4

Congratulations. 

 

He hadn’t realised the number was still saved.

 

It was one word, the most they had spoken in nearly a decade. He could not read the tone, or maybe he didn’t want to. In this case, sincerity might have been worse than sarcasm. 

 

Thank you, he wrote. His thumb hovered over the send button.

 

He deleted it and tried again.

 

You aren’t d—

 

He hated the message before he’d even finished typing it out, quickly reverting the text box to an empty bubble. He stared down at his phone, even after the screen went to sleep and he was left staring at his reflection in the black. It wouldn’t work, no matter how elegant his words, He knew it wouldn’t, knew before all this. He had tried to take charge of the feeling, to free himself from it. Over and over and over again. It didn’t matter. Abandonment festered, it worked its way into every aspect of yourself, every memory. It had manifested, most recently, in a pain just below his hairline. At first it was a dull throb, an ache he could ignore, another feeling he had to push aside, to box away and buckle down and power through. He had spent much of his early twenties on the fifth floor of the Reference Library, inhaling the stale smell of books that had not been touched in decades, utterly unaware of their own uselessness. There, he could bury himself, he could let the emotion go in a way he could not quite bring himself to follow through with. The plan—as it had always been—was to find a research position, pursue tenure. His new-found independence was an asset, something to be celebrated rather than mourned. 

 

He couldn’t go to the Reference Library anymore, something about optics and camera phones and too-open space. He wasn’t even really supposed to be on the subway, but he had taught a semi-successful guest lecture and decided to push his luck. 

 

You’re not that sort, his publicist had said, when he asked her what he needed to improve on, what part of him should be most hastily fixed. You’re above it, people don’t even bother trying to drag you down.

 

He had nothing to say to that, no way of articulating how absolutely incorrect she was without sounding self-pitying, ungrateful. 

 

She took his silence as compliance, and gave him a quick once-over, considering. Maybe you should do something for your far-sightedness. Get rid of the glasses, get some contacts.

 

He didn’t get rid of the glasses. 

 

At least, he hadn’t yet. He had only recently reached the recognizable stage of stardom, where being in a few indie features and one sleeper hit seemed to garner you a niche of people who knew who you were and didn’t hate you for it. Where you couldn’t tell if you were being stared at out of idle curiosity or recognition. He had never realised how piercing the stares of strangers could be. He rarely looked at other people when on public transit. Before, it was out of a sense of deference, not wanting to burst their bubble—whether that be calm or chaotic—he preferred to be ignored, so he did others the same courtesy. After, it was because he didn’t want to know he was being stared at. He wasn’t supposed to take the train anymore. He had the money to take a car, the convenience of wealth to cater to his every whim. He didn’t care. 

 

His agent had begged him not to take it, but it was a lost cause. He missed his aimless days, staring at the ceiling of One’s dorm room, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. He missed not having anywhere to be, anyone to disappoint. He did not think of their time together much anymore, he tried to cover the emotion with a schedule so busy that the only thing he did besides work was sleep, but he never quite got rid of that pressure. The subway was the one place where urgency loosened its grip, where he could pretend that he was still that aimless college student, sure that things would work out as they were supposed to. 

 

He should have looked. He shouldn’t have written off the sharp inhale of breath he heard as he got on as the wheeze of the train. If he had looked, he could have had a chance at self-preservation, he could have known better.  It had made sense, at the time, to assume it was the subway’s exhale. 

 

There are people who carry their sadness in their body, whose very being seems to radiate sorrow. He wasn’t like that. You could look at him and see exactly what he wanted you to see. It was, perhaps, what made him such a compelling actor. Any emotion, no matter how rehearsed, would seem like a genuine outburst, a rare moment of feeling; something you were honoured to be privy to. There are people, I think, who feel so deeply that they become accustomed to hiding it.

 

He grew up in an upper-class neighbourhood in the suburbs of Montreal, where his mother taught arithmetic and his father grew overpriced roses. When he was a child, he had thought all families were like this, supportive and loving and sometimes cold, but never uncaring. This, he thought, was what everyone strived for. A nice house and a job you liked and someone who loved you.  As he had grown up, as the rose tint had faded, he had held onto those three things—the formula for a meaningful existence. He had one of those things. While it didn’t necessarily make him happy, it had to count for something. He had had, at one point, all three. 

 

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, buried the feeling as deeply as possible, past the stretch of veins and bone and the memories he held too close at one time to ever forget. He did not look at the rest of the passengers. Maybe he should have. Maybe things would have been different. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure anything would have changed. 

In any case, he didn’t look. 

 

Doors are now closing.