Page 67 of Finding Jack
But the recording cut off before he finished. He also wasn’t online anymore.
That was it, no follow up video to expand on what he’d meant to say before it cut out.
I mulled the message and replayed it a few more times, but I didn’t know what to say to him. “Give me your heavy things”? To what end? I’d played out that conversation to its logical conclusion where one or both of us upended our lives to gamble on a relationship that didn’t have a deep enough foundation to support the emotional kind of weight Jack was hinting at.
And honestly, that was all on him. He wanted us to keep it at a level where we didn’t dig too deep in the way you have to when you’re building a strong foundation.
Also, if I made one more stupid building analogy, I was going to find the tallest one in San Francisco and push myself off it. Enough, already. Enough.
I set down my phone again. I would not be reading management articles. I would not be crossing anything off my to-do list. I would have to buy Hailey more coffee instead. She had a lot of chasing after me ahead of her because the second I slowed down, I would dwell on Jack. And I didn’t want to do that anymore.
At work, there were two types of inefficiency: the kind that came from not working smart and the kind that happened when you didn’t work at all. And when I got caught up too much in worrying about Jack, I got nothing done.
That wasn’t me. That wasn’t okay. And that wasn’t going to happen anymore.
I attacked work again, examining any sections of my schedule that looked like they were unstructured enough to give me time to brood. Or sulk. Or whatever happened when I thought too hard about Jack. Then I stuffed them full of more work.
My new task list was a meditation, like the lists I made in my head at night to force out all the intrusive thoughts that tried to keep me awake. I’d done it for years, growing each list until I could get all the way from A to Z in a category before moving on to a new list. When I was trying to name a vegetable for every letter of the alphabet, I got too hung up on H to focus on any stress trying to creep into my brain and wake it back up.
When I had a solid week structured that allowed no head space for Jack, I poked my head out of my office door and smiled at Hailey. “I’ll stop doing your work.”
“Yeah, right.” She held out her hand. “Should I go load myself up at the café now?”
I shook my head. “I mean it. I figured out a schedule for me that involves doing none of your work.”
She clasped her hands and mouthed a “thank you” to the ceiling like we were in the cathedral of Our Lady of Administrative Assistant Sorrows.
It was a good first step toward imposing order on my emotional chaos. Of course, it didn’t solve the problem of what to do when Jack intruded on my thoughts during non-work hours. I set up a strict policy of only checking my phone once an hour for alerts and removed all my social media apps until I could break the habit of checking his feeds.
Unfortunately, my mind still wandered his direction during any of my unstructured time and the urge to break all my protocols would grow stronger.
Is this what addicts felt like?
No, that was stupid. As best as I could understand, real addiction was a painful, debilitating illness. Trying not to think about Jack was more like…
Oh. It was exactly like the time when I’d gone to my friend’s church camp when we were thirteen, and I got poison oak on my leg. The camp nurse told me not to scratch because it would make it worse, but in the endless hours between midnight and dawn, nothing could have convinced me that scratching wasn’t exactly the cure I needed. So I scratched. And ended up spreading it over more of myself.
Jack was emotional poison oak. It wouldn’t kill me, but this situation would only make me more miserable the more I poked at it. That meant drowning out the itch when I wasn’t at work too.
If I found myself wondering what Jack was doing at the same moment, I spent time cleaning out old messages in my email folders. By the fourth day, I was already digging back to 2014. And that was after filtering thousands of emails. Based on how often I had to distract myself, biologists could conclude that wondering what Jack was doing was a reflex as instinctive as breathing.
If I caught myself reaching for the phone to see what he’d posted on Twitter, I immediately picked a spot in the house to reorganize instead, which is what Ranée found me doing on Friday afternoon when she walked in from work and called hello.
“Hi.” I had my head inside one of our lower cupboards while I hunted for a container lid.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I stayed in the cupboard, still sifting through the plastic in the farthest reaches of it, but I waved my other hand behind me, brandishing a medium sized round plastic container. “I’m solving the Tupperware problem.”
“We have a problem?”
“Yes. We have almost twice as many lids as containers and somehow only half of them still fit. I’m purging. We’re going to get on top of this thing once and for all.”
“Wow. I feel so safe with a hero like you policing the cabinets of San Francisco.”
I backed out and turned to face her, settling with my back against the cupboard and a pile of plastic in different colors and sizes in front of me. I rummaged through it. “You laugh, but you have no idea how satisfying this is.” I plucked one of the lids out and snapped it on the container in my hand. “Look. Chaos,” I pointed at the pile, “and order.” I waved the newly sealed container at her.
She pointed from the pile—“Sad,” to me. “Sadder.”
