In front of me stand five men. They all know me by different names.
Not just different names, but also different life stories, different loves.
They had called me Isabella, Charli, Regina, Madeline, Daisy.
I look back at them as myself, not that they would know who she is, I'm not even sure if l do.
"You're Celia Clare, I knew I knew your face from somewhere," one of them scowls at me.
I look at him, thinking about my next words.
But what do you say to someone that you knowingly lied to about something trivial to you, never thinking you would be in this moment, where you are being stared in the face by your own selfishness as you realize how changing this reveal is for them.
You don't know what to say, so I'll tell you what you think.
You comb through your mind, looking for where you went wrong, where you should’ve turned around on the path that brought you here; and you work your way back until you find the moment your foot took its first step towards here, towards now.
There comes a time in many a girls life when she wakes up, truly single for the first time in a long time.
This looks different for each one.
Maybe she never liked to be alone, clinging to her significant others as others cling to their childhood home.
It feels safe and familiar, it helps her feel secure.
Maybe she just happened to always find someone right after each break up, with no overlap between the two.
Some will call it attachment issues; she calls it the fate of good timing.
Maybe there was overlap, and there has always been a mess trailed between each breakup and new entanglement.
Maybe she thought she had found the one and was clinging on to the blind hope that things would get better each time a resentful comment was thrown her way.
If she was kind enough, patient enough, good enough;
that maybe he would change into a person capable of loving her the way she was. (Girl he just didn't like you.)
Whatever the story is, and however she got there, she often feels hopeful.
After being with someone for so many years, she gets to be alone now.
That's what she tells herself, but of course, by alone she doesn't mean alone.
She means free, and there is a difference between the two.
That's what I told myself when I woke up one morning in April at the age of two and twenty: that I get to be alone now, I get to learn how to do it.
Which brings me to the beginning.
It's dark, and sad, and full of hope.
I go back and forth between feeling as if my whole world has ended, and in a way it has; but a few hours later I'm bright at the thought of all of the loves I haven't met yet, the stories I have yet to live and die with.
And thank goodness for all of the privilege that allows me to grieve my relationship in peace without worry.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, with parents that have been involved in many media projects, some of your favorite movies and television shows perhaps.
Which is why when I graduated with a bachelor's in English with plans to write a novel, my parents decided that the rational thing to do was finance my entire life in support of me achieving this goal and dream.
I could sit here like all rich kids and tell you that I work really hard and am going to have to work that much harder to get out from under my parents shadows.
Or I can be honest and tell you that I am so sorry for anyone that doesn't get this life.
I do work hard; I'm not saying that I don't. I worked hard(ish) in school and got all A's and B's.
I tried to make up for the fact that I didn't have to work by doing as many hours volunteering as I could.
The hard thing about being financially comfortable, is that there is a lot of pressure to contribute to the world, otherwise you just feel like an unproductive leech.
Problem was, I always struggled with how I wanted to give back. But I loved stories, so that's what I majored in.
My parents always told me to do what you love and figure out how to make money with it later.
The fact that I was a nepotism baby made this much easier.
Yeah, if I published a novel and it became a bestseller because I was so and so's kid, everyone would say that it was because of that.
And they would be at least partly right, but it wouldn't really matter because I would be the one getting to do what I loved and making money doing it.
Because of this financial freedom, my days typically involved me waking up, going to a Pilates class, before grabbing a coffee and going back to my apartment to write for a few hours before I could break out the wine and gossip with my friends over text.
Many of my friends worked serious adult jobs in finance or tech.
Part of me wanted to be like them, working full-time and everything. But the other part really wanted to enjoy my life the way I had it for as long as I could get away with it.
Though, since the breakup, my days had looked different. It had been two weeks, and I hadn't worked out once except for one yoga class in which I had started crying part-way through, and had been so embarrassed I had lied and told the instructor that my boyfriend had died, because that was better???
I hadn't been back since, and had spent my time on my couch eating chocolates, and watching my favorite comfort movies like Little Women, Titanic, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.
Strangely, love stories didn't depress me, if anything they gave me hope, that one day I would have a great love story like the ones I was watching.
What truly helped get me through the days though, were my girls.
Wendy Peters, my roommate, would come home and force me up off the couch. She would drag me to a gym or to a spa, anything to get me out of our apartment.
This doesn't seem like a big deal for a friend to do, but Wendy did this after coming home from a ten-hour day at her finance office. (Can you tell I have no idea what she actually does for work?)
She had been born and raised in France to a single mother.
Driven and ambitious, she saw the world as a ladder to climb, in hopes she could make it out of the floor she was born into.
Often times we would be joined by Valentina, one of my closest friends.
She was one of the highest paid models in America, and unlike Wendy, was often found doing different methods of self-care. If it wasn't something fitting her definition of "beneficial" she never had a problem saying no.
Some may have called her cold, or rigid, but in her words, she knew what she wanted, why would I put my energy towards anything else??"
The last of us was Dove Beaumont, a member of British aristocracy, but unlike me, was determined to prove herself, and ran herself ragged perusing a career in fashion.
She was judgmental, but kind, hard-working but petulant.
She was the type of friend whose love takes a while to recognize, needing to be learned like a language.
It was because of this that I loved her like a sister as someone that had known her for so many years but would often find myself defending her to other people that didn't know how to read her.
Over the past two weeks I had been kept alive by Valentina's gossip, Dove's shopping trips, and quality time with Wendy.
I had healed enough to need something to be inspired by, to want to do, instead of be.
And so, at two in the morning on a Wednesday, is when I had the most brilliant thought.
Brilliant to me, unhinged to other people, I know.
I threw my phone down on the couch and jumped up, ignited by my mission.
I got dressed for the first time in days and brushed my hair. I cleaned up the chocolates off of my coffee table in front of my couch, poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed my laptop, put some perfume on to make myself feel better, and got to work.
Four hours later at the crack of dawn I stood up from my table with a maniacal smile on my face.
I had five names, five personalities, and five back stories of the girls that I would be while dating again.
This. This was how I would get over him and meet the new me.
I know, that sounds like a lot of work, and it was for a nepotism baby, which is why I rewarded myself by leaving my apartment to get some coffee, and then passed the fuck out.