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Twenty-Five

T he Mexican desert falls away beneath the plane.

I’m glued to the window, reliving the trip.

There’s the highway we drove down. The ocean we surfed in.

I pretend that I see every pit stop in the handful of minutes I have as the plane climbs and Cabo drops away beneath us.

I even try to pick out Berta. She’s the one thing I know for sure is down there somewhere, but then we’re up above the clouds and Cabo is just a memory.

I wallow in my misery as the stewardess offers drinks and pretzels, and by the time we’re back in US airspace, I’m a rage monster.

I cry when we touch down in San Francisco.

Six hours after takeoff, when I open my front door, I’ve shifted into failure analysis.

I poured my heart into my algorithm, and then I made the choice to stop hating Ozzy and love him instead.

I’m one part stupid, one part sad, and all parts mad, but my ire is directed mostly at myself for believing Ozzy was different.

That I was different when I was with him.

And so I feed my feelings with Whole Foods deliveries and hide in my loft, wearing my oldest sweatpants and the T-shirt with the spaghetti stain on my boob.

I fail to shower, refuse to adult. I should have stuck to hating Ozzy.

On day three Rosie comes over to help me look for a new place.

Somewhere between San Francisco and Cabo, we became friends, and staying put is not an option.

I love my loft, but I have to move on. For twenty delusional minutes, I debate converting my life savings into a van and driving across the US and into Canada.

The boho chic of Instagram van life is soothing. There are pillows .

It’s Rosie who points out that van life means interacting with strangers on an almost daily basis. Peeing in Walmart bathrooms. Downsizing my things. She suggests I consider remote work instead. I don’t want to live in a van permanently, but maybe I’m not quite so stuck in a rut as I was before.

In the end, I do move, but only across the Bay.

We find me a tiny chocolate box of an urban farmhouse in Berkeley.

It looks like it belongs in France and not in California.

The second floor is reached from a set of stairs so steep they make the Mayan pyramids look flat.

When I stand at the kitchen sink, I can stretch out my arms and the touch the French doors that lead outside.

The front yard is a riotous jungle of flowers.

Best yet, I can (just barely) afford it, and the neighborhood’s safe, if colorful.

People in Berkeley have plenty of room for another quirky neighbor.

Two weeks after my ignominious return from Cabo, I start over.

I hire a moving service to pack me up and move me out while I hit up a home goods store for more pillows, because you can never have too many.

I don’t look to my right when I close the door to my loft for the last time.

That’s no man’s land. Taboo. I’ve nuked that neighbor from my memories.

Rosie, being more practical, has blocked Ozzy’s number on my phone and subscribed me to a pricey service that promises to scrub all traces of me from the internet. She’s as optimistic as ever.

After my first night back in San Francisco, I temporarily relocated to an Airbnb.

An old Victorian not too far from my old condo so I could send Rosie to pick up more clothes or to water my succulents when my phone revealed that Ozzy was safely away.

Once Rosie defaces his dry cleaning with hospital-grade antiseptic when his delivery service makes the mistake of hanging it on his door handle.

“An Armani suit!” She is gleeful. “Take that, cocksucker!”

Ozzy. In a suit?

Who is this stranger?

In the past, I’ve shrugged off breakups.

Since I mostly just hook up, the ends weren’t particularly notable.

I’d stop texting or he would, and then we’d mutually ghost each other.

I have no frame of reference for what I’m feeling, other than the certainty that it sucks.

The moping is seemingly endless, and then I angrily tear up when I find the jar of seashells we gathered in a moment of environmental carelessness or the panda bear alebrije that he bought outside Tijuana.

Each time I accidentally spot them, I reset the Ozzy clock.

It has been zero days since I last thought about him.

Rosie, who has invited herself to live on my sofa as my “personal honor guard,” suggests we bury my “intimate souvenirs” in a giant time capsule in the redwood forest north of San Francisco.

When I point out that this is a national park and digging is highly discouraged, she proposes the municipal dump as an alternate site. I promise to think on it.

Fifteen days after I return, I officially find out that I did not, in fact, get the job of chief play officer.

The email is polite but brief: Bob thanks me for my service but they’ve decided to go in another direction!

He wishes me the best in my endeavors! The enthusiastic punctuation makes it seem unlikely that he wrote the message himself.

I am not shocked, although his sheepish follow-up message the next day is a surprise.

TripFriendz, he messages, would like to offer me a consolation prize: would I care to return in an engineer role?

Since they have a happiness engineer-in-training, an innovation engineer, and a chief fantasy engineer (Enzo’s new job title and a reflection of his highly aspirational sales targets), they suggest I join them as their new intergalactic engineer.

I’m immediately sure that Ozzy made them say this, and I angry-cry some more.

I turn them down.

I move into the new house, which comes with a bonus feral mama cat.

Rosie paints flowers on my nails to match the ones in my new garden, and we watch Stargate .

We both applaud so loudly that mama cat startles when the hero chooses to spend the rest of his life on an alien planet with his hookup, because when it’s true love, it’s true love.

“You are not going to believe this.” Rosie hands me a flower that looks like an orange pom-pom stuck on top of some salad greens. According to the app I just downloaded onto my phone, it’s a marigold, and if the world comes to an end, I can eat it.

My social skills may be rusty, but even I know that’s my cue to say, “What?”

Rosie pops another baby flower out of its black nursery pot. She’s stopped by to say hello and has brought “flowers with roots because otherwise I’m just delivering corpses.” I appreciate the thought, although her estimation of my gardening skills is wildly overinflated.

“So you know how TripFriendz launched yesterday?”

“Yes.” I was sent a complimentary T-shirt, a bumper sticker, and a matchbox van that did not look the slightest bit like Berta, who is one and only.

Rosie takes a minute to pat me on the shoulder. Apparently, the expression on my face is dire.

“They found a bug!”

From her expression, I deduce that the bug was not of the cockroach-tarantula-insect variety. “Bugs are not uncommon, Rosie.”

She should know. She’s introduced more than her fair share of them to TripFriendz’s product.

“Yeah, but they found this one when eight hundred people got matched to the same trip with the same person.”

Ouch. That is bad.

“Look, I know you don’t want to talk about Ozzy and your road trip, but I thought you should know that it wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven. Also, it wasn’t your fault. Or mine. Noah, however, would like me to pass on his résumé in case you know of any openings.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” Rosie shakes her head. “His database query skills need remedial work. He literally wrote a query that matches everyone to Ozzy.”

I debate whether or not I want to ask follow-up questions. I decide I don’t. “He’ll be a very busy man,” I say, and leave it at that.

I don’t need to know how TripFriendz’s new chief play officer is working out.

We manhandle some very patient marigolds into the ground while Rosie tries to keep her thoughts to herself. She almost makes it to the end of the flat before she caves.

“Ozzy never started, you know.”

I do not know.

“Maybe you should talk to him?”

“I don’t think that would be wise.”

I dig a hole to China and stab the final marigold in. I may water it with my bitterness. It turns out that it’s much harder to stop loving someone than it is to stop hating him.

Rosie’s not finished, though. “He came by the office, looking for you. He sent fruit baskets. They might have been bribes to whisper his name to you. I’m not sure.” She taps her lips with her fingers, redistributing leftover potting soil to her chin. “We ate them and left him hanging.”

I guess he thought I’d take the consolation prize.

I fooled him. Instead of accepting TripFriendz’s offer of gainful employment, I decided to work freelance while I turn Crystal Cluster Cosmos into an app that I can sell online.

Rosie’s promised to be my first employee.

She also offered to drop out of Stanford in order to guarantee our success, but I made her promise to graduate before she comes onboard full-time in nine months or so.

Speaking of Stanford, she has to take off to catch the BART, the train, and the bus back to the apartment she shares with two other software interns.

She narrates her journey back, and I answer each of her texts. That I miss talking with someone scares me, especially since I’ve done so well in my fortress of solitude. I didn’t realize how big an Ozzy-sized hole could be, and I don’t know what I’ll do if it doesn’t fill in with time.