1-
The Before Days
I’ve started thinking of that age as “The Before Days.”
It really wasn’t all that long ago, but it kinda feels like a lifetime at this point, doesn’t it? It’s like it was a completely different era.
Back when you could go out in public. Back when you could shop, go to restaurants, see a movie, go to a football game- not that I was all that sorry to see sports go. I never did personally understand the appeal...
Back when you could risk a single cough in the middle of a grocery store, and everyone didn’t suddenly turn around and glare at you with the evil eye. Back when you could make a trip to that same store, with the reasonable expectation that they would have an ample supply of personal bathroom tissue in stock for you to purchase, without having to fistfight another ten or fifteen customers for it.
God, I miss those days...
It’s strange, isn’t it, that those are the things we miss? How mundane everything was. How our boring, day-to-day lives were allowed to be just that- boring, day-to-day lives. We might have wished for some added excitement every now and again, but we never could have guessed what was on the horizon for us.
Could we?
Who knows, maybe if we’d been paying attention we would have seen the signs all along. Maybe we could have been prepared for it. Thinking back now, I’m starting to wonder whether that might be true, but I’m still not sure whether the past me would have believed the present me if I tried to go back in time and warn myself about all of this. I might have been more inclined to go and check myself into a psych ward, if anything.
The pattern of my life had seemed so steady, so consistent for so long, that it was unthinkable to me that my future would end up diverging in so severe a fashion as it did. And not just in the way that you’re probably thinking, either…
But maybe I should pause and rewind a little bit before I get into all of that.
I guess as decent a place to start as any is back during The Before Days, pretty early on in the New Year. My boring, mundane life was about as boring and mundane as it always was, save for one important exception- I’d just been broken up with by the man I’d been dating for the past year and a half.
Dennis was- well, he was fine. He was about as boring as I was. Boring face. Boring haircut. Even the way he talked was boring. I don’t mean to say he was unattractive or anything like that, just that he was monumentally unexceptional. He represented stability in my eyes, though. He was sort of middle-of-the-road ambitious- he wasn’t going to be the next president of the United States, or fly a mission to the moon. But he was reliable enough, with a steady, on-track career. And if you’d been brought up like I was, always making plans for ten, twenty, thirty years into the future, “on-track” was all you really cared about in a man.
And that’s really the key word, I think. “On-track.” My parents had pressured me a lot growing up. I did everything by the books. I envisioned my life as it would be far into the future, giving little thought to my present day needs or desires. Hell, for that matter I don’t even know if you could say I had present day needs or desires, seeing as how everything I aspired to was specifically pursued to bring me some future happiness, some far-off contentment in a more mature age of my life, which I simply had to trust would end up coming to me in time.
It’s not like I totally believed that a person could live their life like clockwork, but I think my breakup with Dennis was the moment that first shattered my faith in the idea that a person is in any way in control over the direction of their own life.
“This isn’t working out,” he announced without preamble one night as we were eating at a Japanese restaurant, his beady gray eyes fixed down at his plate.
“Here, you’re just holding them wrong,” I said, misinterpreting, and reaching for the chopsticks in his hand to correct the way he was gripping them.
I’d no sooner touched him than he pulled his hand away, and I looked up in surprise. He shook his boring, handsome face at me, his clean-shaven lips puckering into a frown, and a strand of blond hair dripping down over his eyes.
“I’m talking about us, Annalise. You and I. Things aren’t working out between us.”
I remember furrowing my brow at this, actually feeling confused at the idea.
“Who said that?” I asked, as though it was someone else dictating the terms of our relationship.
“Nobody said anything,” he said. “Look, I know this is hard, I just… You need to understand, you’re a beautiful girl. You’re smart, talented, and funny, I just… I’m not ready to settle, okay?”
The word plunged into my heart like an arrow.
“Settle?” I asked, my skin suddenly prickling.
He’d looked back down at his plate for a moment, but quickly returned his attention to me when I spoke.
“What? Oh… No, I meant I’m not ready to settle down. Sorry, I misspoke.”
I felt a little bit like I’d just swallowed an entire apple whole, and the thing was lodged painfully at the base of my throat.
“Oh. Oh, I see,” I said in a spacy voice, my eyes drifting off into the middle distance, pondering his obvious Freudian slip.
“Like I said, it’s nothing personal,” he continued in a casual tone of voice, and returned to poking at his dinner plate with his chopsticks. “I just think we’re two different people. We want different things. And that’s totally okay. God, this sushi is delicious…”
And so that was that.
Now I found myself sitting at work, a couple of weeks later, still trying to wrap my head around what had been said to me that evening.
Settle? Settle?!
He was settling for me?
He was the one breaking up with me?
I’d tried to force myself not to go on the rebound immediately after the breakup, as badly as I might have wanted to. I was afraid that I might end up making some pretty poor decisions in the aftermath of such rejection, just to convince myself that I wasn’t the kind of girl who someone “settled” for.
By this point, though, the blow to my self-esteem was proving too hard to live with, and so I found myself reactivating several of my dating profiles with my phone out under my work desk, I was feeling so crushed by it all.
Goldfinch’s open-office plan made it tough to sneak onto your phone during work hours. We technically weren’t supposed to be using our phones for non-business-related purposes, but people did it all the time anyway, and no one was ever very strict about it. Still, I really didn’t want anyone to notice that I was trying to meet people through a dating app, which was exactly why I’d decided to avoid using Goldfinch’s own state-of-the-art hookup app for this purpose, despite having had a hand in designing it. I don’t know how realistic it was to worry that someone from the office might find out I was on there, but I didn’t want to risk that possibility.
As casually I could I peered around the office before entering my login info to an old dating app I’d abandoned after meeting Dennis. No one was paying any attention to me, all eyes locked intently on one of any number of screens that filled the room. My gaze flitted gradually over to my boss and CEO of the company, Malcolm Finch, and I found my eyes suddenly locked into place.