They Could Have Been Yours

Abstract

They Could Have Been Yours Joy Baglio (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Trn Long (Pexels) [End Page 92] It's 8 am on a Monday, and I'm curled in bed, eating cereal from a plastic bowl and browsing the Site, indulging a secret, bitter part of myself that likes to keep tabs on the past. I'm used to seeing every type of announcement, but there's something about J's engagement post, something I hadn't expected, that pricks me like a tack. Perhaps it's that no one wants to see a former lover happily engaged, especially not first thing in the morning, or maybe it's the constant commenting of mutual friends, continually pushing the post to the top of the feed. He has a beard now and longish hair; still attractive, but in a cusp-of-middle-age kind of way. He's wearing angular sunglasses and grinning, arms around a petite, rabbit-faced brunette, the ring on her finger thrust into the foreground like a small glittery moon. Of course, I don't care that much, but it irks me just a little, just enough to text my sister. She'd once [End Page 93] written him a scathing email, defending me during the final fallout, though now she responds quickly, as she does with all drama, unimpressed: Let it go. I dump the remains of my cereal in the sink, troubled that this small sliver of Past has managed to faze me, and head out to work. ________ I'm a lawyer at a top firm in the city. On my lunch break, I check the Site just to see how many "likes" J's post has tallied, and I don't believe what I find: T, a dancer with whom I'd had something complicated and illicit, is (strangely) also getting married. I feel the tack prick harder than it did this morning, because with T there was something abyss-like that might have swallowed me had he not left me first. You're not gonna believe this, I text my sister. T too. T what? Engaged. Stop, she texts. ________ I know it's a dangerous spiral—obsession, memory, regret, logging on more and more—but I'm eager to check on both posts, to torture myself again, to see the announcements, mute and beaming with their growing trains of "Congrats!" and "So happy for you!" and "Gorgeous couple!" On the morning of the next day, while still in bed, unready to face the world, I'm thrown yet again: N, a coworker from my former law firm, whom I dated in the tempest of my first legal battle, who once told me that if it were going to be anyone it would be me, has popped the question to a smiling, round-faced woman in large glasses on the Great Wall of China. And I'm staggered to see that under N's post in the feed, L, whom I met at a bartending class in Chelsea the same fall I quit art and applied to law school, has announced his engagement to a folk musician he met on an Ayahuasca trip in the Peruvian jungle. At work, I tell several coworkers, "Like a third of my exes are suddenly engaged." One looks up from the copy machine, laughs. "That's what happens." "It's life," says another, a girl of unbesmirched modesty who, despite this, has a voice like a stone in your shoe and is engaged herself. Then, without looking up from her computer, "Just block them." Her desk borders mine, and I've spent the last week noticing all the details of her ring, which, since I'm to her left, I see quite frequently. [End Page 94] When I'm home, I arm myself with a pint of Jack Daniels that I swig right out of the bottle, sit on the sofa, and log on. I will block each of them as permanently as I can, wipe each swiftly from my news feeds, though I'm not prepared for what I find: The engagements of the first three must have been...