I’m The Reason There Are No Longer Snow Days. I’m Finally Telling My Story.

BY REBECCA BROCCOLI FAUST

I’ll begin this the way I begin my classes, with a question: What does it mean to disappear? By now you’ve probably read everything about my story and come to conclusions I won’t be rugged enough to shift. It would take a battering ram, after all, and all I’ve brought with me are pens.

After years of writing about other people I find myself in the unenviable position of having to write about myself. It’s not enough that I’ve been fileted in the public square, every detail of the last ten months of my life served up like cancellation pie. It seems I must draw blood myself for you to be satisfied.

For you to believe how sorry I am that I slept with Jack Frost, and fumbled the bag, and that’s why we don’t get snow days anymore.

When I met John I was a professor at CUNY Queens. I was in rewrites hell for my novel The Wife Equation and wondering if I should start applying to programs in the Midwest, where my parents are from. I was madly in love with New York but the winters were a sticking point, how you had to start turning the lights on at four thanks to the obstructed views. I was dreaming of writing my next book from inside a kiddie pool in the middle of a yard.

One night in January my department went out to a local bar. I almost didn’t go, my social battery drained from a long day of teaching. I wanted nothing more than to peel off my winter clothes and curl up with a book and a gray piece of cake (chai chrysanthemum). But my colleagues talked me into it on promises of bad karaoke. So I put all my scarves back on and that was that.

I wasn’t in the mood to chat let alone meet someone, but there he was behind the pool table: the personification of ice, snow, sleet and cold. He was in town for work — a bomb cyclone that was to make impacts from Delaware to Nova Scotia — and meeting up with some meteorologist friends on his night off. From where I sat I could see him lining up his shot, playfully booing the poor outcome, whipping his head to the side as he took a consolational swig. All of his gestures were very hot like watching someone confidently reverse a car.

I straightened up as he made a line for me through the bar, looking elsewhere until the very moment he reached my chair. Behind us a woman slipped and fell because his strides had frozen over that part of the floor.

“I’m Jack,” he said, extending his free hand. His skin was blue but his nose and cheeks and fingertips were a healthy red, like he’d just gotten inside from playing adult kickball.

“Rebecca,” I said in a smart and cool way.

He bought me another of what I was having and we talked for a long time. When we kissed his breath was pure peppermint, the very essence of freshness. It was the breath equivalent of those impossible colors: hyperbolic orange, blacker than black.

At the time I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I knew it was something important enough to tell my husband Greg, who was incredibly supportive. We began the beautiful and difficult work of inviting him into our bedroom.

Out of an abundance of respect for the time we shared, I think it inappropriate to go into detail except to say that yes — he fucks.

From there we began seeing each other. It was so natural: Late mornings in bed drinking cocoa. Ice skating at Rockefeller Center. I found an apartment in Manhattan to make it easier for us to meet up without disrupting Greg’s schedule.

On Valentine’s Day, still wrapped around me from the night before, he asked me to come with him to Baltimore. It would just be a day trip, going from freezing rain to the upper 70’s in a matter of hours. He had been spending a lot of time in my world, standing next to me at academic parties with palmfuls of spinach puff, and he wanted me to see his.

This struck my avoidant attachment style as something too close to domesticity, an attempt to cage me and keep me from writing something significant ever again.

That day we had our first fight. I told him to get out, that I didn’t care if he loved me. I knew, though, I was just doing what I always did: sabotaging my own happiness. That night he showed up at my door with a pink and red gingerbread house. We had phenomenal make up sex which I am not detailing out of deep, incredible respect for him.

I would say we only got stronger from there, but that’s not what happened. We weren’t the same after that. Somehow the ground had shifted beneath us.

Up to that point it had always been him coming towards me, more enamored, more vulnerable. Again, I know this is an unattractive trait, but I was just so un-needy about it all — I think it scared him. From that day on we were good but we were never in love at the same time.

For example, we could be walking down the street, hands on each other’s asses, and I’d look at him and just swell with pride and admiration. But then he’d want to unlink because his arm was getting tired. And then one day he might be all about me, but I’d still be sour over the last rejection. It was all very Carrie/Aidan.

I took a big step by inviting him on a trip of my own. It would be to Berlin as my plus one for a conference happening later in the year. He was cagey, saying he couldn’t plan as far out as December.

“You don’t know what you’re doing in December?” I was standing in one of his shirts with my arms out, incredulous. “You’re the fucking snow!”

I started feeling unimportant. I could tell he wasn’t reading the drafts I sent him anymore, nodding reflexively at dinner. Eventually, out of hurt, I ended up cheating on my boyfriend with my husband. While I don’t agree with it, I honor and hold space for the woman I was when I (she) made that choice.

You could say our uncoupling was messy. As the birds returned and the sun stuck its finger in my eye, I rolled over in my marital bed to find my texts to John were going green. The next time we met up he admitted to being mad at me. Having already apologized, I didn’t know what more could be done.

That was when he floated the idea that we break up and never speak again, and he dissipated into a twinkling vapor.

So I can tell you on good authority, as we approach the holiday season, that there will be no snow days this winter. No waking up to solid white streets like buttercream, no toasty smell of the central heating as it chugs back on after months of disuse. That all left with him. As his first human lover, I basically ruined Earth for him the way exes can ruin cities and entire musical genres.

Needless to say this year has been a whirlwind — but it wasn’t all bad. This spring I sold my fifth book. Greg and I separated for unrelated reasons. Today I am happily focusing on myself and my relationship with one of my grad students.

Since this all happened I’ve been called many things: Selfish. Annoying. “The one breaking up our marriage over a Norse myth.” I’ve been accused of centering myself in a narrative that was already years in the making due to climate change and the rise of telework.

I’m in a place in my life where I’m ready to forgive all that. I know what it’s like down in the muck, wrestling for my reputation. I’ve been there, begging to be seen properly, and where I’m going there’s no room for it. I just ask for one thing of the blue check mob which so insists on nailing me to the cross:

At least have the decency to look me in the eyes as you destroy me.