Second Place: My Girlfriend

 The last time I saw my girlfriend, she was a few seconds behind. 

 Her face froze mid-sentence, her mouth poised around the w-sound. Her locs were longer than they were three months ago–they covered her eyes now, which she loved but knew I hated. The tattoos I’d seen sketched on her iPad were now all over her body–a spider crawling up her abdomen, vines coiled around her collarbone, anime characters battling on her forearm. Then the connection caught up on our Instagram video call and my phone screen was alive again, her stupid gap-toothed grin taking up its entire area.

It’s your broke ass wi-fi.

Bitch, I live in an Ivy League dorm. Whose wi-fi is broke again?

 We smiled, a familiar cadence I couldn’t hear but always felt.

It was October. My birthday. She called without warning. She didn’t say happy birthday right away. Instead, What are you doing today? Which is what you ask someone when you suspect they might be spending their birthday alone, but just want them to confirm it out loud.

Her girlfriend called. She ignored it. Explained she’d get back to it later.

And I thought, ah. Not in a smug, she still loves me way. More like I’ve watched her spill a drink before so I know, instinctively, she won’t clean it up.

I imagined her girlfriend’s phone vibrating on a nightstand somewhere. Imagined her anxiously picking it up, sighing at a caller ID that wasn’t my girlfriend’s, and flipping it face-down. I imagined her waiting. Then feeling stupid for waiting. I remembered knowing, or imagining, on some level, exactly where my girlfriend was and who she was talking to.

I could have hung up. I should have.

But she was telling me about work. 

She had been promoted to crew lead at our local movie theater. She had just learned to drive. She was saving up for something–a car, perhaps. Stability. Just to see her checking account balance sit still instead of jumping off tall things. She called me pretty. Said I must have someone on the roster to take me out for dinner today. She was getting over the flu. She saw my brother a few weeks ago in line for some egregiously violent movie, gave him a full discount. The washed-up teen poet in me thought that moment was worthy of some shitty stanza–I saw a version of you today. I gave it something free.

I told her about the walls in my dorm, how they were so thin I could hear my neighbor’s flu, another having sex, the people in the lounge laughing and laughing like they have never once thought about loneliness. I told her how I had never felt more singular yet plural in my entire life.  

How I flake on plans the way people run yellow lights—half on purpose, half because stopping would feel worse. I cycle through excuses. Busy. Tired. Next time. Sorry. How lately, my body feels like something I’m operating instead of something I live inside. Like I should be signaling before I speak. Like I am moving through the world a half-second behind everyone else, mistiming my exits, hesitating too long at green lights. How people notice. I could tell. How she never did, or if she did, she never minded. She let me move like this, ungraceful, braking too hard, missing turns, circling back. 

How I don’t miss her. But I do miss that. And I don’t know if missing it makes a difference.

She made a noise. Something resulting from sympathy or her flu. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I existed. That’s the worst part, mostly. When she asked if I was happy, I told her the truth. And when she said she missed me, I believed her.

 We talked for forty-three minutes. 

 Then she went back to her girlfriend. And I went back to having one.

*

The term “girlfriend” refers not just to a romantic role, but to a historical fact. The same way I call Pluto a planet. Not because it’s true, but because it was, and I haven’t updated my internal astronomy since. My girlfriend was my girlfriend. She is still the person who occupied that position, still the person I will, against all logic and dignity, write an essay about. This is not nostalgia, nor delusion—this is archival.

I don’t believe in the word ex.

I have a girlfriend. My girlfriend has a girlfriend. This is not a paradox.

*

 Whenever I tell my therapist about my girlfriend, he doesn’t blink. He just closes his notebook and says, How’s your mom?

Which is to say my girlfriend is not the worst thing about me. 

I told him my girlfriend enforced 8 P.M. curfews once I moved to college. That once, she screamed at me on speaker in front of John Jay Hall because I was outside my dorm at 8:05. That she accepted nudes from Emma, and other girls. Wrote weird, breathless love letters to a homoerotic friendship she swore she blocked.  That my friends did host an intervention but made it mostly about themselves.

 My girlfriend never physically cheated. She just stayed exactly on the line, uncrossed. 

The equivalent of stabbing me with a butter knife and saying, look, no blood.

 My therapist just nodded. Ran a hand through his hair. Repeated himself. 

 So, how’s your mom?

 He once told me my diagnosis, but before sharing, he asked if I was sure I wanted to hear it. 

 Apparently, I almost have PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Apparently, I’ve been so high functioning, so high achieving, that I failed the DSM-5. I said thank you. Like he handed me a C for effort. Like I should be proud I hadn’t bled enough to qualify. He says I talk about my feelings like I'm an alumnus of them, not someone still failing the tests. Like self-denial is a kind of courtesy. Like if I don’t ask for help, I won’t owe anyone for giving it.

When my therapist asks about my mom for the third time, I want to tell him he should learn to satisfy.

I was raised on learn to satisfy. A West Indian mother’s Patois response for most requests.

Can I leave the house? Can I try therapy? Can I go to my slam poetry practices without you sitting on the nearby bench? Can I sleep without you in my room?  It was less of a phrase and more of a border between what I was allowed to need and what made me greedy.

My mother would secretly record conversations between me and my girlfriend, then practice and recite them like times tables. She was attempting to confirm her suspicions that we weren’t just friends. She didn’t say I know what you’re up to. Just, why are you never grateful?

The one time he let me talk about my girlfriend, he said, why did you love her? 

 Because my mother told me to learn to satisfy.

My girlfriend once timed her shower for exactly five minutes so she would catch me before I fell asleep at 10:30 P.M. On my nineteenth birthday, I puked three times after greening out from my first edible and she got on her knees with clorox and wipes three times. On the drive home from my high school graduation, my mom went on a tirade about how she hated coming home because of me and my girlfriend texted me jokes from the backseat. Because she made me feel satisfied at a time where every other kind of nourishment in my life came with debt. It wasn’t that she didn’t hurt me. It’s that she was the first person who ever saw me want something and didn’t take it away.

*

I met my girlfriend because my best friend had a crush.

A pandemic is a terrible time to fall in love, but an excellent time to develop emotional dependencies that resemble love if you squint hard enough. Loneliness felt like a thing you could catch, like if you stood too close to it, your body would start to ache.

My best friend, Emma told me she had a crush on me over the summer. And also, on my crush of four years. She had told us separately. We had rejected her separately.

Still, I pitied her. Emma deserved love. Or, at the very least, someone to text at odd hours. A mutual friend and I sat on Zoom and tried to think up people she could date. Emma remembered a girl she had liked in elementary school. Miraculously, she still had her number. 

They started talking. Emma was thrilled, but also shit at conversation. When the girl failed her chemistry midterm, Emma asked me how to console her. I drafted a message. She sent it. The girl replied, Wow. You’re so kind, and thoughtful. Emma beamed. I drafted another message. She sent that one too. It was a long-distance relationship in which I was the delivery pigeon, simultaneously included and excluded from conversation.

It made sense. Emma and I were always getting confused for each other anyway. Two skinny Haitian girls with glasses and PWI posture. Both loud in class–ugly laughs, never in our seats, always a little too proud to stop talking. Both fluent in shock humor, the kind of girls who said n_____ or cum in the middle of a Kahoot to make the white boys laugh and then immediately hated ourselves for it.

We wore the same box braids once and didn’t speak for a week.

She was skinnier. Prettier. Her eyebrows, clean and thick. Her voice didn’t crack when she argued. Her crushes looked back. Her dad was mean, yes, but he wasn’t cruel. Being friends with her felt like sideline-watching a version of myself I might have been if the universe had chosen a better hallway.

She was a What-If I wasn’t supposed to want.

And I didn’t. But every time someone used our names interchangeably, I felt like I’d been copy-pasted wrong.

One day, Emma asked if I wanted to meet the girl.

 We got on a Zoom call, and the first thing I said to her was, Dumb bitch. She had just attempted to set her Chemistry notes on fire in her bedroom, and I had very little patience for arson. She grinned. And then we insulted each other for three hours.

From then on, the three of us talked daily. Together, we were one obnoxious inside joke. We ran through Zoom’s 40-minute limit and switched to Google Meet, which didn’t cut us off. We played games. We argued about anime, which they loved and I hated. We talked about religion and our respective mommy issues, our respective daddy issues, our respective fear of dying in freak accidents.

Eventually, I remembered Emma could be mean, in quiet, efficient ways. Once, she joked about reporting my family to CPS, just to see what would happen. Not long after, Emma started leaving the calls for long periods of time, which we pretended to hate.

“I don’t want to be stuck here with you,” one of us would say. “I want Emma to come back.”

“Okay, then leave. We can end the call.”

“Okay, fine.”

One of us would leave. A few minutes later, we’d return to see the other still waiting.

“Why are you still here? Clearly, you were waiting for me to come back.”

“No, I was waiting for Emma. Why did you come back?”

“Waiting for Emma.”

 Then Emma forgot my birthday. Then she stopped texting the girl entirely.

 Then Emma was no longer part of the joke.

 The girl was my girlfriend. My actual girlfriend. No more pigeons, no more middlemen.

 She was saved as Doormat in my phone–a contact name that mimicked our mean banter. Doormat aka Insufficient Funds. Doormat aka Slow Butt Baby. Doormat aka Yeasty Bitch. She asked me out over an Excel Spreadsheet at 5AM on New Year’s Eve. She called me daily, and we fell asleep on the phone nightly. I knew her favorite candy–Brach’s candy canes (only Brach’s), how long it would take her to wear the new things she bought (immediately, often putting them on while still inside the store), and what to do when she was on her period (let her sleep on the floor, because for some weird reason she liked it there). 

 Emma didn’t find shit funny.

Not the spreadsheet. Not the fact that I was asking permission for the past tense. Not that I still wanted credit for asking. I told her during APUSH. She muttered you do you and kept highlighting her notes on the Industrial Revolution. Ignored me for the rest of the day. I sent her some pathetic Snapchat message about junior-year maturity, how we didn’t have to talk again but it’d be nice if she could say how she felt.

She said, ok ur doing 2 much now.

Later, on Google Meets, she admitted she’d thrown up earlier. That she had a panic attack in the bathroom between first and second period. That she had an inkling. That some things are still sacred, no matter how over they are. Girl code, or whatever’s left of it, and yeah, maybe I do have a whole roster now, and maybe I did kiss people Max was worried about, and maybe I did say I’d never go back to her, but still. It’s kinda, like, fucked up watching someone I loved call you “baby” on her main story.

 But I was in love. And she’d already left the group chat. 

And my girlfriend said the second she met me, she knew she’d picked the wrong friend. Said something had always been there, like a fact, not a confession. So I told myself Emma was being dramatic. That girl code didn’t apply if you never kissed. That if it was really that deep, she wouldn’t have let me stay on the call.

 And no one stopped me. Not her. Not my girlfriend. 

Not even me.

*

I’ve always viewed the statement I have a girlfriend as I no longer want anything else.  

But then I started wanting things. First, it was a college acceptance 1,237 miles away. Then, it was for my girlfriend to contribute something other than yeah, so fucked, when I ranted to her about the human rights theories I learned in class. For a brief moment, it was the boy who innocently said I had a beautiful smile on move-in day and kissed my hand. A FaceTime call where debriefs weren’t embellished interactions to make the other person jealous. A month without me having an anxiety attack over something my girlfriend mentioned or failed to mention. A selfie on Instagram where the comments were about my new hair and not jokes about whether my girlfriend can fight.

 Really, I wanted to see what I looked like when I didn’t belong to her. 

 A long-term relationship, I’ve learned, is not about being held. It’s about being held still. Love, as we practice it, punishes evolution. My girlfriend fell in love with me on a Zoom call. I was sixteen, dimly lit, and worse than I thought I was. The kind of friend who betrayed her best friend and called it winning. 

The trouble with being loved for who you were is that you start to fear who you’re becoming. 

*

It ended at 3 p.m. on a Friday, before my first college winter break.  It ended again, after break, after we’d spent the whole month still in love and still getting married one day when I told her she lied to me and she asked me to stop repeating myself or she’d hang up. When she told me she already had a new girlfriend.

It ended two months prior, when I said I love you and she only wiped up my puke.

It ended four months before that, when I said maybe we should break up and she said no, let me visit first.

And it ended the year before, when she sexted a boy and didn’t tell me. When she hooked up with the girl she told me not to worry about and didn’t tell me.

*

A few months ago, I kissed another girl with a girlfriend. Her name was Carly. A scalpel of a person. Thin and sharp and made only to split me from my recent vow of celibacy. 

 She was smart in a way that made me stutter–the kind of intelligence that was impressive, sure, but also inconvenient. She would turn a joke into a conversation, and that conversation into a joke, until I was never sure if we were laughing at something or solving it. She left our first date at 7 p.m. but was back by midnight. Took an Uber from Brooklyn because she didn’t like how far away I felt. We spent the night trying to fit between each other's mouths. 

She had abnormally long, skinny fingers for someone 5’3. I pointed this out once, and she called me immediately.

Shnayjaah, you’re about to make me crash out.

That’s how we got to know each other. Within fifteen minutes of any iMessage conversation, something about me would make her call me. Some pathetic synapse in me enjoyed the urgency of it. I liked knowing I could say something out-of-pocket and within seconds she would be there, her voice in my ear, already exasperated, already amused.

It felt familiar. We’d done this before. Carly felt like my girlfriend. 

People say dating someone like my girlfriend means I’m not over my girlfriend. But that assumes love is a direction. That assumes romance isn’t just stumbling into an old friend and realizing you still remember all their tells. The right spirit in a different body—less reckless, weirder E.T. fingers. The same ability to match me, step-for-step, word-for-word. Carly wasn’t my girlfriend–but they ran the same patterns. The same kind of pretty that pulled a room toward them. The same way of talking with their whole body, of making strangers feel chosen, of making me feel peripheral on purpose. I liked that about them. I liked working my way back into their orbit. A hand on the small of their back. A shared look across the room. A hair flip they claimed to love. Both of them made me prove I was a planet big enough to be recognized. And I did. Happily.

With both, there was always something to talk about–always some fake argument, some petty debate that that ended in yawns. They were both fiercely passionate, stubborn, emotionally reactive in ways I couldn’t afford to be. My girlfriend nearly broke up with me because I asked her to apply to community college. Carly got into Stanford and turned it down to stay with her old high school girlfriend. I was furious at both. I was also in awe.

For me, romance needed to be something fast and sharp and unrelenting. Otherwise, I might stop to think.

Carly spoke in impulses. She didn’t talk as much as leak. Her sentences always arrived mid-sentence, mid-wrong-doing, mid-laugh. Jumping before checking if the ground was there. Once, I asked if she was seeing anyone else and she responded, Ask me later. I want a Chipotle bowl right now. She was, in many ways, involuntary. Like a twitch. Like a dare. I think she mistook unpredictability for personality. She flaunted her free will like a cigarette in a no smoking zone, performing rebellion just to see who would cough. She wanted everyone to know she was choosing. Even if she wasn’t. Especially when it hurt.

Maybe Carly could have been another girlfriend for me. But Carly had a girlfriend. Not in the way I have a girlfriend, which is to say: an irreversible fact, an ongoing condition, a concept that lives in my mouth long after I’ve stopped speaking it.

She had a girlfriend in the way I used to have a girlfriend. Muting her girlfriend’s Instagram story. Rewatching their videos, puffy-eyed and hopeful, the day before she moved for college. 

 Measuring herself in other people’s mouths–if only to check if she was still whole.  

*

 My girlfriend last called on my birthday.

 And because I’m a person who believes in signs only when they favor me, I picked up. She said, What are you doing today?  Somewhere, her girlfriend’s phone was vibrating on the nightstand. Somewhere, her girlfriend was sighing at the caller ID, flipping it face-down. Somewhere, her girlfriend was waiting. 

But maybe not.

Maybe she thought, Oh, she does this sometimes. Maybe she thought nothing at all. Maybe I was the only one still waiting for proof of something that no longer existed.

 But some people stay out of habit. Some people call because they know you’ll answer. Some people do things they don’t mean, simply because they can. 

 I’ve done things I didn’t mean, too.

 Once, my dad chased my mom up the stairs, her voice breaking on the word murder. Once, he burst into my room, his hand in her hair, her eye already swelling. Once, I stood between them, the way I always had, the way I always would, and when I picked up the phone—my girlfriend unknowingly still on FaceTime—I didn’t ease her into the moment, or gauge what she could carry before letting it all pour out.

 I spilled myself onto her. And I knew, even as I did it, that I would not clean it up.

My girlfriend was never cruel. Only forgetful. She would put a cup on the edge of a table and walk away before it fell, not because she wanted to see it shatter, but because she had already moved on.

Which is to say: maybe she didn’t ignore her girlfriend’s call because she missed me. Maybe she did it because she heard something in my voice—the too-long pauses, the shake at the edges. Maybe she could tell, without me having to say it, that I was alone, that the birthday plans I had probably didn’t exist. That I wasn’t calling anyone else. Maybe she thought, God, she’s still like this. Maybe she thought, Fine. Forty-three minutes. That’s all she gets.

Maybe afterward, she called her girlfriend back and said, Yeah, sorry. It was Val. She’s good. Just... a lot. Maybe they sighed together. Or laughed. Maybe her girlfriend knew, without asking, what kind of phone call it had been.

 I was always kind of a lot. I was jealous and insecure and had no sense of self. I was sharp in the wrong places, soft in the wrong moments. I flirted too much. Apologized too little. Wanted her to be something no one had ever been for me.

Yes, I was a kid. But I am also still impossible.

Maybe that’s why, after a year of knowing about her girlfriend, I finally went looking for her.

For a year, I had resisted. Drunk, sober, sitting with friends who dangled the information in front of me—I chose not to know. I was a person of great self-control. A person who understood consequences. Who decided healing is simply the act of choosing not to know things.

 Until it was a nothing afternoon. Today my friend bought me a matcha latte, and we sat in my dorm lounge, talking about all the ways we could alter ourselves permanently. Stick-and-pokes, piercings, a new name. something to convince the mirror it had never met us before.

I said, offhandedly, that my girlfriend once had a Pinterest board dedicated to tattoo ideas for me. I went to see if it was still there.

 Instead, I found Dream Wedding Rings. Shared with her girlfriend. I should have looked away. Instead, I followed the breadcrumbs. Her Instagram. Her TikTok. The outfits she was imagining next. The hairstyles she was considering.

And finally, her face.

 I braced for impact. I had assumed she would be so beautiful, so impossible, that I would have no choice but to accept my defeat.

 Instead, I saw a girl.

 Who was probably kind. Seemed confident. Likely didn’t need to rehearse things before saying them. Didn’t spend her time analyzing how others received her. Or spend hours in front of the mirror, trying to find the exact angle where her face made sense.

 She liked anime. She probably drew.

She probably let my girlfriend rant about the Spider-Verse movies without interrupting to fact-check. She probably looked at my girlfriend’s iPad sketches and said, Wow, that’s amazing—instead of, You should sell these. You should do commissions. You should monetize this. She probably laughed at the parts of my girlfriend’s stories I had stopped listening to. Probably didn’t console her after a long day at work with obsessive comparisons of pre-law LinkedIn profiles. Probably didn’t ask stupid questions like, how long would you wait to move on if I died, or did you love your ex more than me? Probably let my girlfriend exist without an audience, without performance, without scrutiny.

She, most likely, made love feel easy.

And she wasn’t prettier than me. Just Broward County, Florida pretty. Mink lashes, well-kept acrylics, a slick back with swooped edges. The kind of pretty that’s regional, like an accent, noticeable only when removed from its natural habitat.

 She wasn’t less pretty than me. She wasn’t a measurement of anything at all. She was just someone else. 

And that was worse.

*

My girlfriend first told me she had a girlfriend in the same sentence as her telling me she missed me.

The thing about being told you are missed is that it activates an ancient and unhelpful mechanism in the human brain, designed to conflate nostalgia with relevance. This is a critical flaw, because nostalgia is to relevance what a tumor is to an organ—a copy of something living that has no business being alive.

So when my girlfriend tells me she misses me and also has a girlfriend—when these two seemingly contradictory pieces of information face me shoulder-to-shoulder, as if they are equally true, equally unimportant—It makes me want to believe in Schrödinger’s Cat. In the possibility that somewhere, in some unopened box, we still exist in a state of wanting each other.

She tells me she texts my iMessage number, even though she’s blocked there. Just to say things. Leave them somewhere.

I want to ask what things.

But I don’t. I understand the version of me she’s texting is not me at all, but a ghost with goodposture. The kind of person who wouldn’t spend this much time obsessing over a single sentence.

Maybe she pitied me. Maybe she wanted to see if I was still standing in the same place she left me. Maybe she wanted to feel right about moving on.

Or maybe—horrifyingly—my girlfriend just wanted to talk.

*

You could say that I was never in love. Or that I always am. That’s the trouble with Schrödinger’s cat–until you lift the lid, the thing is both: gone and still breathing. 

You could also say I have a weird relationship with reality. I refresh the new girlfriend’s Tiktok like it’s a heart monitor, watching my girlfriend’s smile for signs of struggle. I’m not hoping they’ve broken up. I’m checking if I ever mattered. Until I see the body, the love isn’t dead. But until she says it out loud, it was never alive. 

I don’t want her back. I want to hold the box long enough to hear breathing. And if I open it, and nothing is there?

At least I’ll stop listening.

-Shnayjaah Valentine Jeanty

Shnayjaah Valentine Jeanty is a third-year at Columbia University who is studying Creative Writing and Human Rights. She is a 2024 National Youth Poet Laureate of the South, as well as a domestic violence prevention and immigration rights activist.