I tried to make myself stop liking Brian anymore. (From now on, I’m going to copy The Girls Bathroom podcast and start calling every guy I mention Brian.) I genuinely put in the work. Before falling asleep, I made up fantasies in my head in which he regretted his decision to end things. In one, I was in a club, leaning against the bar, wearing this orange crochet cut-out dress I saw online. He came in and walked over, and I was really funny and charming. He wanted to kiss me, but then this other guy, my boyfriend, came over and was like, “Sorry, am I interrupting something?” and I was like, “No, not at all.” Which would really hurt Brian, of course, because he would want to be a “something” to me.
I parroted that Keke Palmer meme – “I hate to say it, I hope I don’t sound ridiculous, I don’t know who this man is. I mean he could be walking down the street, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know a thing. Sorry to this man” – when someone mentioned his name. I manifested bad things happening to him, like a witch casting a spell or Lily Allen in the “Smile” video.
But that all went out of the window when I saw him coming out of the cinema last week. We didn’t talk like we usually do. Instead we gave close-lipped smiles and stood back from each other. It wasn’t how I’d planned to bump into him, all bloated with gummy sweets, red-eyed from the big screen, but it was nice to see him, and when he asked me about life, I didn’t show off or lie. I just said I was good and then he told me about his dad coming down to visit and how embarrassing it was when they went to a restaurant because his dad got really angry about their table being at the bar even thought that’s where he’d booked it. Then I told Brian about my uncle’s theory that restaurants seat him in the back because he’s old. How he filed a formal complaint to Wagamama because he believed they’d put him behind a pillar on purpose and how I said no one who works in Wagamama cares enough to enact that kind of policy.
It was nice, actually. It was really nice.
A couple of days later, I was with a friend in the sauna of her gym. It was hot enough that the pages of my book crinkled and sweat rolled over the bridge of my lips. “I still like Brian,” I said, a bit out of nowhere, my legs swinging underneath me.
She nodded as if it was okay that I felt like that, and her nonchalance made me question why I found it so hard to admit. I guess it’s because, in the grand scale of relationships, what happened between us was objectively very short: too small a thing to mourn.
I also didn’t want to do the thing where I lodge an ex in my brain as the internal judge of my actions. As if they’re there watching and laughing when I’m on the pavement on a night out, with my bag open and all my cards everywhere and my dress riding up, thinking, “I knew she wasn’t worth it.”
I don’t want to dwell. I want to move on, get up and grow up, like an Ariana Grande lyric rather than a Lana Del Rey one.
But nothing is too small to feel crap about. And what is small anyway? Even if a relationship is short or casual, it can still mean something. I’ve like-liked a lot of people, but I haven’t felt the same sureness I did with him very often at all. The thought of me and him made sense in my head. It’s understandable that, when it didn’t work out, it would hit me hard.
After admitting my feelings to my friend, I felt so much better. It made me realise how impossible they are to change. You can accept that you’ll be happier without a person, that now’s not the right time, that one or both of you did something wrong, but you can’t talk you way into actually going off them. You just have to wait.
In fact, there’s only one way to speed up the process, and that’s to keep on living your life in a way that makes you happy. To leave the party when it stops being fun, to lie on the grass and look up at the sky until the clouds start to bend and morph into shapes you can’t believe were made by chance, sitting on people’s knees and snogging them in public even though you should be self-conscious. And just by living, you’ll get to a point where that person matters a lot less than they used to.
I remember, when I was going through a break-up, something my mum said that really helped. I told her I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that my ex and I would get back together one day, and she told me to just let myself think that. “As long as you’re not thinking it’ll happen next week or anything,” she explained. “If you’re thinking in a few years’ time, that’s okay, because chances are, by the time you’re there, you won’t feel anything for him anymore so you won’t get disappointed when he doesn’t – sorry, if he doesn’t – want you back.”
Problem is, I think I’ll wait all of those years and still want Brian. I would think that, though. Because, right now, I’m not yet the me who’s stopped caring. She’ll arrive one day. And when she does, I might not even remember I ever felt this way at all.