Cuckoo Clocks + Board Games + Landline Phones

Right before they broke up, his girlfriend visited from Canada and hung a giant ornate white cuckoo clock in his TV room. It was like some last flare signal to me that she was there, and I should stay away. I don’t remember seeing the clock perform as they usually do with sounds and movement and fanfare, but I felt its presence, like her, a little over the top, she wanted me to know she was there, she was moving in, it was this physical representation of her. She was decorating. His home was her home.Their home. I used to stare at it as I inched closer and closer to her boyfriend on his couch trying to get him to touch me because I wanted him, though there was a boundary we weren’t supposed to cross. Sometimes he would stroke my legs, or put my feet in his lap. He played guitar for me. The cuckoo clock, ready to break the silence at any moment, like an alarm for how close we were getting. The curly-cues, and lavish woodwork absorbing each glance, each word we spoke. She once called him, told him she didn’t want him to see me anymore, we couldn’t be friends, but he refused. It felt like a win. I had only met her once; when she visited, and I beat her so badly at bar darts I thought she might cry. It was awful enough she knew I was spending each weekend with her boyfriend, but then to silently murder her at darts with a smirk while he watched, also smirking? I smiled at her pain because that’s who I was then. Someone who had felt so much pain, when others experienced it, I relished it. It was all a game to me. If someone else was in pain, it meant there was less pain in the world for me. 

My crush and I sat in a park in Philadelphia and tried to talk. But after only a few exchanges we realized we were on some giant replica of a game board. All over, game pieces from Monopoly, chess, Sorry. By logic, we were also game pieces. I recognized the knight from chess right away, I play horse-heavy when I play chess, likely because my father taught me and he plays horse-heavy. It’s a stealthy and underrated piece, moving in that L shape people forget about.  Then, scanning, my crush pointed to the Monopoly hat, and the dog. I inched closer to him, making my move, but he was stony. We had been playing online Scrabble on our phones for four months straight. One game bleeding into the next. I kept hoping one day he’d just spell out how he really felt about me on the Scrabble board and then I’d know once and for all. He never did. I lost to him every two days for four months. I thought maybe he would see my willingness to lose to him as meaningful. The week before, I had written him a letter telling him how I felt. He had written back that he was seeing someone. 

I thought about how I sat in a hospital bed for seven days wondering about him a month earlier. Hoping I would get better, hoping I would have the opportunity to tell him how I really felt. Four open IVs poured different antibiotics into me, a whisper away from sepsis with a burst appendix. Wires and tubes blending seamlessly into my body like a sci-fi film. Sick cyborg girl thinks only of living human man. 

When the pathologist came in on day four trying to assess my infection she told me I wasn’t improving as fast as she’d like. Her long white hair and moonstone necklace framed her denim smock dress. She held my hands, looked at them, both sides, took off my grippy socks and looked at my feet, cradling them, she asked what I had to look forward to when I left the hospital. 

“I want to go on walks with my dog and I want to try to be more honest with people about how I feel.” 

“That sounds nice.” She grabbed my hands and squeezed. “Think about those things every day. I believe you’re going to push through this, but you’re not through it yet.”

I have wanted to push against other people’s relationships like they were rotted logs. Push into them, split them, watch them crumble to prove relationships are not strong after all. Connections aren’t really so precious. Mine haven’t been, so yours can’t be either. I’m not that person anymore, though I felt the urge for the first time in a long time to PUSH and really ruin something when I saw my crush. How much does she really matter? What about me? Push, push, push. I didn’t want their connection to be so precious. He had not drawn boundaries around our connection, what makes her so special? I am precious too: why didn’t he see it?

Maybe it was all just a game. Something elaborate and entertaining to pass time during a very difficult period in our lives. Whatever it was, I wanted to keep playing. It didn’t feel finished though I had already lost.

The first person I fell in love with had an ex-girlfriend who haunted our relationship, calling at all hours of the night for the entire first year and half we dated. There were no cell phones then. His dorm room landline with a ring like a fire alarm would go off at two and three in the morning, waking us out of whatever small slumber we were in. I could hear her on the other line, her pain amplified, “is she there?” she would ask. He would simply say, “Yes, she’s here” in response, and then she normally hung up, but a few times when she had been drinking she’d scream, cry, or threaten to hurt herself. The last time she called really surprised me. It had been months since she’d made a phone call asking about me. I thought we were beyond it. We were at his family’s vacation home in the middle of summer about to take a walk when the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon. He picked it up. I didn’t think anything of it until I heard his requisite answer, “yes, she’s here.” She knew the numbers, all of them, and she picked up and she dialed. She really needed to know if I was there, she needed to hear him say it. Sometimes I wondered what it was like for her after she hung up. We always had each other after the calls. Sometimes it reaffirmed our connection to hear him say I was there. But what did she do? Later I saw photographs of her sitting at the kitchen table in his vacation home he had taken. She also had long dark hair like me, was tall like me. But we were different. Her behavior, the desperation, the obsession, the jealousy, the pain of feeling replaced, something I didn’t yet understand because I’d never had a broken heart before–though these many years later I think of her, understand her more and more.

I’ve been the there girl, and the not there girl. I’ve been the who are you with? girl, and the girl he’s been with. I’m trying to be the enough girl. The walk away girl. The don’t give a shit girl. The alone and happy girl. The don’t need anyone or anything girl. The right here, right now girl. The girl with so much love she can just give it away to people who don’t want it. But I am the machine that turns sadness into rage. Late at night, back in New York, when I can’t sleep I want to pick up the phone, call my crush, and scream like some fucking bunny boiler, “IS SHE THERE?” Even though I know she is–and even more than that, all that matters is I’m not there.