You, the Ocean, and Me

Marcus: You remember that, don’t you, Marie? The way the rain fell in sheets, drenching us as we walked through the streets. You were wearing heels and you swore you were going to fall, but I swore I’d catch you if you did.

[Marie closes her eyes, the scarf clutched to her chest. She remembers. She feels a raindrop sliding down her nose.]

Marcus: We both fell that day, though. That’s how it turned out.

That night, Ivy makes herself pasta for dinner and drenches it with parmesan cheese. Then she heats up a bowl of ice cream in the microwave and eats the soup with a spoon. The cold weather is really starting to get to her. Even with the fireplace roaring a few feet away from her, she still feels cold all over, especially in her toes and fingertips and nose. Ice cream bowl put away in the sink, Ivy runs herself a scalding hot bath. Once it’s full, she strips down and climbs in as quickly as she can.

Because the house is small, the bathroom and bedroom are separated by only half a wall. From the bathtub, Ivy can see into the bedroom, where the half-dozen blankets that will have to keep her warm tonight are layered on top of the oversize king bed. When she turns her head, she can see out the window, across the moors to the cliffs, where, down below, the beach threatens to meet you if you fall. At least, that is what Ivy would be able to see during the daytime. Right now, it’s pitch black outside (not even the stars are visible), so Ivy imagines all of that, and when she’s done, she imagines Heathcliff haunting the moors, threatening to make her as miserable as he.

Heathcliff and Ivy’s Marcus are polar opposites in many ways, Ivy supposes, but they do have a few things in common. They’re devoted to the one they love to the point of madness and death, respectively. They haunt the place they lived once they’re gone. And they’re both creepy.

Ivy hadn’t originally intended for Marcus’s role in Marie’s story to be so sinister, so spooky, but the more she thinks about the play and doesn’t write anything, the creepier he becomes. It’s dangerous, Ivy knows, to romanticize what happens after a breakup. Thanks to books like Wuthering Heights and dozens of films, Ivy expected that she’d spend the months after her breakup with Joshua wanting him back. She expected to spend every night lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering whether or not she should’ve stuck with him. She expected that every time she’d see a couple in public, she’d envy them for having what she couldn’t keep. And she expected Joshua to come running back to her, leaving her message after message begging her to take him back, that he was sorry, that it was one mistake and he never meant for it to happen.

But none of that occurred. All Ivy felt once Joshua was gone was relief. And then she started to wonder if she wasn’t doing the breakup right. She was sad, of course, that Joshua was gone, and she missed him–or, not him so much as what he symbolized, the comfort of having somebody there to count on, to cuddle with, to squash spiders for her. She missed the companionship, the partnership, the sense of security that came with knowing that somebody would be there for her tomorrow and the next day and any day months and years after that.

That didn’t drive her to eat ice cream in her pajamas, though. It didn’t drive her to skip showering for a week as she enveloped herself in self-pity and cried in the bathtub. And it most certainly didn’t change who she was.

“I don’t suppose you’ve forgiven me by now,” Joshua had said when he rang her two weeks after the breakup. She’d been surprised to hear from him, but curious, too, and that was mostly why she didn’t hang up.

“I don’t know why that matters to you,” Ivy had answered. She’d been sitting at her mother’s kitchen table when her mobile rang, but she took the phone out onto the porch and leaned on the railing, looking at the garden. Inside, her mum was washing dishes. “You cheated on me, remember?”

She heard Joshua sigh. He was always very good at sighing, at communicating wordlessly just how exasperated he was with her. “I just–”

“You don’t get to feel that way,” Ivy said, cutting him off. It was then that she felt for the first time how angry she was, how different this anger was from any other anger she’d ever felt previously. This anger went deeper, and it would last longer. “It’s not my job to forgive you just so you feel better about yourself, Joshua. You did a shit thing, so you should feel shitty about it.”

Though Ivy hasn’t written it into the play, she knows that Marie and Marcus broke up once, back when they were still in uni. It was an amicable breakup, as amicable as a breakup could be, really. They were having a stressful semester and Marie was throwing herself into her role in the drama department’s production of The Glass Menagerie, and Marcus was feeling neglected. They decided they needed some time apart to pursue their individual ventures.

It didn’t last, though, the breakup. They got back together just as summer came around, in time for Marie to be Marcus’s date to his sister’s wedding. At the wedding, Marcus’s family was so happy to see them together, and they embraced Marie like they’d known her forever. Marie caught the bouquet at the reception.

“Bullshit,” Ivy says to herself now. The water in the tub has cooled to room temperature and goosebumps pop up on her shoulders. “Fucking bullshit.”

She can practically hear Joshua’s response in her mind: They’re your characters. If they’re bullshit it’s your fault.