Common Roots

My hands are still shaking as I write this. When I lift my fingers off of the keys they tremble like a Parkinson patient’s or a former alcoholic’s. It’s because I just ran into my ex, ex-addict, ex-heartbreak.

 

I was not at my best.

 

I started the day knowing I needed to use the Internet to get my schoolwork done. After a half an hour of debating little details about which coffee shop to go to in my neighborhood, wi-fi connection, proximity, ambience, I finally decided on the usual one I visit on Saturday and Sunday mornings and set out, hair tied into a scruffy side pony-tail, blond bangs crimped from a bobby pin the night before and pushed to the side. Still in the stages of cold-recovery, I felt like my skin was blotchy and breaking out, my eyes were puffy, and my lungs wheezy and phlegmmy. I had homework to do; I wasn’t thinking about how I looked.

 

To add further to the back-story, I have been worried over finding a new place to live and searching frantically for a place to call home. Earlier in the morning I had looked at two apartments—one, sort of dingy and not that appealing, and the other cute, and friendly. Lots of windows. Top level. Details from the early 1900’s. Beautiful kitchen. Patio. Storage space. Free internet from the coffee shop across the street. A writer’s apartment. And of course, about $300 more than I felt I should be paying each month for rent considering my goal of operation-speedy-loan-payoff.

 

I was ruminating on my budget. Floundering over the details of rent and groceries. Trying to talk myself out of wanting the apartment. I was scolding myself for going out to dinner with friends and buying new pants and shoes for the school year. Time to buckle down, I thought. Time to be serious. Practical.

 

So of course, on this mucus-filled, watery-eyed day, this day of self-discipline and restraint, I step out of my car and see my ex and his new girlfriend sitting at a table on the patio right by the entrance of the coffee shop.

 

He doesn’t look up as I pass by his elbow, his ear, his backwards baseball cap, my leg six inches from their space. I feel my heart drown into the past, lost suddenly below the surface of the earth and trapped instead in a colder, darker space where ex-husbands brush by like the filmy white legs of jellyfish. I crossed the threshold of the coffee shop. I stopped. I can’t do this. I can’t walk past my ex-husband as if he is someone I’ve never met.

 

I went back outside.

 

“Hi, Shawn.”

 

He jumped in his chair and his eyes flashed blue and lit up like he was about to swallow me in his relief. “Kate!” he said. “How are you?”

 

“Good,” I said, as if I were running into someone from class, someone safe, someone I had not spent the last year and a half writing about in my essays. “I saw you and I was just going to walk past but then I thought that would be awkward. How are you?”

 

He said he was fine and smiled at me and then there was an awkward pause during which I nodded at the new girl before saying I had homework to do and heading into the coffee shop.

 

My fingers have stopped shaking but what stays with me is that right after we said hello, while my body was trembling and my heart jumping in alarm, I still felt stable, steady. I felt like me. I felt like I was light years beyond where I had been. Like I had no desire to be with him and like there was very little anger in our meeting. It was almost like he was becoming someone I might just casually say hi to, someone I might even hug, someone safe, someone comfortably located only in my writing and not in my life.

 

And because I am human, I could not help but note the new girlfriend. She was clearly not getting over a cold and throwing her hair into a ponytail. She was done up and darling, pushed up and pretty. I couldn’t help but think that she also looked like she was trying really hard. It looked tiring. It was like looking at myself five years ago.

 

Instead of feeling like the vaguely nervous, overly anxious, unassuming, unaware, and unsure girl I was in my past, I felt like the cool, cognizant, world-traveling writer that I am now. I felt like a woman who is living her own life pursuing her dreams. A woman not afraid to be herself.

 

I’m getting that apartment, I thought, after walking into the coffee shop.

 

I decided not to do the homework first. I decided to write, even though I had other work to do, even when he walked past me to deposit his coffee mug in a dish pan while I wrote about our encounter, and even with shaky fingers, smiling at the white flower ring I sometimes wear on my fourth finger, the one that no longer breaks out in a rash from my wedding ring.

 

It is only just now that I am noticing the irony of where we encountered each other—the coffee shop called Common Roots. Shawn and I have common roots. We shared our past, a trunk where two lives were encased in one. But now we don’t.

 

And I just love these branches that keep taking me towards the sky, so very far away from where I was.