“I’m just not in the headspace for any more heavy stuff right now,” she said, after I told her my husband had left me and a doctor had just diagnosed me with MS.
My best friend of twenty years told me I was too negative. A downer.
For two decades, I was her unpaid, on-call therapist. I was the one who answered the 2 a.m. phone calls about bad dates, bailed her out of trouble, and talked her off countless self-made ledges. My life was the stable ground she stood on while she set fire to her own.
She assumed that service was guaranteed for life. A bottomless well of support she could draw from forever, without ever having to put a single drop back in.
She thought our friendship was a free ride, but she never imagined the day would come when I’d finally hand her the bill—with every last favor and late-night call itemized—due in full, at the exact moment she had nothing left to pay it with.
The Unpaid Bill: The 2:17 A.M. Call
The blue light of my phone is a harsh little ghost in the dark bedroom. It’s 2:17 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Jessica is crying so hard I can hear the wet catch in her throat.
“He just has this… this energy,” she says, the words hiccuping out of her. “And his profile said he was six-one, Karen. Six-one. He was five-ten, tops. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s a lie. The entire foundation is a lie.”
I make a low, sympathetic noise. My husband, Mark, rolls over with the tectonic groan of a man whose sleep has been murdered. He yanks his pillow over his head, a gesture I know as well as my own reflection.
“You deserve someone who’s honest from the very beginning,” I say. My voice is a smooth, practiced murmur. It’s my ‘Jessica voice.’ I’ve been using it since college.
On the other end, 300 miles away, Jessica’s sobs begin to subside, replaced by the hot hiss of indignation. “Exactly! It’s about respect. I give so much, you know? I’m a giver. And to be treated like my time isn’t valuable…”
I glance at the clock. 2:24 a.m. I have a 9 a.m. deadline, editing a technical manual for a company that makes industrial-grade conveyor belts. It’s soul-crushingly dull work, but it pays the bills. It requires a level of detail-oriented focus that is currently being siphoned out of my brain and poured into validating a grown woman’s outrage over a two-inch discrepancy on a dating app. For the third time this month.
A faint tingling starts in my right hand, a pins-and-needles sensation that’s been visiting more frequently lately. I flex my fingers, trying to shake it out. Probably just the way I’m holding the phone.
“He doesn’t see your worth, Jess,” I say, the words on autopilot.
“No,” she agrees, her voice firming up now. “He really doesn’t.” The crisis has been downgraded to a mere injustice. My work here is almost done. The call lasts another nineteen minutes.
A History of Fires
I try to fall back asleep, but my mind is buzzing. It’s like a fluorescent light that won’t stop humming. I keep thinking about the time, maybe ten years ago, when Jessica was desperate for a job at a high-end marketing firm. Her resume was… creative. Her references were a minefield of burned bridges.
She called me in a panic. “They want to speak to my last manager from the gallery. Karen, you know he hated me. He’ll tank me.”
“What do you want me to do, Jess?” I had asked, already knowing the answer.
“Could you just… be her? Just for one call? Her name was Susan Albright. She was British.”
And so I did. I spent an entire afternoon studying YouTube videos of Judi Dench interviews, practicing a posh, clipped accent. I sat by my phone, my heart hammering against my ribs, until the call came. For fifteen minutes, I became Susan Albright, lauding Jessica’s “proactive, out-of-the-box thinking” and “unflappable grace under pressure.” She got the job. She celebrated by taking a trip to Cancun with her new signing bonus. I celebrated by drinking a bottle of Pepto-Bismol to settle my roiling stomach.
She called it our “little caper.” I called it felony-adjacent. That was the dynamic. Her life was a fast-paced adventure movie, and I was her loyal, slightly terrified, behind-the-scenes crew. The one who rigs the explosions and makes sure the hero’s hair looks good. The one no one ever sees.
I roll over and look at Mark. His back is a rigid wall. We haven’t really talked in weeks. Not really. Our conversations have become a series of logistical check-ins about our daughter, Lily, or who’s taking out the recycling. The space between us in this bed feels wider than the 300 miles separating me from Jessica. The tingling in my hand is back.
The Note on the Kitchen Island
I must have drifted off, because the next thing I know, my alarm is chiming. It’s 6:30 a.m. Mark’s side of the bed is empty and cold. That’s not unusual; he often leaves for the gym before I’m up.
I shuffle into the kitchen, my body feeling heavy and used. The house is silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator. My daughter, Lily, is still asleep. She’s sixteen, and her ability to sleep through anything—including her mother’s late-night therapy sessions—is a superpower I deeply envy.
I go to the coffee maker, and that’s when I see it. A single sheet of paper from his legal pad, sitting squarely in the middle of our granite island. It’s weighted down by the salt shaker.
My heart does a strange little stutter-step. His handwriting is neat, clinical.
Karen,
I can’t do this anymore. It’s not one thing, it’s everything. It’s the silence. It’s the feeling that I am a distant second place in my own home. You have spent fifteen years with your energy focused on putting out Jessica’s fires, and there’s never been any left for us. I’m tired of being the quiet, understanding husband.
I’ve gone to stay at my brother’s. I’ll call about Lily later. Don’t call me.
Mark.
I read it twice. Then a third time. The words don’t seem to connect to my brain. It feels like I’m editing someone else’s horrible, badly written story. Second place in my own home. The phrase hangs in the air, glittering and sharp.
The coffee maker finishes its cycle with a final, pathetic gurgle. The kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the end of the world. My first coherent thought is a tidal wave of pure, uncut panic. My second thought, a reflex honed over two decades, is: I have to call Jessica.
The Shadow on the Scan
Two days pass in a blur of hollowed-out shock. I tell Lily that Dad is on a work trip, a lie so thin it’s transparent. She gives me a look that says she’s sixteen, not stupid, but she lets it go. The house is a museum of our life, every object a little artifact of a happiness I hadn’t even realized was gone.
The tingling in my hand has been joined by a strange, buzzing numbness in my left foot. I have an appointment with a neurologist that I made weeks ago, thinking it was a pinched nerve. Now it feels like a cruel joke on top of a catastrophe.
I sit on the crinkly paper of the examination table, my hospital gown gaping at the back. Dr. Evans is a kind-faced woman with tired eyes. She pulls up an image on her computer monitor. It’s a black-and-white scan of a brain. My brain. It’s dotted with small, ghostly white splotches, like someone spilled milk in the cosmos.
“These are what we call lesions,” she says, her voice soft. “They’re areas of inflammation where your immune system has been mistakenly attacking the protective covering on your nerves.”
She says a lot of other words. “Myelin sheath.” “Demyelination.” “Unpredictable.” Then she says the two words that land like stones in my stomach.
“Multiple Sclerosis.”
She hands me a pamphlet. The cover has a picture of a smiling woman hiking up a mountain. It feels like a mockery. My own personal mountain just erupted, burying me in ash.
I drive home, the pamphlet on the passenger seat next to the wedding ring I twisted off my finger an hour ago. My two new realities. An empty house and a body that has declared war on itself.
I sit on my bed, the same spot where I coached Jessica through her dating-app drama just a few nights ago. My turn. It’s my turn to be the one who needs help. I am entitled to this call. I’ve paid for it a thousand times over.
I find her name in my contacts and press the button. It rings once. Twice. Then the ringing stops, and Jessica’s voice, impossibly cheerful and pre-recorded, fills my ear.
“Hey, you’ve reached Jess! Can’t talk, living my best life in the city! You know what to do. Leave a message!” Beep.
Static on the Line: The Three-Hour Delay
I don’t leave a message. I can’t. The chipper command to “leave a message” after she’s announced she’s “living her best life” feels like a slap. I drop the phone onto the duvet as if it’s hot. For a long time, I just sit there, listening to the crushing silence of the house.
Hours crawl by. I hear Lily come home from school, her footsteps heavy on the stairs. She cracks open my door.
“Mom? You okay?”
“Just a headache, sweetie,” I lie, my voice muffled by my pillow. Another lie to add to the pile.
She lingers for a second, then her footsteps retreat. Later, the smell of burnt popcorn wafts up from the kitchen. The sound of some sitcom laughing track echoes faintly. Normal life is trying to happen in the rooms below me, but it can’t get through the door.
My phone buzzes on the bedspread. I grab it with a surge of desperate hope. It’s a text from Jessica.
3:42 PM: OMG so sorry, crazy day! Just seeing your missed call. Is everything ok?
I start to type a reply, my thumbs clumsy. Mark left me. No, too blunt. I have some bad news. No, too dramatic. As I’m trying to formulate the words, the three little dots appear. She’s typing. I wait, my breath held. The dots vanish. Nothing. Ten minutes pass. My phone buzzes again. A new text from her.
3:53 PM: Talk later? Gotta run, grabbing late lunch and mimosas with the girls! TTYL!
Mimosas. The word is so frivolous, so carefree, it feels like a personal insult. I stare at the screen, at the casual dismissal, and a feeling I can’t quite name—cold and heavy—begins to settle deep in my chest. It’s not anger yet. It’s the chilling precursor to it. It’s the realization that the emergency line I thought I had is actually just a party line, and I’m not invited.
Five Minutes for a Marriage
She finally calls me around nine that night. I’m sitting in the dark, watching the headlights of passing cars slice across the living room wall.
“Okay, I have like ten minutes before my show starts,” she says, her voice breathless and fast. “So, spill! What’s up? Your missed call seemed so mysterious.”
I take a breath. The air feels thick, hard to pull in. “Mark left me, Jess.”
There’s a beat of silence on the other end. I can hear the faint sound of a television. “Oh. Wow.” Another pause. “That sucks. I’m sorry.” Then, before I can even begin to unpack the continent of pain contained in those three words, she continues, her tone shifting from cursory sympathy to bright analysis.
“Honestly, Karen? You’re better off. I never told you this, but he was always so… beige. He had no edge. You need someone with a little more spark, you know? This is a good thing! A fresh start!”
I am speechless. She is re-framing the complete implosion of my fifteen-year marriage as a fabulous opportunity for self-improvement, as if my husband leaving was the emotional equivalent of a spa day.
“Anyway,” she says, the topic of my life’s greatest heartbreak apparently exhausted. “I am so glad I have you on the phone, because my new boss is a literal demon from the seventh circle of hell. She had the audacity to say my report was ‘sufficient.’ Not ‘excellent.’ Not even ‘good.’ Sufficient. Can you imagine the passive aggression?”
She launches into a five-minute monologue about her boss, her landlord, and a barista who gave her regular milk instead of almond. I listen, my mind floating somewhere above my body. I feel like an astronaut whose tether has been cut, watching the Earth—my old, familiar life—recede into the distance. She is talking at me, but the connection is gone. There’s nothing but static on the line.
Not in the Headspace
I wait for a pause in her torrent of workplace injustices. It feels like waiting for a gap in traffic to cross a busy highway. Finally, she takes a breath. I see my opening.
“Jess,” I say, cutting in. My voice sounds small and foreign to my own ears. “There’s… there’s something else. Something important.”
“Oh?” she says, the single syllable loaded with impatience.
I grip the phone tighter. My palms are sweating. “I went to the doctor. The tingling in my hand… it’s not a pinched nerve.” I say the words slowly, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “They did an MRI. They found lesions on my brain.”
The silence on the other end is different this time. It’s not thoughtful. It’s heavy, burdened. I hear her let out a long, theatrical sigh, the kind she uses when a waiter brings her the wrong kind of salad dressing.
“Oh, Karen,” she says, and her voice has changed completely. It’s gone from upbeat and self-absorbed to weary and put-upon. “Can we… can we not? Right now?”
I literally have no response to that. My brain short-circuits. Can we not?
She continues, her words tumbling out now, defensive. “It’s just… I’ve had such a stressful, draining week with this new boss, and my apartment stuff, and I’m just… I’m not really in the headspace for any more heavy stuff right now. It’s too much. Let’s just talk about something fun, okay? Tell me about Lily or something.”
Tell me about Lily or something. A polite, conversational request to shove my life-altering illness back into its box so she doesn’t have to look at it. So her evening isn’t spoiled by the ugliness of my reality.
“I have to go,” I whisper, and I hang up the phone before she can reply.
Living Her Best Life
I sit in the dark for what feels like hours. The phrase “not in the headspace” echoes in the silent room. It’s a corporate, wellness-culture phrase, a bloodless way of saying Your pain is inconvenient for me.
I think of the hundreds of hours, thousands probably, I’ve spent in the headspace for her. For her bad dates, her horrible bosses, her credit card debt, her fights with her mother, her existential dread about turning thirty, and then thirty-five, and then forty. My head has been a storage unit for her emotional baggage for twenty years. And the one time I show up with a single, heavy box of my own, I’m told there’s no room at the inn.
Unable to sleep, I mindlessly scroll through my phone, my thumb swiping up, up, up past pictures of other people’s happy, uncomplicated lives. And then I see it.
A new post from Jessica, uploaded twenty minutes ago.
It’s a photo. Her, and two other friends I vaguely recognize, are squeezed into a booth at some trendy, dimly lit bar. They are all laughing, heads thrown back, holding up jewel-toned cocktails in fancy glasses. Jessica is in the middle, her face glowing with happiness. She looks radiant. Unburdened.
The caption is a gut punch.
Needed this night out with my favorite people more than ever! Soaking up all the positive energy and leaving the drama behind. ✨ #GirlsNight #GoodVibesOnly #NoNegativity
I stare at the picture, at the hashtag #NoNegativity. I am the negativity. My divorce, my diagnosis. I am the drama she is leaving behind. My own reflection is a pale, ghostly shape on the dark screen of the phone, and for the first time in our entire friendship, I feel a hot, unfamiliar surge of pure, undiluted rage.
My phone buzzes in my hand, making me jump. A new text message notification lights up the screen. It’s from her.
11:18 PM: OMG you will not BELIEVE what just happened with my landlord. It’s a total nightmare. I need you. Can you call me ASAP?
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