Eight things better than playing Michaelandellaopoly
You’re rummaging through your parent’s storage unit, looking for dark-colored blankets your mom can use to make a cave for her preschool class.
They’re learning about caves right now, and most of your dinner time conversations have been about what to name the spelunking supply store at the mouth of the classroom cave.
It takes everything within you to not point out that your dad’s suggestion of “Deep Dark Discounts” sounds a little dirty. It gets painted on cardboard and hung by the entrance.
You’re home for the holidays and are not used to being this good of a human being.
You find brown bedsheets in the storage unit and can remember the exact moment your ex brought them home. You’d sent him to Walmart to buy new sheets because company was coming, and he came back with these.
“Brown,” you remember telling him, “is the color of poo.”
In hindsight, you are clearly the antagonist in this story. But in the moment, it really seemed like him for committing the unforgivable act of buying brown bed sheets.
However your anger likely had a little more to do with the painfully slow breakdown of your seven-year relationship, and a little less with the color of the bed sheets.
Lucky for your mom, brown is the perfect color for caves. You flop the sheet over your arm and hope the kids wipe their boogers all over it.
Your parent’s storage unit feels like a relationship graveyard. It’s been five years since the breakup, but you’d crammed in all your furniture afterwards and moved away, leaving it to become some sort of Ikea time capsule.
Entirely against your will and better judgment, you spot Michaelandellaopoly.
Michaelandellaopoly is a board game you made for your ex when you first started dating, back when your nickname was Ella. It’s a spin-off of Monopoly, but all the places have been changed to your favorite spots, and the cards are inside jokes.
The board game might have been cute if that’s where things ended. As a college romance that didn’t work out. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that cut and dry.
You can’t fathom that there was ever a point in your life where playing Michaelandellaopoly sounded fun.
While being home comes with its own set of stressors, for the remainder of your trip, you cheerily remind yourself that anything is preferable to the board game.
You keep a running list of all the things better than playing Michaelandellaopoly. They are, in no particular order:
1) Your grandma being taken to the emergency room the day after Christmas to get her wedding ring removed. She had started complaining about its tightness a few days earlier, and it wasn’t until the family started looking at it that anyone realized just how snug it had gotten.
She wasn’t too far off from one of those indigenous women in her National Geographic magazines. Except that Grandma was wearing clothes, and didn’t know how to hunt.
You listen to a half-hour conversation between your parents and your aunt as they debate whether or not to bring water to your grandpa and uncle so they don’t get dehydrated sitting in the ER waiting room.
“Should we bring sandwiches?” They’re now wondering as the discourse circles back and forth. “They might be hungry.”
You get the impression that they’ve been waiting all day and grandma’s about to be helicoptered up to Stanford for surgery.
It’s been less than 45 minutes, and based on all the attention Grandma’s been getting, this is probably the highlight of her entire year.
You are well-versed in the subtext of your family’s dialogue, and you know that the to-bring-or-not-to-bring water conversation is a front for the guilt of not being the ones sitting in the waiting room themselves.
Every family comes with its own guidebook of unspoken regulations, and in yours, there is communion in misery.
You think to yourself that if anyone was going to be getting dehydrated while sitting for 45 minutes, the hospital waiting room is an excellent place to do it in.
You do not however verbalize these thoughts, because doing so would compromise the family code.
It feels masochistic, but you open the board game. Your self control has always been a limited commodity.
Your first impression is glitter. Not that creating a relationship board game is a subtle undertaking, but does it have to involve such vulgar amounts of glitter?
You can tell just by looking that you spent considerably more time on this board game than on your college dissertation.
You wish you could go back and tell yourself to focus on your dissertation instead. To focus on anything else instead.
2) Drifting off to sleep and waking with a jolt, you realize that you forgot to send your therapist the monkeys.
You said you’d send them to her by Friday, and you did not.
You’d been talking about how it felt like all around you was chaos, and how in normal life you remind yourself, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
But this time it was family, so it felt like it was your circus, and these were your monkeys.
“Interesting,” your therapist had said. “Are they all your monkeys? I wonder, which ones are your monkeys, and which ones aren’t?”
You were supposed to draw your monkeys and send them to her.
You have not done that.
You have however made a five-minute list in your notes app of what might be your monkeys while you were sitting in the examination chair with a little paper skirt over your lap waiting for the dermatologist to come into the room.
You heard somewhere that Taylor Swift writes song lyrics in her notes app. This is reassuring, and makes you feel like your notes app is less hot mess, and more messy genius.
In your defense, you technically hadn’t specified which Friday you would get your therapist the monkeys by.
You wish you could take credit for the gift, but you stole the idea from your brother's old girlfriend who invented Nicholasandcolleenopoly.
They’d also broken up. The board game, evidently, was a curse.
3) Receiving an emergency call from your grandma.
You’ve received many emergency calls from Grandma over the years, and you’ve still yet to witness a single emergency.
She needs a suppository, and can you pick one up from the pharmacy?
You have work to do and deadlines to finish, but based on the number of missed calls, the suppository takes priority.
You call your dad for backstory, because nothing is ever as simple as just going to the pharmacy to buy a suppository.
Your dad says that he thinks she needs a laxative because suppositories are for hemorrhoids, but you should ask her just to double check.
Your grandma tells you to ask the pharmacist, because your dad does not know anything at all about this sort of thing.
You are in the middle of telling the CVS pharmacist the part about how your dad thinks she needs a laxative, but your grandma is certain she wants a suppository, and your dad says that suppositories are for hemorrhoids, and what does she need?
When there’s so many details, you start to feel like you’re lying.
You describe the symptoms in perfect accuracy. You’re convinced the pharmacist thinks you’ve invented a grandma.
Once home, you give Grandma the laxative and she tells you she wanted a suppository. You tell her the pharmacist said she needed a laxative.
“The pharmacist doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she says.
You refrain from commenting because these are probably not your monkeys. Besides, this is still better than playing Michaelandellaopoly.
There’s lots of photos glued to the board and you can’t help but notice that on paper, you look good together.
The board game looks good on paper too.
So good it makes you want to dry heave.
4) Your therapist suggesting that maybe your thinking was getting a little bit stuck. She says it politely, in a way that takes years of schooling to perfect.
There’s no need to soften the delivery, you’re used to it.
Ever since you were a little kid you would lie in bed tracing the outline of the room in your mind, like you had to hold onto the corners to keep them up.
Doctors call it OCD. You call it sticky brain.
Sometimes your brain is sticker than others, it depends on whether or not you remember to take care of yourself.
You lay in bed that night thinking about how maybe your therapist had a point, maybe you were getting sticky brain.
“Sticky brain, sticky brain, sticky brain,” the words repeat, sticking to the inside of your brain.
You wonder why you got stuck with the board game, seeing as it was a present to him.
But you got stuck with a lot from that relationship.
Like packing up the entire apartment on your own. He was busy moving in with his new girlfriend.
You wonder if your brother’s ex-girlfriend got stuck with Nicholasandcolleenopoly as well.
Probably, you think. Women tend to get stuck with most things.
5) Your grandma calling you three times while you’re on the phone with your boyfriend.
Three times, you send the call to voicemail.
You know it’s not an emergency, because you’d just been down to visit a few hours earlier, and there are multiple other people living in the same house as you that she could call if it was serious.
After your phone call is over, you listen to her three voicemails and call her back.
“Yes?” she asks. “What do you need?”
“I’m just returning your calls, Grandma.”
“Oh, I was calling you, because you’d called me. What do you need?”
“I didn’t call you, Grandma,” you say. “You called me. Three times.”
“Because you called me,” she says. “What do you need?”
You decide to call it a truce, and tell her that you’re glad everyone is doing well.
You have no idea what to do with Michaelandellaopoly. Too much of your life was spent making it to just throw it away.
You think about turning it into a drinking game and getting friends together to play.
For a sick second, you think about inviting your ex as well.
6) Your grandma adding a 2023 Christmas photo of your family to your ex-boyfriend’s family photo stream.
You’re not sure why your grandmother has access to:
a) Technology and
b) Your ex’s family photo stream (five years after the breakup)
Both of these things are oversights.
Kind of like the oversight of your ex recently charging $3,000 to your credit card (let’s say it all together now) five years after the breakup.
Apparently you’d forgotten to take him off the account, an oversight on your part. Just like him using the card and not being able to pay you back was an oversight on his part.
Your mom can’t keep a straight face as she tells you about the photo stream.
“Oh God,” you say. “Do I at least look good?” you ask, and lean over to see what photo your grandma posted.
“Nobody really looks that good in the photo,” your mom says. Which makes her laugh even harder.
She is crying with laughter at this point. You’re glad someone is enjoying this.
“There’s worse photos she could have posted,” you say, resigned. There’s better ones too.
Your ex's dad and sister have already liked the photo.
“Do you think it was on purpose?” your mom asks, now thoroughly invested in the photo stream incident.
“Who knows,” you respond. There’s no telling with grandma. She’s still not over the breakup, and asks you on a regular basis how your ex and his family are doing.
She has yet to ask how your current boyfriend is doing.
You’re pretty sure grandma thinks you’re making him up, because he lives in another country. Kind of like how you made a grandmother up, when you were at CVS.
Things are starting to feel a little too Jumanji for your liking.
As if opening the board game has somehow caused the photo stream incident.
7) Doing the dishes after family dinner, you rinse the cutting board that your ex made. Your ex has made, quite literally, half of the furniture in your parents’ house.
You run the cutting board under water as you wash it. You’re not supposed to do this, it warps the wood. You’re supposed to use a damp cloth — something your ex told you a hundred times back when you were together.
Rinsing it under water feels satisfying. It’s petty, but you’re not above petty.
You remember your mom telling you that it would be very convenient to marry a handyman. It was a dig at your dad, who is very much not a handyman.
“If I need a handyman, I will call a handyman,” you remember telling her.
You remember wondering why it felt like who you dated had become a public census. Your own vote being the unpopular opinion.
All of the cards and locations in Michaelandellaopoly are early dating memories, you were drunk for most of them. It’s easy to like someone when you’re drunk.
In one of the pictures you can see your right arm — there’s no scar on it yet. You’ll get that as you’re breaking up.
When you were first dating and had to get a biopsy, your ex took you out for ice cream afterwards. There is no ice cream after the last biopsy.
He watches you do the dishes, even though the doctor said you should rest. It feels like he’s doing it on purpose, as if to show you what your life would be like if he wasn’t in it.
“Good luck without me,” his actions say.
“I don’t need luck,” your actions respond as you clean the house alone, stitches bursting.
8) Reminiscing about when you ended the relationship and your grandma told you that you were making the biggest mistake of your life, and that you’d never find anybody as good as him.
It's been five years, and you’re happy to report that grandma, it turns out, was completely wrong.
The board game makes you mad. You wish you could go back and tell 20-year-old you to just get him a gift card instead.
The remarks of your grandma, and mom, and family, stick to the insides of your brain, and you realize that 20-year-old you doesn't need one more person telling her what to do.
What she needs is the space to make her own mistakes, even if those mistakes mean overstaying in an expired relationship.
It feels prehistoric to hear mention of your ex or to be asked about him.
However the topic still comes up every now and again from those stranded back on Michaelandella island, unaware that ship has since sunk and that you got on a different boat instead. One that led you to another island.
In order to get people over to this new island, you have to row them one by one.
But it’s like that riddle where you can’t leave the fox and the hen alone together, so first you have to take the hen, and then return for the grain, and then bring the hen back when you row the fox over.
It’s a painstaking process and takes patience, so you have to be selective about who you bring.
“Look,” you take their hand to guide them. “This is the island I live on now,” you say.
“It’s not the island I used to share with Michael,” you explain. “It's my own island, and it’s got my own plants, and my own flowers, and why don’t you sit down, and what can I get you to drink?” you ask.
And while literally anything is still better than playing Michaelandellaopoly. Being twenty and making board games for the wrong person was part of what led you to the boat that took you to the island that you now call home.
Besides, you realize with delight. Your brother has a new girlfriend, and she’s never met your ex.