My Kind of Woman

30. Who's Your Mommy?

My experience of heartbreak brought me to my knees for, at first, two weeks.

The first twenty-four were characterised by a lot of crying. I didn't think I'd ever cried that much, not for a long time. I'd curled up at the foot of my bed, the neck of my shirt sodden and damp with my tears. I slept intermittently, drifting off after crying, only to wake and realise what had happened - and cry again.

I stopped looking in the mirror, then stopped going to the bathroom completely for a while. The first time I went in after a good few hours of sobbing, I looked like I'd been through hell and back and still wound up there. My cheekbones and under my eyes were ruddy and swollen, my lashes were slicked together, my whole face just looked heavy. I felt heavy. I wanted to make it stop, make the aching hole in my chest patch itself back up.

She'd given up on me.

Thinking of that fact again made me hang my head over the sink and let my hot tears slip down and off the end of my nose.

The bath made me feel nauseous, the slide-up windows made me feel trapped. I was seeing my own house, that I'd lived in for eighteen years, in a completely new way. It was dank, old-fashioned, too wooden, too far off the road, stuffy. My room was the only room I seemed to enjoy being in. Because in there I could push out the windows, not that I got up to in those two weeks, and pretend they were similar to the ones in that house. They weren't french windows, and they didn't look nearly as pretty. They weren't silver-rimmed, they were wooden and the latch was scratched metal. But the endless hours I spent in my room, I spent under my duvet, curled until my pelvis ached and my legs went dead. I only got up to urinate, but even I held that off for as long as I could. My bladder burned in those hours, so full and hot that the pain spread up through my torso. I thought a few times it would explode inside me, that I'd just keel over and die from the sheer pain. But before it could get to that point, I dragged myself off to the bathroom, clutching my lower stomach and doubled over as if I had back problems.

I wasn't helping myself at all though. I'd convinced myself the time I'd spent not being at school, not studying, being alone was to aid my broken heart. But each night, I was beneath my duvet with a flashlight, reading the book she'd given me - every time, reading over the little note she'd left, hearing her voice and feeling it fill my mouth. It sat on my chest, weighed on me. It left a depressing throb in the very centre of me, and in a pathetic way, I found it quite comforting. I slept with my fingers slipped between the pages, holding my place.

It was quite a cheesy piece of reading. But easy, and romantic, and soft. A love story of a man who has a genetic disorder that causes him to jump through time unexpectedly, and how his wife deals with waiting for him. The Time Traveller's Wife, it was called. It was something I usually wouldn't have picked off the shelf myself, but I was so glad she'd gifted it to me. I got through it the first week of my heartbreak, sobbing with its bitterly lovable ending. And in the back of the book on the final page, a simple message had been scrawled in her handwriting, which was unlooped and blocky, easy to read.

This was the first book I read when I got to America. I hope you loved it as much as I did.

And I cried again.

Not going to school had very few perks. My dad assumed I was extremely ill, and went to work as usual. I didn't study, I didn't ring in to ask for work, I didn't even ring in sick. I hadn't even called Jackie. I was avoiding her like a coward. She'd come to the house before and after school a few times, calling up to my window and knocking on the door.

I'd realised that to not have Mio was to not have Jackie, but to have Mio was still to not have Jackie. I realised that there was no winning in this romance.