He didn't text back.
We'd had one of those dates that felt like a whole movie. Coffee in DUMBO, then walking, then that thing where you both know you're just extending the day so it doesn't end. And then. Silence. Two days of it.
So on Wednesday I did the dramatic thing. I walked the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk, from the DUMBO side, going the wrong direction into Manhattan like a woman in the third act who has decided something.
Here's what I've decided about waiting for a text. It shrinks you. You become a smaller version of yourself, huddled around your phone like it's a fire, refreshing, reading old messages for clues like they're scripture. My friends do it. I do it. We are all detectives of our own heartbreak.
The Brooklyn Bridge at that hour is impossibly crowded and impossibly beautiful and completely indifferent to my situation. Tourists everywhere. A guy playing 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' on a speaker, I swear to God, and I nearly sat down on the pedestrian planks and lost it entirely because if you know that film you know it is a movie about loving someone anyway.
Kal ho naa ho. Tomorrow may or may not come.
I thought about my nani, who married a man she'd met twice and made it a whole life. And here I am unraveling over a boy who can't manage a thumbs-up.
By the time I hit the Manhattan side my legs hurt and my heart had loosened its grip. Not because I stopped caring. Because I remembered I am a person who walks the Brooklyn Bridge alone at dusk and finds it gorgeous. That person doesn't need to be chosen to be whole.
He still hasn't texted. I'm okay. Mostly.
Walk the long way home. The view is better than the wait.
Love,