the habit of being

She trips and falls on the way home from the 24 hour pharmacy. It’s been raining hard all day and now it’s finally letting up in the darkness. She stumbles on an uneven brick street sidewalk, walking too fast. She scrapes her wrists, skins her knee. Inside the double plastic bag, a two-liter of diet coke smashes a small cardboard box containing two pregnancy tests.

She sits there in her long thick skirt, on the bumpy sidewalk, hugging her knees into her chest, saying “you’re okay.” She resolves not too look at her blood until she gets back home.

The first test is negative, the end of an era. The second is sitting on the kitchen shelf, next to the pasta.

* * *

She lies awake in her girlfriend’s boyfriend’s bed. She was invited to keep her friend from crying, from being alone. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Unlike you, they sometimes have the courage to ask.

Before the lights went out, they sat on their sides of the great silent divide, reading their books. Now, as her friend sleeps (breathing easily and tearless until morning, in a familiar bed), she remembers things long laid to rest.

The gulf between their backs is vast enough to contain the years - the years and the boys, the social commitments and first love, the guilt and baggage and birth control. Five years ago they would’ve been holding one another. Five years ago the tears were subtle, the caresses soft and hesitant, the cringes nonexistant. They knew each other then. They cried openly and in unison, for one another then, and did not guard one another against emotion.

This late night loss seems to hold the potential to explain so many things, but she is too sleepy to figure it all out. She dozes off alone, wishing only that she were a poet, so that she might one day write it down.

* * *

It’s raining out again as she sits in a restaurant eating sushi from one platter with five women. These women are Women Over Thirty, getting buzzed on saki and gossiping self-assuredly. One proclaims cheating in marriage is inevitable; that shit happens. One hasn’t been with a man in nine years, but thinks her standard poodle will teach her all she needs to know about intimacy. Another, a divorcee, is quietly smirking with sad eyes.

None these women have it figured out, they’re just no longer ashamed not to. At twenty, newly alone and clueless, she finds this oddly comforting. With their histories and their graduate degrees and their careers, the thirtysomethings tell her she should be a fashion model, a ghost writer.

She eats her cucumber rolls and smiles.

* * *

On her second date, she is drunk on jazz and white wine, kissing him recklessly as he drives her out of the city, down the highway, without a plan.

“I don’t know where to take you,” he keeps saying, and he kisses her, and they keep going. It’s after two in the morning when they’re pulled over by the police, going 85 in a 55, and it is all she can do to keep from laughing as he fills out the paperwork, saying “thank you, sir” (for a lenient lie and a $142 fine). They’ll spend all night holding one another and giggling, in a cheap hotel room with two prints of the same painting.

Everyone will say how much happier she seems in the coming days. Her new self.

* * *

For the first time in nearly a year, she sees her own city. It is the most ironic thing to be with someone you cheated on someone else (disasterously!) with, when the someone else is gone and you’re no longer cheating. It makes you wonder which things are made to last.

She rides on the back of a motorcycle, smiling, her hands again round the waist of the tattooed, black-clad object of her now-historic and far away betrayal. After eighteen months of trying to escape her adulterous crimes, of allowing herself to be torn apart and helping generously with the tearing, now she stares again at the Other Man (just a person), finding herself still attracted and still not sure why.

She invited him here without much thought, because she could, because there was no one to stop her. This time she’ll give herself freely - without guilt, without hesitation - and he’ll ride off with no definite return in sight, and it won’t matter. She’ll turn easily away, rejoicing in the utter relief of feeling no sadness and no expectation.

* * *

While walking to the office in the dark, it occurs to her that, now no longer anyone’s domestic partner, she shouldn’t have to sit at home alone with nothing better than work to do on a Saturday night. EVER. The idea hits her with the force of an epiphany, and she won’t even break pace to tally up all the rules she’s already broken.

Maybe, just maybe, she’s finally free to make her own.