I’m at my desk, working on my happiness book, slogging through another chapter. I motivate myself with this thought: If I turn in this book, next time I’ll get to write something that matters (whatever that is). The sooner I finish this, the sooner I can get myself back on fresh ground (wherever that is). I’m embracing uncertainty. And I’m actually writing the book.
My friend Jen calls, but I don’t pick up. Recently I’ve filled her in on the missing parts of my health situation, and she’s been helpful in the way Wendell has—not by finding a diagnosis but by helping me cope with a lack of one. I’ve been learning how to be okay with not being totally okay while also arranging consults with specialists who might take my condition more seriously. No more wandering-uterus doctors for me.
Right now, though, I have to finish this chapter—I’ve blocked out two hours to write. I type words and they appear on my screen, filling up page after page. I knock out the chapter the way my son does the occasional busywork at school—workmanlike, as the means to an end. I keep going until I get to the chapter’s last line, then give myself a reward: I can check email and call Jen! I’ll take a fifteen-minute break before moving ahead to the next chapter. The end is in sight—just one final section to go.
I’m chatting with Jen and scanning my emails when suddenly I gasp. In bold letters, Boyfriend’s name appears in my box. I’m amazed; I haven’t heard from Boyfriend in eight months, ever since I tried to get answers and brought pages of notes from those calls to Wendell’s office.
“Open it!” Jen says when I tell her, but I just stare at Boyfriend’s name. My stomach tightens, though in a different way than it did when I kept hoping he’d change his mind. It tightens because even if he were to say he’s had some sort of epiphany and wants to be together after all, I would, without question, say no. My gut is telling me two things—that I don’t want to be with him anymore and that, even so, the memory of what happened still stings. Whatever he has to say, it might upset me, and I don’t want to get sidetracked by this right now. I have to finish this book I care nothing about so I can write something I do care about. Maybe, I tell Jen, I’ll read Boyfriend’s email after I crank out another chapter.
“Then send it to me and I’ll read it,” she says. “You can’t make me wait like this!”
I laugh. “Fine. For you, I’ll open it.”
The email is shocking and predictable at the same time.
You won’t believe who I ran into today. Leigh! She just joined the firm.
I read it to Jen. Leigh is someone that Boyfriend and I both know independently and secretly find irritating; if we were still dating, of course he’d share this juicy piece of news. But now? It’s so out of context, so devoid of acknowledgment of what happened between us and where our conversations left off. It feels as though Boyfriend still has his head in the sand—and I’m poking mine out.
“That’s it?” Jen asks. “That’s all the Kid Hater has to say?”
She goes silent, waiting for my reaction. I can’t help it; I’m thrilled. To me, his email is reassuringly poetic, a beautiful summary of everything I’ve discovered about avoidance in Wendell’s office. It even reads like a haiku: three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively.
You won’t believe who
I ran into today. Leigh!
She just joined the firm.
But Jen’s not amused; she’s furious. No matter what I’ve told her about my role in our breakup—that while Boyfriend could have been more upfront with himself and with me early on, I could have been more upfront with myself and with him about what I wanted, what I was hiding from, and whether we were really a match after all—she still thinks he’s an asshole. I remember trying to convince Wendell that Boyfriend was an asshole; nowadays I find myself trying to convince everyone else that he’s not.
“What does that even mean?” Jen asks about the email. “How about ‘How are you doing?’ Is he really that emotionally stunted?”
“It means nothing,” I say. “It’s meaningless.” There’s no point in trying to analyze it, to give it meaning. Jen is outraged, but I’m surprised to find that I’m not upset by this after all. Instead, I’m relieved. My gut unclenches.
“You’re not going to respond to this, I hope,” Jen says, but I almost want to—to thank Boyfriend for breaking up with me and not wasting even more of my time. Maybe his email did have meaning—or at least, my receiving it on this particular day had meaning for me.
I tell Jen I have to get back to writing my book, but after we hang up, that’s not what I do. Nor do I write Boyfriend back. Just as I don’t want a meaningless relationship, I don’t want to write a meaningless book, even though by now I’m three-fourths done. If death and meaninglessness are “ultimate concerns,” it makes sense that this book I care little about has plagued me—and also that I turned down the lucrative parenting book before that. Though I didn’t fully acknowledge my failing body back then, somewhere in my cells I must have become aware that my time was limited, so how I spent it would matter. I remember my conversation with Julie, and another thought occurs to me now: When I die, I don’t want to leave behind my equivalent of Boyfriend’s email.
For a while, I’ve thought that walking around those prison bars meant finishing the book so that I could keep my advance and have the opportunity to write another. But Boyfriend’s email makes me wonder if I’m still shaking those same bars. Wendell has helped me to let go of the story that everything would have worked out for me if I’d married Boyfriend, and there’s no point in holding on to the parallel story that the parenting book would have made everything work out for me too—both are fantasies. Certain things would have been different, sure. Ultimately, though, I’d still be itching for meaning, for something deeper. Just like I am now, with this stupid happiness book that my agent says I have to write for all kinds of practical reasons.
But what if that story’s wrong too? What if I don’t, in fact, have to write this book that my agent says I must or face disaster? On some level, I suspect I’ve known this answer for a while, and now, all of a sudden, I know it in a different way. I think about Charlotte and the stages of change. I’m ready, I decide, for “action.”
I place my fingers on the keyboard again, this time to type a letter to my editor at the publishing house: I want to cancel my contract.
After a brief hesitation, I take a deep breath then push Send, and off it goes—my truth, finally, hurtling through cyberspace.