Elyse Maltin – “Infinity Ways I Tried to Save Us”
“Infinity Ways I Tried to Save Us” takes us on a rollercoaster. Its non-linear structure cleverly corresponds with its theme, mimicking the ups and downs, highs and lows of the toxic relationship that it depicts. The author starts off by sweeping us off our feet and then carries us with through a series of poignant, lyrical fragments into a cohesive, timeless story about surviving abuse, finding courage, and choosing oneself.
– Contest Judge Ayelet Tsabari
Infinity Ways I Tried To Save Us
The truth is I might have stayed longer if you’d given me a reason.
November 20, 2019
I always know I’m falling in love by the music that’s on repeat in my head, and Elvis’s “Fools Rush In” is already on heavy rotation by the time I’m applying makeup for our second date. I don’t consider us fools, at least not yet, but it is true that I can’t help myself. I’m already becoming addicted to the sound of my name in your mouth; it’s so much sweeter than the warnings of my more reasonable friends. We meet outside the restaurant, and I kiss you reverently under the moonlit falling snow. It feels like home, and I’m already falling, wise men be damned.
0 rings
I didn’t really wear rings before you, but now that it’s gone, my finger feels bare. I’d gotten used to a diamond there, to its sparkle, to worrying it around and around while I wondered whether I would ever have a wedding band to match it.
November 16, 2019
You arrive at our first date wearing a feather-adorned fedora, which is a lot. Also, you’re blonde—definitely not my type. But you have piercing blue eyes, and I have the exhilarating experience of being matched by a man—truly intellectually matched—for perhaps the first time in my life. Also, you want children; I want them badly enough that I’ve already been trying on my own. Afterward, I’m not sure about you, at least until the texting marathon begins.
Would I have kept shrinking myself if you hadn’t forced my hand?
February 29, 2020
I’m sitting in my therapist’s small, second-floor office up a steep flight of stairs. She’s in one corner, I’m in the other; the room is small enough that we feel neither too near nor too far. A train rattles by the small window to my right, but I barely hear it. I’m so distracted these days anyhow, having slept poorly beside your restless body for months. Right now, all I’m aware of is the sensation of lightness in a season of dark weight. She has, after only four sessions together, woken me up. The part of me that I’ve been ignoring in favour of hope knows now that there’s nothing I can do to save us, despite how hard I’ve tried. I can only save myself. I’m done. I’m finally—finally?! it seems so strange to say that, given how short a time it’s been—done.
1 token of my love
About a decade before I meet you, in a tiny, tucked-away cafe in downtown Toronto that doubled as a small home goods shop, I noticed a bowl full of smooth, flat, wooden hearts, roughly 5cm wide, by the cash. In that moment, I decided that that token was what I would give to the person with whom I would spend my life when I found them. I bought one, and held onto it through several moves and even more relationships. Sometimes, I would find it in the back of a drawer while I was in a relationship and think, “maybe, but not yet”; those maybes never turned into a “yes.” But I know, even before I decide I’m ready to give it to you, that this heart is yours.
Thank God you didn’t get me pregnant.
5.75
Three and a half weeks after our first date, I waltz into Spencer Diamonds to get my ring finger sized. The sales associate asks me how long we’ve been “looking”. He means for a ring; I’ve been looking for you for what feels like my entire adult life. “Oh, just a few weeks,” I reply breezily. I can’t admit we’ve just met, even to a stranger.
1 very low bar
“It’s not like I’m hitting you,” you say as we talk while we unpack your belongings. You moved in without our ever really discussing it. This is the bar? I think. It’s as close as you’ve come to acknowledging the way you’ve been treating me.
11 days
There are 11 days between the day we break up and the day the world turns on its axis with the WHO’s pronouncement of a global pandemic I assume will only last a few weeks. I no longer wanted your touch, but to go from that to starvation is still a shock to the system.
An imaginary future date
There’s an alternate timeline in which you write to me, apologizing. You’re seeing a new therapist, I imagine you telling me (not the one who clearly couldn’t draw the truth out of you then). You see now how you laid your pain at my feet, strapped it to my back, adding weight with each cutting word, interrupted night, dismissal of my hurt. This will, of course, never happen. I imagine it only so I can feel myself vindicated. I’m only human, after all.
November 17, 2020
On our first date, I tease you about how little sleep you get, so the next morning, you text me “7.5”—just the number, no context. Answering my “?”, you tell me that’s how many hours you slept last night. I congratulate you, adding that I hadn’t meant for you to report back, and you reply, “so it wasn’t just a phenomenally transparent way to say hello?”. This launches a daily ritual of you sending me a number—a riddle to do with us—and me guessing its meaning, starting with “animal, vegetable, or mineral?”. I begin waking with a smile in anticipation.
March 3, 2020
The day after you leave, I walk back into my now empty-feeling condo and my entire being floods with a rush of relief. So much spaciousness to the square foot without your things, without your angst there to crowd my own. That night, I starfish in my bed and begin the long journey of reckoning with choosing myself.
7 diamonds
We choose the ring together, lying in the rumpled sheets of our king-size hotel bed during our first road trip three and a half weeks after meeting each other. It’s a round, lab-made solitaire garnished by three tiny gems on each side, set in a thin rose gold band, and it is evidence: My time has come.
When you told me past partners had accused you of being controlling, I accepted your having shared this as evidence that you’d changed.
3rd session
You can’t handle someone who won’t be controlled; the harder you try, the more I resist. Our therapist calls it a push/pull dynamic—the more you reach, the more I pull away. But it is a deeper knowing: you aren’t reaching. You’re clenching.
January 10, 2020 (morning)
The morning of the day you’re (unbeknownst to me) about to propose, for the first time since the day after we met, you don’t text me a number. Crestfallen, I sleepily walk out of our bedroom to find a piece of paper torn from your notepad on the coffee table. It simply reads “55”. When I text you and ask, you say I’m not allowed to guess, that I will find out tonight. I suspect, but don’t want to get too cocky and end up like the Elle Woods to your Warner.
8/15 signs
Later, on the pharmacy counter, I see a postcard about emotional abuse. “If you are experiencing any of these in your relationship, you’re not alone. We’re here to help,” it reads. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.
January 10, 2020 (evening)
We walk into the enclosed back patio of the restaurant. The faces of our friends and loved ones are glowing, lit by the twinkling lights strung along the ceiling. My heart is hammering so hard that it feels like it is drowning out the sounds of their voices. My brother is holding up a phone; later I find out he has my parents there, on FaceTime. My face is flush with anticipation. I knew this moment was coming, but now that it is here, my consciousness is hovering a few feet outside my corporeal form. I turn to you, trembling with nerves at my side. You tell the story of the note you left me this morning, with the mysterious number 55—the number of days since we met. You get down on one knee and ask me. “Yes” I answer, breathlessly, “a thousand times yes”. You slide the ring onto my finger.
If that was emotional abuse, then how did I let you do that to me?
3rd date
Sitting in the warmly lit, cozy restaurant waiting for our tapas, you pound the table to emphasize your point. You call the naturopath I depend on for most of my care a snake oil salesman; “IF IT WORKED, THEY’D CALL IT MEDICINE,” you loudly pronounce. Afterward, I am proud of myself for making it through the “disagreement” calmly and respectfully.
How red would the flags have needed to be for me to see beyond my delirious happiness at having been chosen?
How many?
Room 403
During our post-first-date texting marathon, we discover that we lived in the same residence room in McGill’s Molson Hall, years apart. Among other “signs”, we giddily consider this fate.
6th session
Our therapist did a decent job of balancing our perspectives, at least for a while. In this final session, I feel all but forsaken. I wonder afterward: Was she walking on eggshells with you to and avoid you hurting yourself, or hurting me? She did, after all, ask if you had any intentions of harming yourself.
2 / 2 / 2
We smugly hashtag the post #couplegoals. In it, we are cuddled on the couch in periwinkle sherpa fleece pants and slippers, each holding our own pint of ice cream. We caption it: “When you’ve had a rough week and Muttonhead has a sale on muppet fleece sweatpants, you buy matching pairs and curl up on the couch with ice cream.” A friend comments, “I might throw up from the cheese if I wasn’t so happy for you”.
The truth is I didn’t let you do anything. I believed in our love, fiercely.
I thought I could turn you back into the Dr. Jekyll I met, if I just tried hard enough.
January 15, 2020
You’re sitting on the couch in your blue bathrobe when you get the call. I watch you nod, respond, hear what the doctor says, face crumpling. You hang up and tell me: The baby we’d hoped we could make together won’t be as simple an endeavour as we first thought. There are no blinds on the window, and the sun is streaming through, but it seems like we are shrouded in darkness now. Your fear, your disappointment, your ego crumbling are almost so palpable I can taste them.
1st IKEA trip
We’re immensely proud of ourselves after our first joint IKEA expedition. We not only make it out alive, we laugh. We love each other more. We pick curtains.
53 days
There were almost as many days from the day we met to the day you proposed as there are from the day you propose to the day you hand me back that wooden heart, sliding it across out therapist’s orange couch at our final session. The near symmetry seems poetic.
What would have happened had we been isolated together in those early days? I shudder at the thought.
I changed the locks when you left just in case.
December 7, 2019
After we’ve stuffed ourselves with my mother’s brisket and latkes, and filled ourselves to the brim with wine, we gather around the living room to sing. As the revelry dies down, you pick up my dad’s acoustic and start plucking; we all swoon. You’d already passed this first test of meeting my parents and their oldest friends, but this is the icing on the romantic cake. Next, you sit down at the piano and play a 12-bar blues riff. My mom, already in love with you from everything I told her before we walked in the door and more than a little drunk, looks at me and says, “don’t fuck this up.”
3 double-spaced pages
I start with “Fuck you for…” and keep writing. My anger, bottled up for so long, spills out of me like molten lava.
3 months, 14 years ago
Slowly, you begin to unravel at the seams. You tell me you don’t want me telling my friends I love them; you don’t want me hanging around with my “performatively polyamorous” friends; you don’t want me hugging my ex—a woman who is now my close friend, whom I dated briefly, long ago. There are so many things you don’t want me to do, but one thing you still do: marry you.
3 weeks out
You slip in at some point that you ended your previous nine-year relationship three weeks before we met. You realized you wanted kids, but that you didn’t want them with her. “I’m so lucky to have met me as soon as you did,” you say.
4 wedding venues visited
Standing at dusk on a cold January eve, on the patio a few feet away from where we would get married if we choose the Berkeley Fieldhouse, I look at you and shed a tear for how much I want this to work, how much I want to be married (to you).
1 recycled diamond
This one, I buy myself: a tiny, recycled diamond recessed in a thin rose gold band (after all, my taste in jewelry hasn’t changed, even if my taste in/for men has). It is a symbol: I choose myself.