Pug Hill by Alison Pace

right now. What I don’t need right now is to go to Pug Hill and be reminded that the pugs are not always there. But the thought, that if I went there, I would maybe see a pug, overrides any memory of how much worse I felt when there were no pugs at Pug Hill. And anyway, I’ve never been tremendously skilled at learning from my mistakes. Historically, I’ve been much more of a fan of trying them out for a second time.
    Though I do aspire to be the type of person who learns from her mistakes, or at least from her previous breakups. If you get to thirty-one years old and find yourself single, as I now have, chances are that in order to get here, you’ve gotten yourself through quite a few breakups, quite a few breakups from which you can learn. Unless, of course, you’ve had one boyfriend or even a husband for the past, say, ten years and at thirty-one, this is the first breakup you are dealing with. If that is the case, I fear I cannot help you with the knowledge I’ve spent a while now accumulating.
    Granted, as far as breakups go, I know that the Evan breakup is going to be slightly easier, because I really do believe that the leaving of this relationship is such a better thing than staying in it. But even so, there will be things I’ll have to hurdle over, concepts I’ll have to wrap my head around. The first, and I believe the most important, thing that I will need to understand is that things are going to be different. Clearly.
    This morning, for example, when I first woke up, the first thing that popped into my head was no longer a muddled, fuzzy, What is going on with me and Evan, and why are we even holding on to any of it, and why don’t we just break up? The first thing rather was crisp, clear: I am single. Here I am. And that, I’m pretty sure, was as good a place as any to start. And then I thought about Pug Hill and how I’d like to go there before work, just really quickly, and see if maybe any pugs were there.
    I get ready for work as quickly as I can. I don’t linger over the paper or spend a lot of time figuring out what to wear, because of Elliot and all. Today is not, out of respect mostly for the relationship that just ended, a day to think about Elliot. As I head out the door, I realize something: I have to get my coffee at Starbucks now.
    Today is not the day to go to Columbus Bakery, the place where I usually go in the mornings to get coffee. Columbus Bakery, for years, was just Columbus Bakery, a place with excellent coffee—so excellent as to overshadow the stressful clientele and a mind-bogglingly disorganized and really rather senseless ordering system. But then the inevitable association happened. Maybe it was because he liked the coffee there as much as I do, or maybe it was because I’d clued in fairly early on that the suggestion of a trip to Columbus Bakery could sometimes keep us from the never-ending game of Arctic Explorer that Evan always seemed so determined to play. But somewhere along the way, Columbus Bakery went from being just a place to being an Evan place. And now, I can’t go there.
    It isn’t the time to get nostalgic. Nostalgic, as everyone who has ever had a breakup knows, is just a stop or two away on the train from Maybe-It-Wasn‘t-All-That-Bad-ville. I tell myself that no matter how lonely I may feel in the days to come, when the IM’s don’t pop up on my computer screen, when there isn’t anyone there on weekend mornings (even if the person who was there on weekend mornings believed himself to be Nanuk of the North), I know I don’t want to go to Maybe-It-Wasn’t-All-That-Bad-ville. I’ve stopped by this town so many times in my past. It’s taken me a long time, longer perhaps than most, to figure out that they don’t tell you the truth there.

    Starbucks, I am compelled to say, as I cue up behind five or six comparatively less-stressed-out-than-the-Columbus-Bakery types, feels remarkably (or at least comparatively) more serene. How sad really, if you