro
Jeff
Troy
Kamal
Christopher
Garrett
Zale
Walker
Tom J.
Bernie
Charlie
Jake
Grayson
Owen
Cooper
John
It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at. The essential things I processed were: a list of 41 names and mine at the end. I stared at it for a few moments, my mind gone numb and silent, and then closed it out and clicked on the grocery list and tried to pretend I’d never seen it.
But it was that moment that changed everything. Later that evening when Margot made the mushroom and chicken risotto for dinner, I couldn’t even bring myself to start a conversation with her. I just nodded along and reacted to whatever she talked about, and it was clear enough to her that something was off.
“Are you okay? You’ve been really quiet,” she said.
“No, I’m good. Just been a long day.”
“A long day of World of Warcraft and lounging around in the bed,” Margot said faux-sympathetically.
“You know. It takes it out of me.”
I tried to keep up our banter, our trademark loving and wry way of speaking to each other. But the list was pulsing inside my brain and my heart and not letting a single cell in my body rest. Across the table from me, she looked so small and innocent. She hardly wore any makeup, and the downturned slope of her dark eyes and eyebrows gave her the permanent appearance of sweetness and vulnerability.
The truth is, you could put a trillion different truths in front of me and have me believing in them all at once. Margot was still the woman I loved, the woman who made me a better person than I was before—more organized, more motivated, more thoughtful, more capable of sharing and understanding my feelings instead of squashing them like a roach. But how was it possible she had slept with forty men before meeting me?
I could recognize that part of this could be my own insecurity. I had only had one girlfriend during my senior year of high school, and the relationship lasted only four months. Besides that, I had two one-night stands in college and one recurring “friend with benefits,” for a whopping total of four. I had never given it more than a moment’s thought. Sure, she’d been with other guys. It was college, that’s what college girls do. But there’s a difference between having a vague awareness of the thing and seeing forty-one names on the list.
Margot sat across from me, her small serving of risotto, her dark eyes sparkling, her mouth curled to the side the way she does when she knows something is not quite right. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact the way I was. Whenever we had any squabble or disagreement, she would penetrate it with her eyes, poke holes and eviscerate it right in front of me. If we thought we had moved on, but the air was still a bit tense, she’d look at me with her dark eyes and say something like, “John, should we talk about it again? It’s all right if you’re still upset,” and manage to discuss it calmly and empathetically until all the ridges smoothed over. Unlike me, who as a child would stare at my mom’s ankles and fiddle with my hands when she caught me breaking rules, rather than admit I did something wrong. I couldn’t mention the list. Even imagining bringing it up over dinner like this gave me chills.
“You sure everything’s okay?”
“Course. Risotto’s great, by the way.”
“Thanks,” she said flatly. She let her spoon drop into the bowl.
~
A week went by, and I couldn’t get the list out of my head. For a moment, I started to question if I had seen it at all. The moment had been so brief, with no witnesses to verify its existence. Could it have been some mirage the darkest self-sabotaging corners of my brain had conjured, a flash of dream that I’d mixed up with reality? I knew it wasn’t. But I wanted to hope.
I tried, so badly. I really did try to let it go. I thought through it methodically, like a science equation. Yes, she had slept with many men before me, but that did not fundamentally change who she was. She was still my loving, nerdy, intelligent, loyal girlfriend, the woman I wanted to make my wife. But feelings did not submit to logic, no matter how sound. You jump when a fire alarm sounds, even if you read the email stating it’s just a drill. You can’t not jump. I couldn’t see her the same way, no matter how hard I tried. I still loved Margot, but the love was no longer fueled by passion and hope and lust. It was a dampened, concrete love, stuffed into a box, frozen in time.
After we watched some corny Netflix movie, Margot began to kiss me, passionately, her cold hands running down my back all the way to my thigh. We were both two glasses of red wine deep, and it was 10 o’clock—just enough time for us to have sex, snuggle, complete our evening routines, and still be asleep by 11:30. But her hands felt like a stranger’s, a cold, artificial grip trying to pry some softness out of me. I closed my eyes, touched her thick curly hair, tried to remember how lovely, how sensual, how full of goodness and intelligence she was. That’s my girl. “That’s my girl,” is something I’d whisper into her ear when I’d pull her close, usually in public. When she knew the answer to the final question at trivia and locked in the win, when she baked beautiful little raspberry squares—that’s my girl. I was so proud to be with her. My first love. The one who showed me I didn’t have to be lonely. Her hips pressed into mine and she crawled on top of me. I leaned back like I was coming up for air. She pulled away and cocked her head to the side.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“Is it the bathroom thing?”
“The what?”
“You know. The hair?”
Earlier that week, Margot had gotten onto me about leaving my hair in the sink after shaving. “It’s just not my absolute favorite thing in the world to wake up to,” she’d said. I’d said sorry and made sure to rinse out the drain.
“No, it’s not the hair.”
“I’m sorry if I came across as harsh.”
“No. You didn’t,” I said.
“I love you and all your chin hair,” she said, her eyes glistening with regret, and perhaps a little hope.
“It’s the list,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t look at her, had no desire to witness her reaction to what I was about to say.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw the list on your phone. The list of guys’ names. I can’t get past it,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded. Strained, self-righteous, melodramatic.
She put her hand on my leg gently and I fought the urge to shake it off. “Baby,” she said. I knew she was looking directly into my eyes, but I didn’t look back at her. “Why would you let that bother you? All that happened before we were together. Are you serious?”
A part of me had been hoping she had an explanation for the list. Maybe it was a list of boys she’d had schoolgirl crushes on, boys she’d kissed, or gone on dates with. But no, she seemed to confirm it was not that innocent. My heart dropped like an anchor, felt heavy in my stomach. It would be more cruel to keep her in the relationship, to make her try to earn some unattainable redemption in my eyes, prove her purity or worth or goodness to me. It would be selfish of me, the worst thing I could possibly do.
“I don’t think we should be together,” I said.
I moved out quietly and quickly. So quickly I’d left countless things behind or felt too ashamed to try to claim things I’d paid for, like the patio rug or reading chair. I left them as apology gifts to her, told her she could just throw out whatever she found and didn’t need. In the new apartment, I worked from home, surrounded by boxes and trash bags. After work, I went to Ikea to get things to replace all of Margot’s stuff.
I broke down a bit. It was that fear, that creeping, gnawing fear again. Nobody would ever love me again like her. No one would give it a shot. Why would they? And even if they try, how could I ever catch them back up, make them understand as much about me as Margot understood? She knew everything: my most embarrassing middle-school memories, my paralyzing fear of my parents dying in a car crash, my childlike love for sea creatures, my height, my weight, my shirt size, my allergies, my favorite ice cream flavor, my dislike for olives, the list of places I’d dreamed of traveling to.
Everywhere I went, the grocery store, Ikea, the dentist, the comic book store, I imagined running into her, meeting her for the first time, starting over completely. Never seeing the list.
You are probably thinking poorly of me now. Here I am, making myself the victim in this downer of a story when Margot was the one left abandoned, heartbroken, harshly judged for choices she made before she’d even met me. I will not try to dissuade you from that thinking. In fact I found my mind drifting to that same place, imagining how lonely and betrayed she must have felt, alone in that apartment that we had made into a home together, staring at stacks of board games with no one to play with, a pantry stocked with all kinds of ingredients but no one to cook for, as desolate and unhappy as I’d felt in those first few days by myself, but without any of the power that I’d at least had.
I relinquished a bit of power to her. In my depressive daze when moving out, I’d left the $8,000 ring in the box underneath the bed. I can’t quite explain why I did this. There are numerous options, multiple of which may be true: I cruelly wanted Margot to find it and realize the full extent of the love I’d once had for her, the future she missed out on. I wanted to punish myself for hurting her. I did not deserve the eight thousand dollars back; it was a parting gift for her to pawn, eight thousand dollars to dry her tears with. And, of course, the most obvious one: I wanted a reason to go back to the apartment.
It was late in the evening when I went. I had been mindlessly walking through the aisles at Target, adding items to my cart at random. I’d chosen the location close to our old apartment, the one we’d gone to together at least once a month. I didn’t let myself think too much about it. I’d ask her how she was doing, tell her I’d left something, take the ring and all the other things she probably had neatly stacked in a pile for me, and say goodbye. Or perhaps, she’d want to talk to me. Maybe she missed me as badly as I missed her.
The sky was a brilliant purple. The drive into the apartment felt so easy, natural. I’d done it thousands of times before. I parked in my old parking spot, walked up to my old unit, and knocked on the door. It took a few moments for her to answer, and right before the door opened, I had this enormous wave of anxiety, like I was invading a stranger’s home and was about to be humiliated and rebuked.
She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and pink sweatpants. Her curly hair was pulled back in a bun, a few tendrils falling out and framing the sides of her face. The apartment smelled like warm cinnamon—she must have lit some of her scented candles. She furrowed her brows, looking annoyed. Then her eyes shifted like she was suspicious of me, then her expression became neutral, all in the span of less than two seconds.
“Hi,” I said.
She continued staring. No hi back.
“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”
“Mhm,” she said. Her eyes locked in on me, waiting for me to say something worthwhile.
“I understand you probably hate me right now.”
“John. Please don’t show up here playing the victim. I really don’t have the energy for this.”
“I’m not the victim. I know. I screwed up. I made a dumb decision.”
“Screwed up? You made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was broken and worthless. Like I was dirty.” Her face crumpled when she said the word dirty. I had never seen anybody with so much pain on their face. I wanted to hug her, make the pain go away, as if some other asshole, not me, had been the one who hurt her. “You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You didn’t even give me a chance. You threw me away like garbage.”
“Margot, I screwed up. I was an idiot. There’s nothing wrong with you. If anything, I probably realized you were too good for me. And I let it psych me out.”
“I loved you, John. I thought you loved me back, no matter what. I didn’t think it was contingent on me being some idealized, perfect version of myself. I loved every part of you, even the worst parts.”
“I know. I wanted to marry you.”
Her face softened with curiosity.
“I bought a ring. That’s what I’m here for.”
“To take it back? Or to propose?”
I rested my hand on the doorframe and looked up at the ceiling like the answer to her question might be conveniently written in graffiti. I was buying time. I looked back at her, her eyes were shiny with tears and bigger than they’d ever been. Her arms were crossed in on themselves like she was cold. I did want to marry her. Forty-one names and all. She was the only person who understood me. She was the love of my life.
“Margot, I—”
“Everything okay, babe?” a voice called from inside the apartment. From our bedroom.
“Yeah, one second,” she called back.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
Her gaze flickered towards the bedroom then back to me. “Somebody,” she said.
“Who?”
“I’m coming out in a second. Should I put a shirt on?” the voice called.
“It’s all right! He’s leaving soon.”
I felt betrayed. She’d pulled the knife out of her guts and plunged it into mine. All my love and affection for her immediately inverted itself, became something nasty and hateful.
“What were you saying?” she asked. Her tone was all business, like I was trying to schedule a meeting with her very busy superior.
“I—I need to get something.”
“And where’d you leave it?” she asked.
“It’s in the bedroom. Under the bed.”
“Well go on and get it. Ryan’s in there. He won’t mind,” she said. Of course, Ryan wouldn’t mind. Why should he? And why should I?
This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.