After Aiden left, every day melted into the next without much differentiation. Nothing seems to matter anymore. There is no reason to get up in the morning. There is no reason to go to bed. I stay up late watching television and I sleep at random times throughout the day. I can’t manage to sleep more than two hours a time, but my body continues to crave some shut-eye so I start to exist in this perpetual state where I’m not fully awake nor fully asleep.

When I am awake, I cry. My eyes get puffy and stay swollen for days. No amount of ice, nor hot or cool teabags takes away the redness. It gets so depressing that after a while, I stop looking at myself in the mirror completely. Why does it matter what I look like? The sight of my uncombed and unwashed hair, a bathrobe that I’ve been living in for close to a week, if not more, and pale pasty skin is not something that I can face.

“Ellie, you have to snap out of it,” Caroline says one day when the sun is shining brightly through my curtains. She comes in and opens them with one violent motion, making me squirm and hide my face under the blankets.

“You haven’t showered or changed your clothes or been outside in days.”

Okay, days is actually good. I thought it was longer.

“Many, many days,” Caroline clarifies. Many, many days do add up to a week or more. This is less good.

“I can’t today.”

“You have to. This is the first sunny day we’ve had in a while and we have to go outside. You need to stretch your legs. Your muscles are probably all atrophied by now.”

Caroline pulls my blankets off me and pulls me up by my arms. I want to protest, but that seems more work than to just go along with her. I let her push me into the bathroom.

“If you don’t strip and get into the shower, I’ll do it for you,” she threatens.

“Can I have some privacy please?”

“No,” she says. “But I will turn around.”

I guess that’s better than nothing. Slowly, I take off my bathrobe and pajamas and socks. My clothes definitely have a distinctively well-worn smell to them. Or is that just me? Perhaps, a shower isn’t such a horrible idea after all. I turn on the water and wait for it to turn warm. When I see the steam rising to the top, I climb in slowly and let it cover me from my head to my toes.

“How does it feel?” Caroline asks. I close my eyes and lose myself in the pleasure. Every pore in my body seems to open up and welcome the refreshment. I lather up the shampoo in my hands and run it through my hair. The shampoo runs down my face and body and I revel in the feeling.

“Really good,” I mumble.

“Told you.”

After I get out of the shower, I wrap myself in a towel and flash Caroline a small smile. It’s not much, but I’m making an effort. That seems to be enough for her.

“I’m tossing all of these clothes into the wash,” she announces, probably half expecting me to protest. But I’m glad they’re going. I’ve been wearing them since the night he told me he doesn’t want to marry me and I can’t stand the sight of them.

“How are you?” I ask. “I’m sorry I’ve been in such a funk and I haven’t been here for you.”

I’m a terrible friend, I know that. But there was literally nothing I could do.

“I’m fine actually. I guess all those days of moping around were good for me.”

“And here you are trying to get me to stop.”

“Wow, a joke?” Caroline says. “I guess you’ll make it through this yet.”

I roll my eyes.

“That’s the thing about time, isn’t it? It keeps going even if you want it to stop. And as it marches on, it starts to take away some of the pain,” Caroline adds.

I know she’s right, but the idea of time healing all things is a foreign concept to me now. I mean, intellectually, of course, I agree. But deep down in my soul, my heart still hurts thinking about Aiden.

---

***

---

An hour later, I’m doing something I didn’t think I could ever do again, eat waffles for breakfast and enjoy them. Caroline makes them and slathers them in maple syrup. Oddly, they are one of the few things that she can make entirely from scratch.

“These are amazing,” I mumble, as I stuff them into my mouth.

“Yes, they’re pretty good, aren’t they?”

We sit there in silence for a few moments enjoying the delicious breakfast. Just when I don’t think I can stomach another bite, the buzzer goes off.

“Who could that be?” I ask, getting up. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand before I press on the intercom button. When I hear her voice, chills run down my back.

“It’s my mom!” I yell, running back to the kitchen. Since I was the one who answered, I couldn’t not let her in. But now I’m freaking out.

“So what?” Caroline asks, clearly not understanding the urgency of the situation.

I only have a few moments before she rides up the elevator and walks over to our door. I glance around the living room and the kitchen. There are things around, but the place doesn’t look that bad. I run into my room. Now, this place is much more of a disaster area.

“Can you get that?” I turn to Caroline when I hear my mom knock on the door. The fact that I kept it locked was not an accident.

While Caroline gets the door, I quickly cram all the clothes and shoes that are coving my floor into the closet. The closet door barely closes but with a little bit of muscle and determination, I manage to get it shut.

“Hey there,” I say. When I give her a warm hug, I see my reflection in the mirror on the wall.

Holy crap!

How could I forget?

Shit!

“Ellie, what’s going on?” my mom asks. “You look….”

She doesn’t finish her sentence because she hasn’t seen me without makeup since high school. But today, the situation is much worse than me just not wearing a full fresh face. I’m freshly showered, but that doesn’t exactly remove evidence of not sleeping and crying my eyes out for days.

“You look awful,” Mom says, shaking her head.

“Gee thanks,” I say.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I wasn’t really feeling like myself for a while,” I say, shrugging. I know that my mom doesn’t really mean anything when she comments on my appearance, but that doesn’t change the fact that it still hurts and makes me feel like crap. It’s also the main reason that I always feel compelled to look perfect when I come over for dinner. Nothing can be off. Everything has to be perfect, otherwise she will make a comment about it and act ‘concerned.’

“Mom, what are you doing here?”

“I had to come see you. I called and texted you a million times and I didn’t hear back. I was getting worried.”

“I’m fine,” I say with a shrug.

“You don’t look fine.”

“She is, Margie,” Caroline says. “She was just going through something.”

“With Aiden?”

“Yes.”

Mom shakes her head and crosses her arms at her chest. “That guy is trouble,” she announces, as if she knows anything about him.

“I thought you would be excited about us being together. I mean, he is somewhat of a celebrity.”

“Do you really think I’m that shallow?”

I shrug again. I didn’t think so, but recently she has changed quite a lot. She has been hanging out with way too many people with apartments on Park Avenue and houses in the Hamptons. And with enough contact with them, things tend to change.

“Listen, you don’t have to worry, okay,” I say after a moment. “We’re not together anymore.”

“What?”

I take a deep breath. This part is so embarrassing. I mean, I just introduced him as my boyfriend and now it’s over. Now, I know why people wait for months or even years to introduce their significant others to their parents. So, you don’t have to go through stuff like this.

“Oh my God!” Mom gasps and grabs my left hand. As soon as I look down, I realize my mistake.

“What is this?”

“It’s nothing,” I say, and hide my hand behind my back. I had put my engagement ring back on last night when I was feeling particularly pitiful and sorry for myself and I had forgotten to take it off.

“This is an engagement ring!”

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Caroline pipes in. If this is her idea of a joke, it’s not funny. I give her a look to shut her up.

“We’re not engaged, okay? I forgot to take this off.”

“But you were engaged. And you didn’t tell me?”

“I was going to, but then things got kind of complicated at dinner.”

Mom shakes her head and paces around the room.

“So, you were engaged when you came over? And you deliberately didn’t wear the ring?”

“Yes, okay? So, what?”

“So, what? I thought that we were close, Ellie. I thought that we had a good mother-daughter bond and then you go and get engaged and don’t even tell me. What the hell?”

I shrug. I don’t really have an answer except that I have no idea what mother-daughter bond she’s talking about. Ever since I became a teenager, we have always had somewhat of a cool relationship. We used to fight a lot, and now that we don’t, we don’t talk much anymore either. She hardly knows anything about me or my life and what she does know, she criticizes. This makes it kind of difficult to share new and potentially dramatic information about my life. Of course, I can’t really go into any of this right now because it will just open a big can of worms that I’m not really equipped to deal with at the moment.

“Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. The conversation at dinner sort of went off the rails and it didn’t seem like the right time. And now…well, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore since we broke up.”

“Was it because of what you wrote in your novel?” Mom asks. She’s well aware of the Page Six article and, knowing her, she probably went out and researched me as a romance writer as well. I didn’t explicitly tell her not to read my books, but I did warn her that they have rather sexually explicit content that she might not want to read (mainly, because the writer is her daughter). Initially, I was pretty certain that she hadn’t read my work. But now with everything that has come out about it? I’m not so sure anymore.

“No, not really. He was really supportive of my writing actually,” I say. It’s hard to explain why exactly we broke up. I hardly understand it myself.