I ignored his text message.

I didn’t know how to answer such a simple, yet overwhelming question. The way Maya acted, the intensity of her anger, it all had me quite convinced that there was something between her and Jeremy. So, No– I wasn’t okay.

I had let my guard down and now I was hurting. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t eat and I developed a habit of bursting into tears at random times. I went through my days consumed with the situation. Why couldn’t anything be easy? Why cant things just fall into place? I also began to have a lot of body anxiety because Maya is skinny. I started feeling like I was crazy to think Jeremy would choose me over her, despite my previous discoveries about what he’s attracted to. This went on for three days, until I slowly began to snap out of it. I went to my favorite yoga class, I started putting together extra-cute outfits for work… anything to make me feel better.

Then I got a text message from Jeremy:

“Are you going to Maya’s party on Sat?”

I completely forgot! Maya’s birthday was in two days… this was going to be tough because, despite all the recent confusion surrounding Jeremy, Maya and I are friends! I don’t dislike her at all, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to face a potential repeat of the last time the three of us were together. Somehow between me sending him a text saying I wasn’t sure if I was going, and Jeremy trying to convince me that “we should go”, we ended up making plans for him to come over to my apartment later that night.

My plan was to let him have the floor in the hopes that he would explain what was going on with him and Maya (and him and me for that matter). But that didn’t happen. He talked about everything and nothing… I could feel the frustration brewing inside of me until I blurted out:

“What happened the other night?”

He looked at me blankly.

“Why was Maya so upset?” I continued.

“I don’t know,” he said. “…I was just trying to talk to you.”

I wanted to punch him, but I pressed on.

“She seemed really upset, though…”

“Yeah– I don’t know what her problem was. I was trying to be nice to her, but she seemed like she was in a mood.” And with that, he shrugged and changed the subject.

I didn’t have the energy to steer the conversation back, and doing so would only make me look like a jealous brat, so I let it die. I was sure that my instincts were correct, but since he was going to pretend that he wasn’t involved with her, I’d just have to go along with it.

I was going to have to take things one step at a time and step one would be to toss my body anxiety aside, pull it together and go to Maya’s birthday….