I reached for my tea. “No. No, thank you. I don’t need the wine or the ice cream either.”
We’d gone out with Gabby during my first two days in Chicago. She was an excellent distraction. Or rather, her constant gabbing, zaniness, and wacky stories were. I was glad she was coming over just for the distraction factor.
“Well, you’re getting wine and ice cream because she already bought them,” Lisa said to me as she meandered closer, and then to Gabby, “Tell Duke to stay on standby. Okay, see you in a little bit. Bye.” My sister returned to her spot on the couch, leaving her phone on the coffee table.
Taking as deep of a breath as I possibly could, I decided it was time to explain the entire situation to my sister. The inability to speak without becoming a blubbering mess had been a major limiting factor. I would just have to get over it. I would accept the tears, rather than fight them, and I would tell her the whole story.
“I’ll tell you everything that happened,” I rushed to say before she could launch into another rant. “Truly, Lisa. Abram is not like that, he’s not like Tyler. He’s not like Mom and Dad either.”
She gritted her teeth and released a humorless laugh, shaking her head. “He is exactly like Tyler—and Mom, and Dad—musicians and artists are all the same, Mo, especially the brilliant ones. They’re flighty, selfish, and vain. They might be brilliant, but they only care about themselves, their ego, and their music. They will suck the soul right out of anyone who loves them, and they use it to feed their own brilliance until your light is extinguished, until you’re left broken. And then they move on.”
“Let me just tell you what happened, okay?”
“Fine, but if he doesn’t call you soon, groveling, and begging for forgiveness for not making contact in six days, then I will junk punch him with my new taekwondo moves, and then break his femurs.”
For the record, I didn’t want Lisa to junk punch Abram, but for some reason her overprotectiveness warmed my heart and, you guessed it, made me want to cry. I blinked against the new onslaught, lifting my eyes to the ceiling.
“Okay, first, let me explain something.” I cleared my throat and endeavored to recenter my thoughts. “You first have to understand, time doesn’t exist. As such, I can’t be angry at Abram for not calling me.”
One of Lisa’s eyebrows lifted, her gaze became a glare. “Riiiiiiight.”
“No, hear me out. We talk about people being deep, we talk about feelings being heavy. I’ve been thinking about this for the past week and it made me wonder: Do heavy feelings have more mass? Do they have their own gravity? Fields we cannot detect with any scientific instrument because they’re calibrated for the physical world?”
“Mona—”
“Just listen. If time is the result of gravity shaping or warping reality—which it is, which is why clocks tick faster on a mountain than at sea level—then what impact do heavy, weighty feelings have on time? I hypothesize that sadness slows time, and happiness does the opposite. Make sense?”
She rolled her eyes. “Only you would overcomplicate something so simple. Forget about the rules of physics—”
“Laws of physics.”
“Whatever! The rules of life, of society and engagement say that—if Abram was serious about you, if you were important to him—he would have called you the very next day. You can’t tell me the weight of your feelings is at all responsible for the force of the mass of the gravity of fucking, selfish, shitty boys being shitty to you, blah blah blah.” She waved her hands through the air, working herself into a frenzy. “He hasn’t called you in six days. I don’t care about gravity and feelings. In every universe, six days is a ridiculous amount of time.”
“Yes. But—”
“There is no but! Stop making excuses for him!” Lisa’s voice had lowered to a sharp whisper, and it was clear my attempt at using logic to explain my behavior was angering her.