Word Count
by Madeline Garfinkle
I write my cheating ex-boyfriend an email. Subject line: I WROTE ABOUT YOU. Body message: but I am an unpublished author. Signed: yours truly. I think this is fine. I think this is good. He deserves to know the word count of his damage which is, if you can believe it, 25,000 words. So what? I had a lot to say.
My cheating ex-boyfriend does not respond right away, given, it is an email. There is a different social contract with emails than, let’s say, a text message, which I also send him, which reads: I SENT YOU AN EMAIL. It has been twelve minutes and he has responded to neither, given, it is 8am on a Saturday morning. He might have the question of: why were you writing about me at 8am on a Saturday morning?, to which I might say: I wasn’t. I was writing about you at 10pm on a Friday night. And what might he have to say about that? Same thing. Except it’s not. He was always saying same thing, to things that were not the same thing. Perhaps this means he’s lazy, perhaps this means he has a small brain. I loved him anyway.
What did I write about him? The usual garbage. The way we met. The way we fucked. The way we stopped fucking even while we were still fucking. The way he fucked someone else. The end. It’s not a happy story, I should warn him. This probably won’t surprise him, given, he was there for all of it.
What’s the point in writing something you’ve already lived? he might ask. I might say: to understand why I lived it. Did it work? No. I don’t understand why I’ve lived a lot of things, I don’t understand even when I try very hard to. Does anyone? I’m not sure which one of us would ask this. Probably me. I was always asking the sad questions he never had the patience or brainpower to contemplate. Sometimes this made me jealous of him.
When did we break up? A year ago. How long did we date? Two years. This means, technically, I have a whole other year to get over him. There’s that idea that it takes you as long to get over someone as it did for you to date them. Or is it half of the time? Whatever. Remember this the next time you accidentally fall in love with someone. How long do you want to spend getting over this person? Because sometimes life is only that.
Here were his parting words: I just don’t love you anymore. I just don’t want to be with you anymore. And you might think: Ouch. No way. You can’t just take two years of love and promises away in an instant like you’re sucking it out with a vacuum cleaner, can you?
You can. In fact, people end relationships this way all the time. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with it; the brute honesty, the matter-of-fact-ness. Perhaps there’s something to be respected, even admired, in this terse route of departure. But why does it feel like it should be illegal?
If you want a reason why I needed to let him know that I wrote about him, perhaps because it gives my words a heartbeat, a set of lungs, a sign of life. If he were to not know, that would mean no one knew. Except me. And my laptop. Which would mean that, if I die tomorrow, and my laptop simultaneously crashes as I die—if, in essence, we die together—this work would be completely erased from the world. It would be as if it never existed. As if the energy and time I spent writing it has vanished from whatever layer of the Earth these sorts of things float around in. In telling my cheating ex-boyfriend, there is a record of me announcing it exists. Perhaps there was a healthier way to do this. Let’s say, putting up signs on the trees outside my apartment: I have written 25,000 words about my cheating ex-boyfriend. I am an unpublished author, so if you’d like to read it: email me. I could have also posted it to Facebook. I could have also called my mom. Or my grandma who, if you can believe it, is still alive. I don’t have a problem with the fact that she is still alive, it’s just confusing.
But no. I wanted him, the lying, cheating ex-boyfriend of mine to be the only witness to my unpublished work. This is not about male approval, I swear. This is about revenge. Sort of, maybe. This is about saying: you caused 25,000 words of damage and now that I have counted them, I am no longer holding them. Which means, I think, I am over him. Sort of, maybe. Remember: I still have another year. Perhaps I should have clarified that it’s not about him in the body message of the email, or the text message, or in the 25,000 words, just so that his ego doesn’t get carried away. Perhaps I should have said: don’t get carried away. This isn’t really about you, even if it is about you. It is about me. It is about me. Sort of, maybe, I swear. Perhaps I will clarify this once he responds, which he does, around 9:36am:
Glad to hear you’re writing again. Hope all is well.
But I don’t respond, and I don’t clarify. Because sometimes heartbreak is only that: 10 words to your 25,000.
Madeline Garfinkle is a writer from Miami, Florida. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was nominated for the Henfield Prize in Fiction. Her work is forthcoming in the Washington Square Review.
