This Is How You Remind Me

O’s number flashes up on my phone. O never calls me. He writes in the British Library and communicates exclusively via text.

He wants to know if I mind if he meets up with BN2 tonight. I am oddly touched that he asked, and yet I wish he hadn’t. (Because of a complex web of loyalties I feared my friendship with O would be one of the casualties of the split, even though he and BN2 hardly know each other.)

I think briefly and ungenerously that all of BN2’s other women must be booked – the ones I’m sure he was referring to “all I (willingly) gave up for you,” as he put it in his first text message after the split. I wonder if he wanted it to get back to me that he has spent at least one night not trying to shag other women. I decide that possibly it’s a combination of both – that he’s filling his time as I have been trying to fill my time.

My pause is just long enough for O to say awkwardly: “I mean, I don’t know if there’s daggers drawn between the two of you or whatever.”

“No, not on my side,” I say, and mean it. “I’m just sad, that’s all.”

“Yeah, it’s sad,” agrees O. I don’t tell him that tonight is the night BN2 wanted to celebrate my birthday, since he has his daughter tomorrow (my actual birthday).

When I get home two birthday cards have arrived in the post. One I think I recognize as Friend Bearing Chocolate’s mum, but quickly realize from the return address is BN2’s mum. (Do all mums in this country have the same handwriting?) I turn over the second card and see a row of x’s – kisses – on the back. BN2.

It’s a New Yorker card. I haven’t read the New Yorker in front of him in at least a year, if ever (how did I get so far from it?), but somehow he’s remembered. The card makes me cry. “I’m sorry for whatever I did or didn’t do that’s made you eschew all further contact with me,” I think it says, among other things (I don’t want to read it again, and therefore cry again, so please excuse the lack of fact-checking. He did, for the record, definitely use the word “eschew.”).

I want to call him immediately, to give him a verbal hug. I want to meet up with him and talk about how we’ll work it out; to collaborate in the invention of the new us.

But I know that I can’t, and so I don’t.

Can I at least text him and thank him for the card? I think.

No, I cannot.

Oh, what’s the harm in a simple text?

NO.

I sit in front of my computer and try to work, but I just want to text him, or to eat. I just ate lunch a half hour ago. I wonder grumpily why I have to have a breakup now, when I can’t even shop as a distraction (can’t afford it).

I pick up my computer, buy two diet cherry Cokes (gross, I know, but they are a habit) and sit in the Starbucks, trying not to think about the fact that he helped me pick out my computer in February.

Then I remember we fought about that, too. That helps for oh, about a second.