Absolute Best
Illustration by Jia Sung She told him in February. They were both sitting—both freezing—by the bank of the Charles. His ungloved hands were curled like paws into his jacket sleeves, and wind kept blowing off the fur-lined hood of her coat. He was in the second year of his doctorate. She was a year out from undergrad but had spent the past eight months hanging around, doing research for someone in his department.
They’d been together three years. The first she’d spent waiting for him to commit, the second waiting for him to get past the whole astronaut thing. “Fucking NASA,” she’d complained to Corrie. “This asshole thinks I’m gonna be psyched about him floating around in the ether while I change diapers?” She called him “this asshole” when he wasn’t around, “sweetheart” in his company.
This last year had been better—after watching a six-part docuseries about the real lives of astronauts, he’d given up the fantasy and resolved to stick out his PhD. Just a few more years, she’d told herself, then he would graduate and they could start their lives. They’d talked vaguely of moving West. She’d settled into their temporary existence as one does on a couch with not quite enough room.
Then, New Year’s Eve. He was blind drunk, couldn’t keep his erection, so he rolled off of her but pride compelled him to continue touching her anyway, letting one hand roam over her body. He paused at her belly, spread his fingers wide and whispered, “I want to put a baby in you.” He had never said anything like it before, and suddenly she could see their future stretching like summer before her, long and shallow. A trench. She’d been made to wait too long: her belief in them had curdled. She could no longer reconcile “this asshole” with “sweetheart.” She knew she would have to leave him, but it took her five weeks to get up the courage.
So now they were freezing, their breath making fast-dissolving clouds as they talked and talked in circles until finally she said, “Please, Graham, I’m really sorry, I really am, but I just can’t.”
She quit her research job, moved back to her mom’s in Connecticut. He drove down twice that spring to try and get her back. The degree of his heartbreak surprised them both. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus. He was atrophying, the meat of his arms and cheeks dissolving gradually. It was so hard telling him no because for years his attention was all she’d wanted. There had been another guy at one point—a cheerful, boyish Iowan who’d adored her—but that had come to nothing, really—a nervous kiss, a few long walks. In the end she hadn’t been able to leave Graham, his moon white back with its constellations of freckles, his advice, more Machiavellian the more he drunk he got, and his voice. Just the sound of his voice.
After Graham drove away the second time, she dragged herself up the worn carpeted stairs to her childhood bedroom and literally fell to her knees. There was the black, black floating despair, the void in her center like a blooming wound. There was the burden of being the one who knew there was no saving it. He could only love her because she was gone.
