I don’t know how to answer this, so I don’t. I wasn’t expecting to get quite so heavy this quickly, I thought that we’d have more time just casually catching up on small talk, but I should know my mom. She cuts through the bullshit quickly and gets to the route of the problem. It really has been a while; I shouldn’t be shocked.
“No, Mom, for the time being I don’t have a deadline. I’m taking a time out.”
“Time out? Is everything okay?” She sits opposite me, her gaze piercing right through me.
“Everything is fine, it’s just… I don’t know. I need a break, that’s all.”
“Okay…” she drawls slowly. “Well, as long as everything is alright, that’s all that I care about. I mean, you are still enjoying it, aren’t you? You aren’t… unhappy?”
I can’t lie to Mom and she knows it. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel like me…”
“Hmmm, you don’t look like you. I think I said that when you first came in.”
“Yes, so I need to work out what I want.” I toss my hands in the air in frustration. “That’s all. Work out where my life is going and what the future holds.”
“Right, I see.” Mom takes a second to ponder this. “So, you want more?”
“I don’t know what I want. That’s the problem.”
“You don’t have to do the band, if that’s what you’re worried about. I know it might not be the easiest thing to pull away from the only life that you’ve known as an adult, but if it isn’t making you happy…”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“I’m not trying to make it sound easy, I’m just letting you know that you have options.”
She always knows just when to leave a conversation, to give me just enough to think about, then she exits and allows me to make my own mind up. I can tell that’s what she’s trying to do here, but the topic of conversation that she switches to is too sudden, too shocking. It completely blows me away.
“So, I saw Addie the other day. Do you remember her? The girl you were seeing for a while in college…”
Seeing? Fucking seeing. I know Mom means well but the way that she dismisses the most intense relationship of my life is like someone has stabbed a knife right into me. There’s an actual pain in my chest. A wheezing in my lungs. I don’t know if Mom can tell though because she carries on as if it’s nothing.
“She didn’t see me, of course. She’s always so busy these days, walking about at the speed of light with her head down, but she is still very beautiful. It’s a shame that things didn’t work out…”
“Mom, I can’t…” I have to shut her down, I can’t listen to this. Especially knowing what I’m about to do with the whole dating agency madness. “I can’t think about Addie right now. Or anyone from my past.”
“I don’t know anyone else from your past, you know. She’s the only one I ever met. I see the other girls that you are… going on dates with in the papers and on television. Sometimes my friends from the hairdressers tell me what they’ve seen online, but I never meet any of them.”
“Hmmm, yeah. Well they aren’t really girlfriends though. Some of them I barely know, I’m just standing with them at the time the press arrives to take a few pictures.”
“Right, but Addie was a girlfriend, right?” She sips her drink, trying to look innocent. “I wonder if you’ll bump into her while you’re here.”
A heat rises in my cheeks. I don’t know if I can contain it. A big part of me wants to just tell Mom to get her advice on the crazy plan but I know I can’t. One because I can just imagine what she might say, and two because I may still change my mind.
“It would be nice if you bumped into her, I’d like to see her again,” Mom continues. “She was good for you. I remember how happy you were when you were with her. Much more like you…”
“Hmm yeah, well that didn’t quite… workout, did it?” Even at the time, I didn’t tell her the truth.
“That’s a shame, isn’t it?”
Her words twist in my gut, I almost want to throw up. It’s time to end this conversation now, so I make my excuses and head up to the bedroom which is a shrine to who I once was before I left, before I got famous. It’s just another dagger in the chest, and a reminder that I really need to figure this shit out.
7
ADDISON
“…So, that’s the funniest thing about accounting. It’s a much wilder life than people think.”
Max chuckles to himself while twisting his sweaty hands around and around. It’s clear that he’s nervous, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s probably worse really because I haven’t got a damn clue what to say to him. I know this might be my first ever date so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but this seems like a bad one.