But I would watch the hell out of the sequel, when things get messy, and they work through it. I want the part where they bicker over her never putting the dishes away and his obsession with vacuuming. When they fart in front of each other and talk openly about pooping. When they’re sleep-deprived and shaky because they have a colicky baby, or bereft over the decline of a parent. I want to watch them live out the pleasure and sadness and tedium and comfort and joy of a partnered existence.
Because I never needed the rom-com part of our relationship.
I was living for the part you don’t freeze in amber. The love and the pain and the mess.
And instead, I’m getting this. The most profound emotions of my life, packaged into commercialized fiction. The sweet things I did, amped up into swoony details to make you fall vicariously in love with the dude in the movie. Our most tender moments, turned into heart-clenching dialogue. Our foibles, simplified into predictable character flaws that we’ll overcome in 110 minutes.
Part of me is so hurt that this is what she chose to do with our love story. Idealizing it instead of trying to fix it. Selling it instead of living it out. That sliver of me is tempted to simmer in my resentment until this movie comes out in three years, and then write an aggrieved open letter calling her out for monetizing my pain behind my back. Sue her for exploiting my life rights without my permission. Get her back for how much losing her cost me.
But that’s not how I’m built.
In my heart I think there’s something at work here more important than ambition or money. I think writing this script is how Molly is trying to heal.
I know, in my soul, that we love each other in a way I’ve never experienced, and doubt I’ll ever experience again.
Our love wasn’t a romantic comedy.
I didn’t expect it to be.
All I ever wanted was her.
But what am I supposed to do now? Reach out, just to get rejected again? Receive another lecture on how I don’t understand that fiction is fake?
As much as I want to storm her door and demand that she try again, I can’t be the one on my knees.
Not again.
But I hope.
I hope, and hope, and hope.
CHAPTER 40 Molly
“Molls, do you have any Aleve in that stockpile of pills you travel with?” Alyssa moans.
“Or morphine?” Dezzie asks. “I think I might need actual morphine.”
I peel myself out of my sleeping bag on the floor of my mother’s attic. My body feels like I slept in a trash compactor.
“We are officially too aged and infirm for sleepovers,” I say as I limp toward the bathroom.
When the three of us concocted this plan to have a post-Christmas slumber party at my mom’s, we did not think through what might happen to a thirty-six-year-old body sleeping on a hardwood floor.
“We should have gotten air mattresses,” Alyssa says. “I think my hips are bruised.”
“Well, it was fun,” I call through the open bathroom door. It was the first night I haven’t spent fully obsessing about Seth since we broke up. “And look, I found some Advil.”
We pass around the bottle like we’re sharing ecstasy at a rave.
“Do I hear the pitter-patter of little feet?” my mom calls from downstairs.
“We’re up,” I call back.
“Oh good. I’m making waffles.”
We shuffle down to the kitchen, where my mom is standing in a palm-tree-print caftan shoving whole oranges down her $3,000 juicer.
“I covet this kitchen,” Dezzie says as she hobbles to a barstool.
“You can come over and cook with me anytime,” Mom says. “Someone here will only make the same boring salad.”
Dezzie and Alyssa both burst out laughing.
My mom slides us a pitcher of orange juice. It’s perfect. Florida does two things better than California: white-sand beaches and citrus.
“So how was you girls’ Christmas?” Mom asks, pouring batter into the waffle iron.
“Chaotic,” Alyssa says. “Eight cousins careening around my dad’s house. The tree fell over twice. I thought my stepmom was going to take the whole gang outside and start performing executions.”
“I bet they love spending time with the grandkids,” my Mom says, looking at me pointedly. “Some of us may never know.”
All three of them have been doing this all week. Making veiled references to their mutual belief I should go after Seth.
I haven’t told them my plan to fly to Chicago when I leave here.
How I’m going to have my script printed and bound. How I’m going to show up on Seth’s door on January 1, his least favorite day of the year, with this piece of my heart in my hand, and ask him to read it.
I want to tell them. I’m in agony, wondering how he will receive me when I show up, and all I want to do is pepper them with questions about what they think will happen.
