Iain Reid - I'm Thinking of Ending Things

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’Tsleep. 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.”

— The body was found in the closet.

— Really?

— Yeah. A small closet. Big enough to hang shirts and jackets, some boots, not much else. The body was all scrunched up in there. The door was closed.

— It makes me sad. And angry.

— Why not reach out to someone, right? Talk to someone. He had coworkers. It wasn’t like he was working in a place without other people. There were people around all the time.

— I know. It didn’t have to happen this way.

— Of course not.

— Do we know much about his background?

— Not a lot. He was smart, well-read. He knew things. He’d had an earlier career, some sort of academic work, PhD level, I think. That didn’t last, and he ended up here.

— He wasn’t married?

— No, he wasn’t married. No wife. No kids. No one. It’s rare these days to see someone living like that, entirely alone.

It’s a long, slow drive up the farm’s potholed driveway. Trees line both sides. We bump along for about a minute. The gravel and dirt grind under the tires.

The house at the end of the driveway is made of stone. From here, it doesn’t look huge. There’s a wooden, railed deck on one side. We park to the right of the house. There are no other vehicles in sight. Don’t his parents have a car? I can see a light coming from what Jake says is the kitchen. The rest of the house is dark.

There must be a woodstove inside, because the first thing I smell as soon as I step out of the car is smoke. This would have been a pretty place at one time, I imagine, but now it’s a bit run-down. They could use some fresh paint on the windowsills and trim. Much of the porch is rotting. The porch swing is ripped and rusted.

“I don’t want to go in yet,” says Jake. I’ve already taken a few steps toward the house. I stop and turn back. “All that sitting in the car. Let’s take a walk around first.”

“It’s a bit dark, isn’t it? We can’t really see much, can we?”

“At least to get some air, then,” he says. “The stars aren’t out tonight, but on a clear night in summer they’re unbelievable. Three times as bright as in the city. I used to love that. And the clouds. I remember coming out on humid afternoons and the clouds were so massive and soft-looking. I liked how gently they moved across the sky, how different they were from one another. It’s silly, I guess, just watching clouds. I wish we could see them now.”