I'm wearing the t-shirt Christian brought over for me. It didn't fit him and he would be the smallest of the guys so the next logical wearer is me. It's huge and it says Fabbing Fuckulous on it. Jacob laughed and asked if I was planning to wear it in public and I said yes, but only to church and PTA meetings. Of course I was kidding but the look he shot me was worth it.
Ben has not called back. Instead I lunged at the phone at 9 pm and it wasn't what I expected at all.
It was Sophie.
She'll be the only one relatively unscathed by the mess made because she wasn't even engaged when it happened. And it was a fluke that Jacob wound up at the conference, there was a last-minute opening that he was able to grab as a favor repaid. They haven't had contact since, no, I'm not worried that it's going to happen again, from what I know and have seen, while he admires her togetherness as much as he abhors my chaos, she doesn't move him nearly an iota as much. He fell for me hard, he is all mine in a way that has surprised, and continues to surprise everyone.
She called to apologize to me and to wish us a happy belated anniversary and to ask me if I had anything I wanted or needed to say to her. That she didn't want me to hate her. That she was surprised by how not into it Jacob turned out to be and how grief-stricken he was and how she assumed he had admitted his mistakes long ago.
This is how civilized adults mend fences. We're all in our thirties. We should all know better. We keep trying to do better, and that's all we can do.
God, am I this magnanimous?
Not on your fucking life.
She apologized and asked me not to forgive or let her off the hook but just to know she wouldn't hurt me again. Or Jacob. She also had told her fiance before they were engaged. I wasn't kidding when I say she is pulled together and so not that type of person.
I'll never be that self-assured or that pulled together. She is the tight chignon, the business formal and I am the wispy mess, the day at the fair hair, undone and unkempt.
Soft and wild. Sweet and certifiable.
Everyone rushing in to assure their absolution from me is astounding. Since when did the world ever revolve around me? Apparently it always has, and my happiness has come to command a king's ransom. One that was paid for when I asked for it. I took Jacob's heart back because it belongs to me and it stays with me, from here on out.
She said she probably won't call for a long while, maybe at Christmas to wish us well, or not, but that I should know, if I don't or if there's any doubt, just how much Jacob truly loves me, that the time she has spent with him whether before their marriage or after, was filled with my presence and his preoccupation with me. With his obsession for me that supersedes everything he does.
But here's a little deviation from the way everyone expects Bridget to react to all the reassurance that Bridget's the one he wants and he'd never do it again. Maybe it's cold, maybe it's a result of diluting my emotions and anticipated reactions from all the drugs, which were increased recently, did you catch the shift? Maybe I wasn't born yesterday and maybe I never saw this coming, I thought I had him wrapped but I was sure I did before he married Sophie so maybe she takes up just as much of him as I do and maybe, like me, there's more than enough room for more than one soulmate. Maybe we're lucid and acting and feeling but we're not stupid in never putting all our eggs in the one basket because you never know when it'll get kicked over and you'll have a mess left to deal with. Alone. Human beans weren't meant to be alone.
We weren't meant to be so fragile either.
Was I meant to be so cold?
I think I know exactly how Jacob feels in that when he thinks about me going to Loch he feels an uncontrollable sadness, and a panic and a rage that threatens to eat him alive. So it's better not to think about it all. We talked it out privately, we've dealt with it in therapy, it's done. Sophie calling now just seeks to undo me again and I'm not going there. I'm no longer naive and I don't care that *I* haven't fully dealt with it, preferring instead to take my knocks for my own betrayals and not touching Jacob's.
I can't. I'll die if I think about it and so I don't. Why in the hell do you think I happily agreed to upping my drugs to the highest dosage ever yet? Because I will put it off forever. It's how I deal with things. I just keep on going and pick up the pieces of my heart along the way and pretend everything is fine.
I told her I wished she hadn't called. That it wasn't fair of her to use me so that she could move on and feel better and soothe her own guilt. I think that's what surprises everyone now, how much rage can fester inside of such a tiny package unchecked for much longer than most people can carry that load.
I can. Indefinitely. And that can't be healthy. And I refuse to talk about to the right people. Because I simply feel like holding all the cards right now and making them nervous and maybe the stupid fragile girl is less stupid and even more stupid than we all previously thought.
Because I really have no idea what I'm doing here. What's sad is how comfortable this feeling is.
What's even more sad is how unfeeling this feeling is.
