Junot Diaz: This Is How You Lose Her

A month later the law student sends you an invitation to her wedding in Kenya. There’s a foto and the two of them are dressed in what you assume is traditional Kenyan jumpoffs. She looks very thin, and she’s wearing a lot of makeup. You expect a note, some mention of what you did for her, but there is nothing. Even the address was typed on a computer.

Maybe it’s a mistake, you say.

It wasn’t a mistake, Arlenny assures you.

Elvis tears the invite up, throws it out the truck window. Fuck that bitch. Fuck all bitches.

You manage to save a tiny piece of the foto. It’s of her hand.

You work harder than you’ve ever worked at everything — the teaching, your physical therapy, your regular therapy, your reading, your walking. You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn’t come.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?

There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a matter of willpower: The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.

One night that winter you go out with all the boys to a ghetto-ass Latin club in Mattapan Square. Murder-fucking-pan. Outside it’s close to zero, but inside it’s so hot that everybody’s stripped down to their T-shirts and the funk is as thick as a fro. There’s a girl who keeps bumping into you. You say to her Pero mi amor, ya. And she says: Ya yourself. She’s Dominican and lithe and super tall. I could never date anyone as short as you, she informs you very early on in your conversations. But she gives you her number at the end of the night. All evening, Elvis sits at the bar quietly, drinking shot after shot of Rémy. The week before, he took a quick solo trip to the DR, a ghost recon. Didn’t tell you about it until after. He tried looking for the mom and Elvis Jr. but they had moved and no one knew where they were. None of the numbers he had for her worked. I hope they turn up, he says.

I hope so, too.

You take the longest walks. Every ten minutes you drop and do squats or push-ups. It’s not running, but it raises your heart rate, better than nothing. Afterward you are in so much nerve pain that you can barely move.

Some nights you have Neuromancer dreams where you see the ex and the boy and another figure, familiar, waving at you in the distance. Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

And finally, when you feel like you can do so without blowing into burning atoms, you open a folder you have kept hidden under your bed. The Doomsday Book. Copies of all the e-mails and fotos from the cheating days, the ones the ex found and compiled and mailed to you a month after she ended it. Dear Yunior, for your next book. Probably the last time she wrote your name.

You read the whole thing cover to cover (yes, she put covers on it). You are surprised at what a fucking chickenshit coward you are. It kills you to admit it but it’s true. You are astounded by the depths of your mendacity. When you finish the Book a second time you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra. You did the right thing.

She’s right; this would make a killer book, Elvis says. The two of you have been pulled over by a cop and are waiting for Officer Dickhead to finish running your license. Elvis holds up one of the fotos.

She’s Colombian, you say.

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.

You think?

I do.

It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny’s Ph.D. defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex’s name and: The half-life of love is forever .

You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down.

The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don’t want to burn them or give up writing forever.

It’s a start, you say to the room.

That’s about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace — and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.