Story_I've Been Thinking

I’ve Been Thinking

By Kasia Halawa

It had been precisely three weeks since I last heard from him. My efforts to reach out had been wrung dry, yet every phone ping made my stomach flip with hope that it would be him. But three weeks turned into a month, then two at which point I stopped keeping track. There was no conclusion - we were returning to our respective colleges in different cities, and the epic love story I had weaved in my head was abruptly over, to my dismay, rewritten as a summer fling.

I wasted no time in regurgitating everything that happened between us to pinpoint exactly where it went wrong. If I had done everything differently, would the ending be the same? There was no amount of conversation that could bring closure. In fact, as soon as the words left my mouth, it felt like some sadistic doctor was painstakingly picking apart the suture I has fastened on my heart. Every time I brought up his name, I could see my friends getting bored. But I couldn’t stop. His name rolled off my tongue and slipped out as if it was the only word I knew, a compulsion I couldn’t control. So, I embraced who I had become: a pathetic girl with a plagued vocabulary.

The desperation with which I tried to relive that summer found me on a grand tour of old memories, buried and gone. I drove past his house, looking for his car in the driveway to no avail. I returned to the bar where we met, me sipping on a long island iced tea just a little too strong, but strong enough to approach him. I checked my dating apps with futile compulsion, knowing they had nothing to offer.

The déjà vu of asking new boys the same questions I had asked him gave me vertigo. I played songs that had blasted through his car’s speakers countless times, but the chords became unbearably dissonant, and lyrics jumbled, so I deleted them from my playlists. My mind morphed into a reel of every moment we had spent together, from our first meeting to his tires peeling out of my driveway that late August night, before I had even gotten my key in the lock, as if he couldn’t leave fast enough.

I dragged my best friend along with me.

“I feel like I’m enabling a drug addict,” she said as we staked out his street in the darkness of a late October night. “You do this, you know. You romanticize these guys that were never promising to begin with,” she remarked, matter-of-factly, as if declaring my fatal flaw would rewire my psyche.

On the inside, I agreed, knowing that my hyper-fixations were bulldozers to my life’s order. I laughed out loud, a wry laugh at the things I had forced myself to overlook to end up in this position. I clenched my fists and wished I had never met him.

Eventually, I knew if I continued, I would alienate the people around me. Patience can only be stretched so far before it snaps. I declared my indifference, and when they looked at me with skepticism, I berated the boy’s faults and expressed such disgust at my old self for being involved with such an unearthly creature, that they had no choice but to believe me. I deleted his contact from my phone to validate my claims.

Finally, in the seventh month, I sat in the silence that permeated the space around me. While he still crossed my mind, he didn’t inhabit it. I heard a ping that jolted me out of my thoughts and glanced down at my phone. A singular line of text appeared:

“Hey, I’ve been thinking about you,” from an unsaved number.

I froze as my mind computed, eyes the size of saucers, heart pounding so hard I feared it may find itself on the ceramic kitchen tile any second. My thumbs danced in the air above the screen and, seeming to gain a mind of their own, albeit apprehensively, tapped the text and opened the message.