My Person

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Chapter one

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn't working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood. I'd filled my cart with all the ingredients I would need to make meat loaf, which I made every Sunday when we'd host these parties-our Sunday Loaf parties. It was Margot's favorite meal, my mother's recipe, a staple in our home. It was my way of saying: Yes, I want this to end, but look at how much I still care. It took eight minutes to walk through the Metro parking lot and back to the apartment. I wasn't thinking of anything. Our friendship did not flash before me like some kind of dead-wife montage in a film. I did not experience some kind of come-to-Jesus moment in which the Earth cracked open. There was no sudden realization. It was all just cool.

Outside, it was dark. Women wore workout sets while walking their dogs, goldendoodles in their creamy apricot coats. Really, I wasn't thinking of anything critically, except dodging dog shit. The air was stiff and shifted my mood; I became melancholic, felt even a little exhilarated with anticipation. We'd been hosting these dinner parties since I moved in, not this past August, but the August the year before. It began with a housewarming. Weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I made the meat loaf again for the exact same group of people, and like that, we'd created a tradition.

Before all this, when I had floated the idea of us living together, our friends expressed concerns about our compatibility. She's so type A, they said. And you've just sold your next book, don't writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf parties had evolved into a celebration of our love. Margot and I always color-coordinated our dresses-merlot or crimson in the fall, shades of blue in the winter, pastels in the spring. We decorated the apartment according to the season and collaborated on the menu. But the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both agreed this was proof that we really were in this for the long run. "This" being our friendship, our community, the fine china we displayed in the wooden cabinet behind the dining table.

I was aiming for a clean separation without any complications. I couldn't figure out an exact reason for wanting to leave. This was causing me a lot of stress, because Margot was the kind of person who'd need an exact reason. There was a void I couldn't quite explain and this voice in my head that kept saying: It's time to go. But I couldn't say that to Margot because I did not want to be therapized. She'd gently present that I was just "being a poet" then suggest I needed a meaningful vacation, somewhere like Delhi. I'd find myself crazed with a sudden loss of faculties and agree with her, and if I wasn't careful, I might even end up on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, paid for by Margot. A gift she'd then hold over me for the rest of our lives.

I did not write poetry anymore. It had not paid me enough to feed myself, so I'd turned to fiction. I was trying to write a second novel that my agent sold a few weeks before I moved in with Margot. At the time of acquisition, I had a finished first draft. Then, when I moved in, something about the draft suddenly wasn't working, so I deleted everything and convinced my editor to pause on the edits, assuring her that I'd have a fresh manuscript by winter. That deadline was a year ago and still I had nothing. They had to push the pub date and remove the book from the catalog, which didn't really mean anything to me because I did not understand what a catalog was. But I knew that I was in hot water. After I missed my deadline, I rarely answered my editor's emails or calls. The advance, the awards, the being-recognized-at-Toronto-indie-bookstores-it was just distracting me from the real work. Not that I didn't appreciate the exposure, but I desired a more secluded life. I thought I could just write a little book and resume my little life of being, for example, someone's person. Because I did desire that-intimacy, joy. And I no longer knew if Margot was it for me, or if we were one of those magical accidents that leave you saying: fuck.

Here's everything I knew about Marguerite on a superficial level: She was white, for starters. We called her Margot because she told us to. It was a self-appointed nickname that turned into an identity. Margot because she was blonde and lean with brown eyes. Margot because her hair had recently been cut into a straight bob, her face was shaped like an upside-down triangle. Margot because it suited her. Made her sound serious, a little cunty. She had wide hips, which was a point of agreement for her, said her hips were made for birthing, called them love handles, as in "love knobs," thought they made her look like a woman who would have an easy time bringing life into the world.

Margot was supposed to be a stay-at-home mother by now. Instead, she was a social media specialist for a luxury bridal shop, where she felt crazy constantly witnessing other people's happiness. Crazy on Margot looked like desperation. It gave her some kind of edge. I had a thing for a woman with some kick to her. My mother was an extreme version of such a woman. As for Margot, she was the kind to wear Lululemon exclusively. She had a fat ass and ate lettuce frequently. She walked around with a Yeti mug and preferred to speak directly into her Apple Watch as opposed to just typing out a text. It was easy to correctly categorize her as a woman who lived in Liberty Village, but to be fair, so did I.

Margot's big internal conflict was that she was failing at convincing her boyfriend to put a baby in her. The boyfriend was named Ryan. I paid exactly no mind to him whatsoever, unless he came up in conversation with Margot. The thing was: He showed no signs of wanting what she wanted. Children, for example, were a nonstarter for him. Marriage was capitalism set on fire. This was at the root of all their problems, however, and in the year of my and Margot's joint cohabitation, this became my problem too. Her job was light work, so she had all day to obsess over her uterus, the amount of mucus she discharged between cycles, her chances of getting pregnant after thirty. I understood that she was going through a lot. It didn't feel right to leave someone worse off than I had found them.

Except that, as Eli had recently pointed out, I found Margot twenty-two years ago. Surely, he had said during one of our late-night phone calls, there's room for negotiation, maybe you can redefine the terms of your friendship. I didn't know what he meant by that, and I didn't ask. Eli was Margot's cousin. Yes, there had been a time in childhood when I was undeniably in love with him. He was into books and so cool, had taught Margot and me how to hit a bong, and whenever we were alone together, there was this electricity that raptured me. And yes, Margot had explicitly asked me not to fuck her cousin, so I'd spent my life working overtime to keep those thoughts out of my head. And then one day they were just gone.

Eli was in finance, like all the men in Margot's family. He had this big, logical, disciplined brain that made him act like an older brother to us both. Similar to the rest of their relatives, he had an all-American look. He was clean-shaven, blond, brown-eyed too. Thin, rosy lips. He checked in on me regularly, treated me the way he treated Margot. I could have been anyone, I understood that. His kindness wasn't about me, it was just his nature. I was the impulsive one, Margot was the dramatic one, and Eli was the warmth. He was the calm. Older by only a year but he knew, almost professionally, how to pull us back. He did not call as frequently as he used to. He was getting married. I supported that. It was just that, without his constant interference, I could not shake the feeling that something felt off.

Not that our survival depended on Eli-it would be stupid to pretend that our roles were not predetermined. Nothing about my life felt like a choice anymore. It was like I had fallen into writing and fallen into a sensitive roommate situation and fallen into a specific kind of body-Afro, artist, atheist-and regardless of how extraordinary these things seemed at times, all I felt, really, was the fall. So no, I did not know the exact reasons I was leaving Margot. I supposed it was a combination of things, mainly the length of time. Things rust. They deteriorate. This theory could apply to relationships too. We were eight, then twelve, then eighteen, then twenty-five, et cetera. It didn't even matter. All I knew was that, for once, I was standing still, firm in my decision.


I got home from Metro around 10 o’clock I played with the keys outside our door. The hallway was dark. It had this green carpet that smelled of air freshener. I felt both excited and humiliated about what I was going to do. Margot and I lived in an open-concept apartment that was basically just one gigantic room with a clean island and a sleek velvet sectional. It was not uncommon for me to arrive home to find Margot in a bathrobe with some kind of face mask on-whatever was trending at the time, clay or sheet, Korean or Indian-with a big bowl of popcorn, a bottle of wine and two glasses. I slowed my breathing and placed my ear to the door. I heard nothing. Which meant she had the TV on pause while she scrolled through her Instagram feed, likely overanalyzing her posts from the bridal shop. I opened the door.

"Hey." Right away, her singsong voice.

"Hi," I said back.

I stepped into the foyer, the kitchen. Margot glanced in my direction for the first time, as if to say: You're home. I made a face, as if to say: Sure looks like it. I was being cold and she could sense it. From the unchanged expression on her face, I knew that she had accepted aloofness as one of my little quirks. She'd often tell me I had a tendency to shut down in response to gestures of intimacy but that she'd given me a pass because this quality of mine didn't seem fixable. I disagreed with her. What she perceived as me shutting down was actually me surrendering to fatigue, but at some point I stopped trying to get her to understand that. She'd respond to this, my aloofness/fatigue, by reminding me that she loved me, which was okay, fine, because I loved her too. I just didn't like her anymore. It had taken me this long to realize.

Margot got up from the sectional. I was trying not to look her in the eyes. I placed the bags down to get out of my boots. She walked over, grabbed the groceries, and took them to the kitchen, commenting on everything I bought. The strawberries looked "so fresh," and the yellow onions were "much better than white ones," and coconut water had "natural electrolytes." We were standing in between the island and the stove. Margot was talking a lot, but I was distracted by the faucet. It had been leaking for a couple of days. There were several reminders in my Notes app to call someone to fix it-Eli maybe or a professional of some sort. It was making this sound like glop, glop, glop.

Margot began recounting her day with impressive specificity. She was generally a prude, but with me, nothing was off-limits. Leaning on the island, she told me her diva cup didn't fill up anymore. This made her feel like less of a woman. In fact, she wanted to know if not producing enough period blood meant she wouldn't make enough "food" to properly feed a fetus. I didn't think that was scientifically sound, but I had gotten tired of challenging her on that. Right away, I was put back in the awkward position of faking interest. Saying, Oh, and, I don't know, and, Sounds really tough.

"You're making meat loaf tomorrow?" Her voice, again, was drawn out and high-pitched.

"We don't call it Sunday Loaf for fun."

"Yes, we do." She gave a little laugh. "We literally call it that for fun."

"I guess asking me what I'm making when I make the same thing every time we host these parties is a little redundant, don't you think?"

She asked if everything was all right, that I'd been hot and cold all month, pulling away and being weird. I asked her to expand. She told me I seemed low energy. I said nothing, just nodded. I was moving around the kitchen, still putting things away. There were some dishes on the counter. A cereal bowl. A spoon. A mug. I placed them in the dishwasher. And though only a minute ago I had it all figured out, that moment had passed. I was withering. A familiar feeling, a heart palpitation, was flaring up again, "panic outburst," Margot had been calling them, the latest condition she'd diagnosed me with, linking it to that one mention of my novel in the New York Times. It wasn't negative or anything like that. It was just a small nod to my book in a review about someone else's novel, but I did not see the correlation. Margot had printed the review anyway, highlighted my name and pinned it to the fridge. She walked around the kitchen island and stood on the other side of me. Quietly, I told her I needed space. She began asking me a series of questions:

1. Is it your deadline? They're made to be broken, so fuck that, it's not worth your mental, babe, call your agent or editor or whatever and say you need more time-

2. Is it Eli? Tomorrow doesn't have to be about his engagement. If that feels like too much pressure, we can order Chinese, you don't have to cook-

3. Is it me? Have I offended you-god, just tell me what I've done wrong this time-