Please, baby. Just talk to me.
The word "baby" felt like a fossil, a relic from a dead language. It sparked nothing.
The final message of the morning came from a number I recognized: her sister, Mia.
Alex, what is wrong with you? Chloe is devastated. She came home to a nightmare. You can't just abandon someone like that. She needed some space to breathe and you go full-on psycho. Man up and fix this. Call her.
I stared at the message. The flying monkey sent to guilt me. The narrative was already being spun to her family: Poor Chloe. Her controlling ex had a mental break and robbed her.
I didn't reply. I blocked Mia's number, too.
The karma wasn't a dramatic explosion; it was a slow, sinking realization. She wasn't being punished by a vengeful god; she was facing the natural, logical consequences of her own choices. She had told her live-in partner to leave, and he had—thoroughly. She had gone on a trip flaunting her freedom with other men, and she had returned to the freedom of an empty apartment. She had wanted a life without my jealousy, without my suffocating presence, and now she had it completely.
The true unraveling wasn't in her texts; it was in the silence she now had to live in. The silence where the hum of my computer used to be. The empty side of the bed. The lack of a ready-made dinner, or someone to complain to about her day, or someone whose stuff she could borrow without asking. She had mistaken the infrastructure of our shared life for the backdrop of her life, and I had quietly, calmly dismantled the infrastructure.
I got up, showered, and dressed in clean clothes. I had a different kind of logistics to attend to.
I opened a dating app I hadn't used in three years. I updated my profile with a simple, recent picture my brother took of me on our run. I wasn't looking for a soulmate; I was looking for a distraction, for proof of concept, for a quiet dinner with someone who hadn't told me to leave.
I swiped for a while, the mundanity of it feeling revolutionary. Within an hour, I matched with a woman named Sarah. Her profile was witty, her smile genuine. We exchanged a few messages. She was a graphic designer, liked hiking and terrible sci-fi movies. The conversation was easy, light. There were no landmines, no subtext, no history.
Me: I know it's last-minute, but any interest in grabbing a drink tonight? I could use a break from my own thoughts.