Red Flag – Epilogue – Don’t Be Sorry

You’re going to want to feel sorry for me.

Don’t.

I know that’s an unusual way to begin. Most confessional stories ease you in – a little vulnerability up front, just enough to make you lean forward, just enough to establish that the person telling the story has feelings and therefore deserves your sympathy before they tell you the thing they actually did. It’s a good technique. I know it well. I use it constantly.

But you came here for honesty, so here it is: I am not a sympathetic character. I am the person your friend described when she said there’s something off about her and you defended me because I’d been charming enough at dinner that the warning didn’t stick. I am the one who will look you in the eye and tell you exactly what you want to hear and mean approximately forty percent of it. I am the woman three of the last four men I dated would describe, if they were being accurate instead of kind, as the reason they went to therapy.

I know this.

That’s the part that should bother you more than the behavior itself.

I’m sitting at a bar right now. Friday night, dim lighting, the kind of place that exists in every city where the drinks are honest and nobody asks questions. There’s a couple across from me – early thirties, the specific body language of two people who are still in the part where they can’t stop touching each other. Her hand keeps finding his arm. He keeps leaning in when she talks, like whatever she’s saying is the most interesting thing in the room.

I’ve been watching them for twenty minutes.

Not with longing. I want to be precise about that – I am not sitting here watching them with the ache of a woman who wants what they have. I am watching them the way a mechanic watches an engine: with the specific, professional interest of someone who understands exactly how it works and exactly what will eventually go wrong.

Something will go wrong. It always does. Maybe he’ll get lazy and she’ll get lonely. Maybe she’ll find out he’s a different person in private than he is in public. Maybe they’ll just quietly suffocate each other the way people do when they’ve been together long enough that the familiarity becomes its own kind of trap.

Or maybe she’s like me. Maybe she’s sitting there letting him lean in and thinking, in the part of herself that runs underneath the performance of being someone’s girlfriend, about the other conversation she’s going to have later tonight. The other option she’s keeping warm, just in case.

I hope not. Genuinely.

One of us at this bar is enough.

My name is Kate. I’m twenty-eight years old. I’m a designer at a small IT company and I live with my mother and I have never once in my adult life been in a relationship I didn’t either destroy or prepare to destroy before the other person could do it first.

This is the story of how I became that person.

Not how I stopped. I didn’t stop.

This is just the story of how it started, and what I did with it, and where I am now, sitting at a bar on Friday watching someone else’s love story with the detached professional interest of a woman who knows exactly what she is.

The couple just kissed.

I ordered another drink.

Let’s begin.