Page 85 of On the Run
Dear Pitiful,
Simple and easy are two different things, but if you truly love your cat, you’ll fight for her. When you love hard, you’ll fight harder, even when it seems hopeless. I suggest talking to your vet. Also, check out the articles linked below. I’ll be thinking of you. Check back soon.
Love,
Hagatha
* * *
“Tobias, are you even listening?”Jeanette’s disembodied voice came through the phone as I sprawled on my sofa, staring out my ginormous curved window at the city skyline.
That view over Chelsea, which was worth at least a couple million dollars of the apartment’s 3.5-million price tag, looked wrong.
The sky wasn’t blue enough.
Big, blocky buildings littered the horizon where palm trees should have swayed.
Nothing in my cramped apartment smelled like coconut sunscreen or fresh air.
Even the roar of engines and honking cars muted by the thick glass windows jarred me, when a few weeks ago, they’d been my usual evening lullaby.
I’d been back in New York for five days. Not a single appliance, dubiously domesticated cat, or rogue watercraft in the city had tried to murder me in all that time, which was probably for the best since there were no shining-armored knights around to save me, but somehow the lack of death-defying experiences made my days feel flat…
Or, fine, maybe it was the lack of knights.
Either way, nothing about my life worked right anymore. My ultra-plush mattress was hard as a rock when Beale wasn’t holding me, I couldn’t watch movies without wanting to redeem the villains, for all the good that would do, and it was hard to fall asleep and even harder still to wake up. I was getting grocery deliveries of Peanut Butter Party ice cream with such regularity that I’d told Franz the doorman to just give the delivery guys my key when they came through, and I swore I could feel the cholesterol hardening my arteries in real time.
In short, I was unhappy to report that breakups—even fake breakups of impossible relationships—were no more fun at thirty-five than at nineteen, and in fact, they seemed to get worse as you aged.
Like chicken pox, or whichever pox it was.
At least when I was a teenager, the most reactionary thing I’d done to get over a breakup was to find a rebound hookup. Now I was contemplating far more drastic action, like quitting my job and moving to Malé for real.
Someone needed to call Aunt Hagatha to stage an intervention.
Oh, wait.
“Tobias!”
I sighed and turned toward the ceiling. “Jeanette, precious, my eardrums are perfectly functional,” I informed her. “I gather that you’re displeased with the content of my column today.” I studied my nails in the late-afternoon sunlight. “I’m not sure why. It was thoughtful, responsible advice, and I linked to subject matter experts. My commenters seem to relate to it.”
“Your twenty commenters.”
“Mmhmm.”
“When you usually have hundreds, Tobias. Sometimes over a thousand.”
“What can I tell you?” I sighed again. Sighing was a super-underutilized way of coping with stress. Much like Peanut Butter Party. “Quality’s more important than quantity, darling.”
Jeanette made a noise halfway between a growl and the whistle of a teakettle. “Not. To. Our. Advertisers,” she bit out. “But alright, fine, let’s talk quality. This response is perfectly unoffensive, but it’s trite. ‘When you love hard, you’ll fight harder’? Seriously? I’m almost positive I read that inside a chocolate wrapper. People expect more of Hagatha.”
This was extremely annoying because “When you love hard, you’ll fight harder, even when it seems hopeless”was something Littlejohn had said a few days back on one of our nightlyJeopardy!calls, and I’d actually found it kind of chest-squeezingly profound in the moment… though, come to think of it, hehadbeen gobbling chocolate while we’d chatted, goddamn it.
Next thing you knew, I’d be getting teary-eyed over Hallmark cards. Where would this emotional bullshittery end?
“Been thinkin’ Veronica Hampton might just be the lady for me, Trey,” Littlejohn had said. “She rollerblades like a dream, she’s fair at trivia, and she agreed to be the sexy Scully to my badass Mulder come Halloween. I’m a simple man. I don’t need much more.”
“That’s enough for anyone,” I’d agreed. “Have you made her SpaghettiO Surprise?”
