I'm Thinking of Ending Things

~ ~ ~

Jake has started talking about aging. I didn’t see it coming. It’s not a topic we’ve ever discussed before. “It’s just one of those culturally misunderstood things.”

“But you think getting old is good?”

“I do. It is. First of all, it’s inevitable. It just seems negative because of our overwhelming obsession with youth.”

“Yeah, I know. They’re all positives. But what about your boyish good looks? You can kiss those good-bye. Are you prepared to be fat and bald?”

“Whatever we lose physically as we age is worth it, given what we gain. It’s a fair trade-off.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m with you,” I say. “I actually want to be older. I’m happy to age, seriously.”

“I keep hoping for some gray hairs. Some wrinkles. I’d like to have some laugh lines. I guess, more than anything, I want to be myself,” he says. “I want to be. To be me.”

“How so?”

“I want to understand myself and recognize how others see me. I want to be comfortable being myself. How I reach that is almost less important, right? It means something to get to the next year. It’s significant.”

“I think that’s why so many people rush into marriage and stay in shitty relationships, regardless of age, because they aren’t comfortable being alone.”

I can’t say this to Jake and I don’t, but maybe it’s better to be alone. Why abandon the routine we each master? Why give up the opportunity for many diverse relationships in exchange for one? There’s plenty of good with coupling up, I get it, but is it better? When single, I tend to focus on how much the company of someone would improve my life, increase my happiness. But does it?

“Do you care if I turn this down a bit?” I ask, adjusting the radio before waiting for his reply. I’ve turned it down multiple times on this drive; Jake keeps turning it back up. I think he might be a bit deaf. At least some of the time. It’s like all absentminded ticks — there sometimes, but other times, not so much.

One night, I had a headache. We were chatting on the phone and he was planning on coming over to hang out. I asked him to bring me a couple of Advil. I wasn’t sure he’d remember, even though I’d repeated it. It was one of the bad headaches I’ve been getting recently. I assumed he’d forget. Jake forgets things. He can be a bit of a scatterbrained professor cliché.

When he arrived at my place, I didn’t say anything about the pills. I didn’t want him to feel bad if he’d forgotten. He didn’t say anything, either. Not at first. We were talking about something else, I can’t remember, and he just said out of the blue, “Your pills.”

He pushed a hand into his pocket. He had to straighten out his legs to get his hand in. I watched him.

“Here,” he’d said.

He didn’t just pull out two pills from his linty pocket. He handed me a small ball of Kleenex, all wrapped up in itself and sealed with a single piece of tape. The package looked like a large white Hershey’s Kiss. I undid the tape. Inside were my pills. Three of them. An extra, in case I needed it.

“Thanks,” I said. I went into the bathroom for water. I didn’t say anything to Jake, but to me, the wrapping was significant. Protecting the pills like that. He wouldn’t have done that for himself.

It threw me off a bit, made me rethink things. I was going to break up with him that night — maybe. It’s possible I was. I wasn’t planning to. But it could have happened. But he put my pills in the Kleenex.

Are small, critical actions enough? Small gestures make us feel good — about ourselves, about others. Small things connect us. They feel like everything. A lot depends on them. It’s not unlike religion and God. We believe in certain constructs that help us understand life. Not only to understand it, but as a means of providing comfort. The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It’s a belief we want to be true.

Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn’t it? To find another person to spend all your life with? To age with and change with? To see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?

It’s funny that Jake brought up intelligence earlier. His question about the smartest human in the world. It’s like Jake knew I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been thinking about all of these things. Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret? It’s been on my mind a lot, Jake’s intelligence. Not just now. I’ve been thinking about it for a while.

His intelligence initially attracted me, but in a committed relationship, is it a good thing for me? Would someone less intelligent be harder to live with or easier? I’m talking long-term here, not just a few months or years. Logic and intelligence aren’t linked with generosity and empathy. Or are they? Not his intelligence, anyway. He’s a literal, linear, intellectual thinker. How does this make thirty or forty or fifty years together more appealing?

I turn to him. “I know you don’t like talking about actual work stuff, but I’ve never seen your lab. What’s it like?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s hard for me to envision where you work.”

“Picture a lab. That’s pretty much it.”

“Does it smell like chemicals? Are there lots of people around?”

“I don’t know. I guess so, yeah, usually.”

“But you don’t have any problems being distracted, or concentrating?”

“Usually it’s fine. Every now and then there’s a disturbance or something, someone talking on the phone or laughing. Once I had to ‘shhh’ a colleague. That’s never fun.”

“I know how you are when you get focused.”

“At those times I don’t even want to hear the clock.”

I think this car must be dusty, or maybe it’s just the vents. But my eyes feel dry in here. I adjust the vent, aiming it fully toward the floor.

“Give me a virtual tour.”

“Of the lab?”

“Yeah.”

“Now?”

“You can do that and drive. What would you show me if I visited you at work?”

For a while he doesn’t say anything. He just looks straight ahead, through the windshield.

“First, I’d show you the protein crystallography room.” He doesn’t look at me as he talks.

“Okay,” I say. “Good.”

I know his work involves ice crystals and proteins. That’s about it. I know he’s working on a postdoc and thesis.

“I’d show you the two crystallization robots that allow us to screen a large area of crystallization space, using sub-microliter volumes of difficult-to-express recombinant proteins.”

“See,” I say, “I like hearing this.”

I really do.

“You’d probably be interested in the microscope room that contains the setup of our three-color TIRF, or total internal reflection fluorescence, as well as the spinning disk microscope that allows us to accurately track fluorescently tagged single molecules, either in vitro or in vivo with nanometer precision.”

“Go on.”

“I’d show you our temperature-controlled incubators in which we grow large volumes, more than twenty liters, of yeast and E. coli cultures that have been genetically engineered to overexpress a protein of our choosing.”

As he talks, I’m studying his face, his neck, his hands. I can’t help myself.

“I’d show you our two systems — AKTA FPLC, fast protein liquid chromatography — that allow us to purify any protein quickly and accurately using any combination of affinity, ion exchange, and gel permeation chromatographies.”

I want to kiss him as he drives.

“I’d show you the tissue culture room where we grow and maintain various mammalian cell lines either for transfection of specific genes or harvesting of cell lysate…”

He pauses.

“Go on,” I say. “And then?”

“And then I feel like you’d be bored and ready to leave.”

I could say something to him right now. We’re alone in the car. It’s the perfect time. I could say I’ve been thinking about a relationship in the context of only myself and what everything means to me. Or I could ask if this is irrelevant because a relationship can’t be understood sliced in two. Or I could be completely honest and say, “I’m thinking of ending things.” But I don’t. I don’t say any of that.

Maybe going to meet his parents, seeing where he comes from, where he grew up, maybe that will help me decide what to do.

“Thank you,” I say. “For the tour.”

I watch him drive. For now. That messy, slightly curled hair. That fucking exquisite posture. I think about those three tiny pills. It changes everything. It was so nice of him to wrap them up for me.

WE’D KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR only about two weeks when Jake left town for two nights. We’d seen each other or spoken almost every day since meeting. He would call. I’d text. But I learned he hated texting. He might send one text, two at most. If the conversation went any further, he would call. He likes talking and listening. He appreciates discourse.

It was weird to be all alone again for those two days when he was away. That was what I’d been used to, before, but after, it felt insufficient. I missed him. I missed being with another person. It’s corny, I know, but I felt like a part of me was gone.

Getting to know someone is like putting a never-ending puzzle together. We fit the smallest pieces first and we get to know ourselves better in the process. The details I know about Jake — that he likes his meat well-done, that he avoids using public bathrooms, that he hates when people pick their teeth with their fingernails after a meal — are trivial and inconsequential compared to the large truths that take time to eventually reveal themselves.

After spending so much time alone, I started to feel like I knew Jake well, really well. If you’re seeing someone constantly, like Jake and I did after only two weeks, it starts to feel… intense. It was intense. I thought about him all the time those first couple of weeks, even when we weren’t together. We’d had lots of long talks while sitting on the floor, or lying on the couch, or in bed. We could talk for hours. One of us starting into a topic, the other picking up on it. We’d ask each other questions. We’d discuss, debate. It wasn’t about agreeing all the time. One question would always lead to another. Once, we stayed up all night talking. Jake was different from anyone else I’d ever met. Our bond was unique. Is unique. I still think that.

“Trying to restore a critical balance,” Jake says. “That’s something we’ve been thinking about at work lately. Critical balance is needed in everything. I was thinking about this in bed the other night. Everything is so… delicate. Take something like metabolic alkalosis — a very slight rise in the pH level of tissue, which has to do with a small dip in hydrogen concentration. It’s just… it’s all extremely subtle. It’s only one example, and yet it’s vital. There are so many things like this. Everything is impossibly fragile.”

“A lot of things are, yeah,” I say. Like everything I’ve been thinking about.

“Some days, a current runs through me. There’s an energy in me. And you. It’s something worth being aware of. Does this make any sense? Sorry, I’m rambling.”

I have my feet out of my shoes and they’re up, resting on the dashboard in front of me. I’m leaning back in my seat. I feel like I could doze off. It’s the rhythm of the wheels on the road, the movement. Driving has this anesthetic effect on me.

“What do you mean by the current?” I ask, closing my eyes.

“Just how it feels. You and me,” he says. “The singular velocity of flow.”

“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DEPRESSED or anything?” I ask.

We’ve just made what felt like a significant turn. We’d been on the same road for a while. We turned at a stop sign, not at a light. Left. There are no traffic lights out here.

“Sorry, that was out of the blue. I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

For years, my life has been flat. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I’ve never admitted it before. I’m not depressed, I don’t think. That’s not what I’m saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It’s been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.

“Sometimes, I feel sad for no apparent reason,” I say. “Does this happen to you?”

“Not particularly, I don’t think,” he says. “I used to worry when I was kid.”

“Worry?”

“Yeah, like I would worry about insignificant things. Some people, strangers, might worry me. I had trouble sleeping. I’d get stomachaches.”

“How old were you then?”

“Young. Maybe eight, nine. When it would get bad, my mom would make what she called ‘kids tea,’ which was pretty much all milk and sugar, and we’d sit and talk.”

“About what?”

“Usually about what I’d been worried about.”

“Do you remember anything specific?”

“I never worried about dying, but I did worry about people in my family dying. Mostly it was abstract fears. For a while I worried one of my limbs might fall off.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we had sheep at our farm, lambs. A day or two after a lamb was born, Dad would put special rubber bands around its tail. They’re very tight, enough to stop the blood flow. After a few days, the tail would just fall off. It’s not painful for the lambs; they don’t even know what’s happening.

“Every so often, as a kid, I’d be out in the fields and I’d find a severed lamb tail. I started to wonder if the same thing could happen to me. What if the sleeves on a shirt or a pair of socks were slightly too tight? And what if I slept with my socks on and I woke up in the middle of the night and my foot had fallen off? It made me worry, too, about what’s important. Like, why isn’t the tail an important part of the lamb? How much of you can fall off before something important is lost? Right?”

“I can see how that might be unnerving.”

“Sorry. That was a very long answer to your question. So to answer, I would say that no, I’m not depressed.”

“But sad?”

“Sure.”

“Why is that — how is that different?”

“Depression is a serious illness. It’s physically painful, debilitating. And you can’t just decide to get over it in the same way you can’t just decide to get over cancer. Sadness is a normal human condition, no different from happiness. You wouldn’t think of happiness as an illness. Sadness and happiness need each other. To exist, each relies on the other, is what I mean.”

“It seems like more people, if not depressed, are unhappy these days. Would you agree?”

“I’m not sure I’d say that. It does seem like there’s more opportunity to reflect on sadness and feelings of inadequacy, and also a pressure to be happy all the time. Which is impossible.”

“That’s what I mean. We live in a sad time, which doesn’t make sense to me. Why is that? Are there more sad people around now than there used to be?”

“There are many around the university, students and profs whose biggest concern each day — and I’m not exaggerating — is how to burn the proper number of calories for their specific body type based on diet and amount of strenuous exercise. Think about that in the context of human history. Talk about sad.

“There’s something about modernity and what we value now. Our shift in morality. Is there a general lack of compassion? Of interest in others? In connections? It’s all related. How are we supposed to achieve a feeling of significance and purpose without feeling a link to something bigger than our own lives? The more I think about it, the more it seems happiness and fulfillment rely on the presence of others, even just one other. The same way sadness requires happiness, and vice versa. Alone is…”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“There’s an old example that gets used in first-year philosophy. It’s about context. It goes like this: Todd has a small plant in his room with red leaves. He decides he doesn’t like the look of it and wants his plant to look like the other plants in his house. So he very carefully paints each leaf green. After the paint dries, you can’t tell that the plant has been painted. It just looks green. Are you with me?”

“Yeah.”

“The next day he gets a call from his friend. She’s a plant biologist and asks if he has a green plant she can borrow to do some tests on. He says no. The next day, another friend, this time an artist, calls to ask if he has a green plant she can use as a model for a new painting. He says yes. He’s asked the same question twice and gives opposite answers, and each time he’s being honest.”

“I see what you mean.”

Another turn, this time at a four-way stop.

“It seems to me that in the context of life and existing and people and relationships and work, being sad is one correct answer. It’s truthful. Both are right answers. The more we tell ourselves that we should always be happy, that happiness is an end in itself, the worse it gets. And by the way, this isn’t a very original thought or anything. You know I’m not trying to be brilliant right now, right? We’re just talking.”

“We’re communicating,” I say. “We’re thinking.”

IT’S MY PHONE THAT BREAKS the silence, ringing from my bag. Again.

“Sorry,” I say, reaching down to retrieve it. It’s my number on the screen. “My friend again.”

“Maybe you should answer it this time.”

“I really don’t feel like talking. She’ll stop calling eventually. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

I put the phone in my bag but pick it up again when it beeps. Two new messages. This time, I’m glad the volume of the radio is high. I don’t want Jake to hear the messages. But the Caller’s not talking in the first message. It’s just sounds, noises, running water. In the second, it’s more running water and I can hear him walking, footsteps, and what sounds like hinges, a door closing. It’s him. It has to be.

“Anything important?” Jake asks.

“No.” I hope to sound casual, but I can feel my face growing warmer.

I’m going to have to deal with this when we get back, tell someone, anyone, about the Caller. But now, if I do say something to Jake, I’ll also have to tell him I’ve been lying. It can’t keep going on. Not like this. Not anymore. The running water continues. I’m not sure why he’s doing this to me.

“Really? Not important? Two calls, not even texts, in a row. Seems important, no?”

“People are dramatic sometimes,” I say. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow. My phone’s about to die anyway.”

I THINK JAKE’S LAST GIRLFRIEND was a grad student in another department. I’ve seen her around. She’s cute: athletic, with blond hair. A runner. He definitely dated her. He says they’re still friends. Not close friends. They don’t hang out. But he said they had coffee a week before we met at the pub. I probably sound jealous. I’m not. I’m curious. I’m also not a runner.

It’s weird, but I’d like to talk to her. I’d like to sit down with a pot of tea and ask her about Jake. I’d like to know why they started dating. What was it about him that attracted her? I’d like to know why it didn’t last. Did she end things, or did Jake? If it was her, for how long was she thinking of ending things? Doesn’t this seem like a reasonable idea, chatting with a new partner’s ex?

I’ve asked him about her a few times. He’s coy. He doesn’t say much. He just says their relationship wasn’t long or very serious. That’s why it’s her I have to talk to. To hear her side.

We’re alone in a car in the middle of nowhere. Now seems as good a time as any.

“So, how did it end?” I say. “With your last girlfriend, I mean.”

“It never really started,” he says. “It was minor and temporary.”

“But you didn’t start out thinking that.”

“It didn’t start out any more serious than when it ended.”

“Why didn’t it last?”

“It wasn’t real.”

“How do you know?”

“You always know,” he says.

“But how do we know when a relationship becomes real?”

“Are you asking in general, or about that relationship specifically?”

“That one.”

“There was no dependency. Dependency equates to seriousness.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” I said. “What about real? How do you know when something’s real?”

“What is real?” he says. “It’s real when there are stakes, when something’s on the line.”

For a while we don’t say anything.

“Do you remember me telling you about the woman who lives across the street?” I ask.

I think we must be getting close to the farm. Jake hasn’t confirmed we are, but we’ve been driving for a while. Must be close to two hours.

“Who?”

“The older woman from across the street. Remember?”

“I think so, yeah,” he says noncommittally.

“She was saying how she and her husband have stopped sleeping together.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t mean not having sex. I mean have stopped sleeping in the same bed at night. They both decided a good night’s sleep trumps any benefits to sleeping in the same bed. They want their own sleeping space. They don’t want to hear another person snoring or feel them turn over. She said her husband’s a pretty vicious snorer.”

I find this very sad.

“It seems reasonable that if one person is disruptive, sleeping alone would be an option.”

“You think? We spend almost half our lives asleep.”

“That could be an argument for why it’s best to find the optimal sleeping situation. It’s an option, that’s all I’m saying.”

“But you’re not just sleeping. You’re aware of the other person.”

“You are just sleeping,” he insists.

“You’re never just sleeping,” I say. “Not even when you’re asleep.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Jake signals and makes a left turn. This new road is smaller. It’s definitely not a main road. This is a back road.

“Aren’t you aware of me when we’re sleeping?”

“I mean, I don’t know. I’m asleep.”

“I’m aware of you,” I say.

TWO NIGHTS AGO, I COULDN’T sleep. Yet again. I’ve been thinking too much for weeks. Jake slept over for the third night in a row. I actually like sleeping in bed with someone. Sleeping beside someone. Jake was sound asleep, not snoring, but his breathing was unmistakably close. Right there.

I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else and maybe even me. Isn’t that why we commit to another? It’s not for sex. If it were for sex, we wouldn’t marry one person. We’d just keep finding new partners. We commit for many reasons, I know, but the more I think about it, the more I think long-term relationships are for getting to know someone. I want someone to know me, really know me, almost like that person could get into my head. What would that feel like? To have access, to know what it’s like in someone else’s head. To rely on someone else, have him rely on you. That’s not a biological connection like the one between parents and children. This kind of relationship would be chosen. It would be something cooler, harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetics.

I think that’s it. Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible.

I like that.

In bed that night, I looked over at Jake. He was so stable, babyish. He looked smaller. Stress and tension hide during sleep. He never grinds his teeth. His eyelids don’t flutter. He usually sleeps so soundly. He looks like a different person when he sleeps.

During the day, when Jake’s awake, there’s always an underlying intensity, an energy that simmers. He has these little movements, twitches and ticks.

But isn’t being alone closer to the truest version of ourselves, when we’re not linked to another, not diluted by their presence and judgments? We form relationships with others, friends, family. That’s fine. Those relationships don’t bind the way love does. We can still have lovers, short-term. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves. How can we know ourselves without this solitude? And not just when we sleep.

It’s probably not going to work out with Jake. I’m probably going to end it. What’s unrealistic, I think, is the number of people who attempt an enduring, committed relationship, who believe it will work long-term. Jake isn’t a bad guy. He’s perfectly fine. Even considering the data that shows the majority of marriages don’t last, people still think marriage is the normal human state. Most people want to get married. Is there anything else that people do in such huge numbers, with such a terrible success rate?

Jake once told me that he keeps a photograph of himself at his desk in his lab. He says it’s the only photograph he keeps there. It’s of him when he was five. He had curly blond hair and chubby cheeks. How did he ever have chubby cheeks? He told me he likes the photo because it’s him, yet physically, he’s completely different now from the child he sees in the photo. He doesn’t just mean he looks different but that every cell captured in the image has died, been shed and replaced by new cells. In the present, he is literally a different person. Where’s the consistency? How is he still aware of being that younger age if he’s physically completely different? He would say something about all those proteins.

Our physical structures, like a relationship, change and repeat, tire and wilt, age and deplete. We get sick and better, or sick and worse. We don’t know when, or how, or why. We just carry on.

Is it better to be paired up or alone?

Three nights ago, with Jake fully comatose, I waited for the light to start peeking through the blinds. On the nights I can’t sleep, like that one, like so many recently, I wish I could just turn my mind off like a lamp. I wish I had a shutdown command like my computer. I hadn’t looked at the clock in a while. I lay there, thinking, wishing I was asleep like everyone else.

“Almost there,” says Jake. “We’re five minutes away.”

I sit up and stretch my arms over my head. I yawn. “Felt like a quick trip,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“Thanks for coming,” he says. Then, inexplicably, “And you also know things are real when they can be lost.”