EVE
FIFTH STREET, MY APARTMENT, A ROOM OF MY OWN
The trail of rose petals began at my door and led to the bed. I looked down at my feet, at the faded yellow petals strewn across the wood floor. My initial thought, honestly, was: I am about to get murdered by a very creative serial killer. But then I realized that the petals were familiar. There had been roses of that exact color, in a vase on my kitchen counter, for about a week.
“You used old rose petals?” I went into the kitchen, where Ben was standing in his boxers.
He turned around and looked at me. “Yeah? So?”
“You’re not supposed to use old rose petals!” I started to smile. “You’re supposed to use new ones, assuming this is the romantic gesture that I think it’s supposed to be.”
“But we had roses already.” He looked perplexed.
“We didn’t have anything. I had roses that were about to die.”
“Exactly! They were dying, so I gave them a new purpose. People use new rose petals?”
“Yes!”
“But that’s such a waste.”
I stared at him. “What are you still doing here anyway?”
He shrugged. “Well, after you left, I fell back asleep. And then I decided to be romantic, with the rose petals, so that you’d have something nice to see when you got home. And then I made myself a sandwich, which was delicious, by the way.”
I went at him with a book I grabbed off the table. “Get out!” I swatted him on the shoulder, as if he were a fly. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
“But . . .” He turned and looked helplessly at the kitchen counter, where every single one of my condiment jars was open and had a knife sticking out of it. He took a deep breath, like he was about to say something profound, and used a concerned voice. “But I haven’t even told you about the sandwich yet.”
He started to remove each knife from its appropriated jar and ran them under the tap water. When he was finished, he dried them all off with a towel.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” I said, watching him. “I’m just worried that you’re going to confuse our relationship with a proper one. No rose petals, okay?”
“So you aren’t really my girlfriend?” He smirked, waiting for me to take the bait.
My eyes narrowed on him. “You know that we’re just sleeping together.”
He grinned and interlocked his fingers, stretched them over his head, yawning.
“It’s weird how you keep kicking me out and then the next weekend texting me, I missssssss you, where arrrrre you? What are you up to? Some people might think that you don’t know what you want.”
“Funny. I don’t feel confused.”
He was right, and I was wrong. But that all seemed like much less of a concern if he was no longer in my apartment.
“I’m just not sure why you’re asking me what my plans are on any given Saturday night, when you know that it’s the same answer every time.”
“What?” I said quietly.
“If you go, I’ll go.” He reached for me.
I walked over to the bed, picked up his T-shirt from the floor.
“That’s pathetic,” I said, throwing the shirt at him. He caught it and laughed.
Ben tried to explain, as I was pushing him out the door, that it was the result of serendipity that led him to me, over and over again. In the field of engineering, he said that it could be a measure of great progress to figure something out by chance, something that was not sought after deliberately. It was to stumble upon something much better than what was originally desired.
“It was a fluke,” I said, and then walked away from him, started to clean up my apartment, to gather a few glasses scattered about, collecting them in the sink.
“Synchronicity,” he insisted.
“I don’t know what that means!” I yelled behind me.
Ben took on a professor-like tone. “It’s the idea that just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Rather than being ‘meant to be’ or a result of fate, some things just fall together in time. It’s a principle of explanation, a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality. So I didn’t seek you out. X didn’t cause Y. But I think the fact that we kept running into each other punctured a hole in rationalism. It broke intellectual resistance. We’ve come into each other’s lives over and over again, and that’s fine. No big deal. But because we have, we begin to feel a destiny with each other that tests whether we actually have one, and then we do, because we thought that we might.”
“You thought that we might.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Oh come on. It’s a meaningful coincidence. Look. Think about how easy it would have been for this not to have happened, or for some variation to have taken place instead. That’s the phenomenon of parallel universes, the theory of quantum physics that we are all somehow navigating through alternate worlds that are correlated to our past histories, among the myriad possible other worlds that are not as correlated.”
“I don’t believe in parallel universes.”
“How would you know? Maybe this version of you doesn’t believe, but others might. All I can tell you is that I think back on all those times that we ran into each other and I think, Thank God you were there, you know? You could have been anywhere, in any number of places, and you were there.”
“So this is destiny? Is that your little theory? I don’t think so, Ben.”
“C’mon,” he said. “What are the chances that we’d ever even interact with each other, let alone have the best sex of your life?” He smiled.
“GET OUT!” I shouted.
I watched him get dressed. I didn’t stop him through the T-shirt and pants and belt, but then once he started lacing up his shoes, the guilt came on. I examined the floor around his feet, the brown suede shoes, his hands fiddling with the laces. I thought, What are you doing? I didn’t want him to leave. I went over to him and put my head against his shoulder. He stopped moving.
“I don’t think we should have any more sleepovers,” I said. He laughed and put his arm around my waist.
“No more cuddling then,” he said, his mouth close to my ear, his arms wrapped around me tightly. “Your loss.”
After he left, I picked up the rose petals from the floor and threw them into the garbage. I put everything back in order—dishes and glasses into the dishwasher, the comforter smoothed evenly over the bed, clothes folded into piles. The sun was creating a big block of warm light in the middle of the apartment. I decided to go out for a walk, to get rid of some of the energy inside of me, the chaotic thoughts. I was ready to make the city work for me, as it always did, when I felt this way. I’d walk for a while, stomp the pavement. I’d lose myself in the activity around me, in the strange faces and hodgepodge of stores and restaurants, and then I’d come home, feeling restored. I grabbed a jacket from my closet and bounced down the single flight of stairs, past the double doors, the entrance hallway with its pink tiles lining the walls.
Once outside, my preference was always to go left, toward Astor Square. Fifth Street was a row of walk-ups and townhouses, with trees planted every so often, which made it charming and picturesque. All the buildings on the block were around five stories high. There was very little traffic, few pedestrians walking by. Fifth Street was always my savior. Whenever I turned onto it, I felt an immediate sense of relief. My building was a pink walk-up with a mint-green door and a steep white staircase leading up to it. It was less authentic-looking than the other dark red and brown walk-ups on the block, and more like the cartoon version, but I loved the fact that I could see it from down the street. I told people who came over to look for the “cutest” walk-up on the block, and they always found it easily, the walk-up that looked like it was frosted pink for somebody’s birthday.
As I walked, thoughts about my mother were turning every which way. I hadn’t told Ben yet about her, or about my father. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t worth it, that my relationship with Ben wasn’t important enough. We didn’t talk about our parents. And from what I could tell, his family life was perfect, which would only make me, even more so, the damaged girl. She’ll be so dependent on me, he’ll think. Her father left, and she’ll never trust another man. When Ben returned my mother’s card to me, I could have told him then. I was so relieved to put it back into its rightful place in my wallet. It had felt so empty, with the card gone. I’d kept it there ever since the day she gave it to me. There was nothing extraordinary about the card itself, or about the fact that she gave it to me. At the time, it was a mostly practical measure. She was giving me a way to contact her at work, in case her cell phone wasn’t working. It was actually sort of annoying. “Just don’t turn off your cell,” I had said. “Nobody shuts off their cell phone these days, Mom, like ever.” She had the habit of turning it off when she wasn’t using it, which my sister and I found infuriating.
Looking back on it though, I think she was actually sort of proud of that card. It symbolized something larger—how she’d managed to move on from what happened with my father. She had a new husband and a new job—both located in Manhattan. When she first got the card, she pointed out to us how the letters were raised slightly, explained that that was a sign that they weren’t cheaply made, that the letters were embossed and not simply printed. “Only fancy companies do that,” she’d said. Then she showed us the address, that ever so important address—“downtown Manhattan,” she’d declared, in case we hadn’t noticed.
I had rolled my eyes, took the card, planned to plug the number into my phone and then forget about it, toss it. But then, after a few days had gone by, I found that I rather liked having it in there, tucked away, a small white rectangle that was visible whenever I opened my wallet. It was a reminder of how well she was doing now, and thank God, after all she’d been through. I didn’t have to worry about her anymore. It also served as a kind of connection to her, something that I could feel. And then once she was gone, really gone, I was certainly not removing it then. I guess I liked to think back on that time when she gave it to me, of her desire to protect me.
It was just a small, reassuring object. It wasn’t sentimental, really, but it was her, present. I pictured her outstretched hand, handing it to me, with no idea of the wrenching moments that would come later. I literally could not remove it from my wallet. It was silly, no rhyme or reason to keep it there. I had more sentimental things, so many objects that meant more, but the card reminded me, each time I saw it, of the first time I saw it, a time before, when my life was intact, not perfect of course, but intact. Back when I had more of a grip on things, a safety net beneath me. Don’t get me wrong. There were a few holes in the net. I’d discovered them over the years, one cavernous hole for my father, but I knew where the holes were, and I was grateful for the part that was strung together. At least I had that. Actually, you know what, I wasn’t grateful for it. It was just there. I lived my life, dealt with whatever small problems came up, and it was just there, in case I needed it. But then when it was gone, I so missed that time. I missed life with that hole-filled but somewhat solid object beneath me, life before it all became untethered, before I found myself not tied to anything. The funny thing was I kept looking around for a replacement—left, right, up, down—scanning for something to ground me. I didn’t care. Just tie me to something! It wasn’t like I was alone, really. I had my sister and friends and various certified adults who cared, my mother’s friends, my stepfather. But it wasn’t enough. It felt profoundly like not enough. Losing my mother, the biggest adjustment was to a life untethered. I had this feeling like I could do anything and go anywhere and it wouldn’t matter, like nobody was keeping track of me. I had this freedom that I hated.
It was dark outside by the time I got home. Emma was sitting on the steps in front of my building, bags piled next to her.
“Learn to answer your phone,” she said, and then gave me her signature look of hostility.
“I couldn’t hear it on the street,” I replied, coming up the stairs. “I thought you were coming later.”
“My friends are already out,” she said. “I need to eat before I meet up with them, and Arthur says I have to spend time with you first.”
“That’s very generous of you.” I unlocked the door, and she walked ahead of me.
“Look at this place,” she said. “Everything is so ordered and immaculate. It’s so unrepresentative of who you are.”
She was wearing jeans and a sweater, but she had long blond hair and long legs, so everything that she wore made her look statuesque. Her hair had gotten blonder lately, which made her look more like our mother. “Where’s a good place to get food?” She got on her phone and started typing. “Are you hungry? Do you want anything?” she asked.
An hour later, she was lying on my floor with a salad and a container of french fries. Emma drifted between my apartment and Arthur’s, while she saved up to afford her own place. Arthur and I didn’t mesh, didn’t have any chemistry. Basically: if life were a sitcom, Arthur and I would never have been given our own subplot. We were okay, as two parts of a larger group, but the writers would never have put us alone together. Emma was better with him. They talked a lot about sports. Even went to a few games together, a James Taylor concert. But whenever Arthur and I were alone together, silence blanketed the room.
“I can’t believe he’s not driving you bonkers,” I said to her. “When I lived there, he annoyed the hell out of me. So many jokes.”
Arthur couldn’t pick out a tomato at the grocery store without making conversation with those around him, without doing a little comedy routine in the produce aisle. When waitresses at restaurants asked him for his drink order, he said, “Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm,” with great joy, as if there was such great joy in being asked, and then declared his choice with gusto, as if he were giving them the thrill of the century.
“I don’t get annoyed,” Emma said plainly. And I thought, Right. Emma behaved as if everything didn’t affect her, whereas I always felt like I was wrenched out from underneath.
“Have you heard his latest ringtone?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“ ‘Stayin’ Alive’?”
“Yeah, I think it went off when we were at dinner once.”
“I never thought I would hear that song so many times in my life.”
“Yeah,” she said distantly. “It’s an odd choice.”
I sat there in silence as Emma got up to use my computer. I lay on my bed. She barely regarded me, or looked up from her typing. She eyed the notepad that was next to the computer, and then picked it up, held it in front of my face. I looked closer. At the bottom of the page, it read, “Remind me to tell you something about LES Jewels.”
I took it from her, ripped the sheet from the pad, and crumpled the paper into a ball. The note was from Ben. LES Jewels, a.k.a. Lower East Side Jewels, was a homeless person known throughout the East Village. Ben and I had seen him the night before, asking for spare change outside of Tompkins Square Park, and then again by Ray’s Candy Store. LES Jewels knew everybody. He was what one might call a lovable neighborhood eccentric. He talked to people. But he was also mentally ill and kind of a problem. He would stop cars in the middle of the street and refuse to move. Ben and I often discussed him, along with the other characters who frequented the East Village, but Ben was the one who drifted into full-on research mode about it, always coming up with new tidbits to tell me.
“Who is this from?” Emma asked. “And why are you smiling so much?” I forced my face into a frown and studied her. She stood up, looked at my closet with a thin layer of mistrust. She rifled through the T-shirts that were folded near the foot of the bed.
“What is going on?” she demanded, holding up a COLUMBIA ENGINEERING T-shirt.
I gave her a wide-eyed look. “What if I were dating someone? Would that be so crazy?”
She made a face as if she were sucking on something sour. “Who would date you?”
She smiled and sat down in my desk chair. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “Sort of.” She grabbed the paper and pen and started writing.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just some guy.”
“What guy?”
“This guy, Ben.”
“Who is he? Do you have a secret boyfriend?” Every now and then, Emma still fell into the role of the younger sister who didn’t want to be left out. The one screaming “Welcome to the family!” to my childhood crush.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said quickly. “Last night, we went to this stupid Christmas party in the community gardens on Ninth Street. There was this potluck and they built a fire in a wheelbarrow and . . .” I started to talk about the party, getting increasingly animated. “There was this guy there, Biker Bill. He’s one of the Hells Angels. You know the Hells Angels? He has a ponytail and a goatee and he’s this huge guy. Everyone calls him Biker Bill. Anyway, Biker Bill was like . . . not moving from in front of this fire and the cops started coming by. There was this man claiming to be a veteran paratrooper with a gun collection. It was a bunch of weirdos. Anyway, Lower East Side Jewels tried to put out the fire with his shoe and . . .”
“Why’d you go to that?”
I shrugged. “I thought I’d get a story out of it.”
She looked confused. “Why?”
“I thought I’d find out more about C-squat, that abandoned building on Avenue C that squatters live in.”
She stared at me blankly.
“Ben told me about it. I had no idea it even existed, but then I started reading. Basically, in the nineties, all these squatters got evicted from this building on Avenue C but some managed to stay. There are apartments, and in the basement they put on punk shows. And, like, good shows sometimes. Some of the members of this really influential turn-of-the-century punk band still live there. Oh! I met this girl at the party who is in mortuary school.” I raised my eyebrows. “She actually climbed to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. She also broke into a building in Times Square and showed me a picture of her looking down on this big crowd from up above. She told me an insane story about her boyfriend and how she accused him of killing her dog and they had to get an autopsy because she didn’t believe that he didn’t kill the dog. . . . Who has a situation like that? Anyway, the whole C-squat thing fascinated me, because so many musicians lived there and some still do. There’s also a lot of drug use and people stealing from one another but I just wanted to find out more about this weird housing situation.”
“Why? So that you could go there and look for dates?”
“No!” I yelled, and then glared at her. “Because I thought it might make for a good story for Voice.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you,” she spat. “Is that where Ben lives?”
I tilted my head to the side. “Ben is a structural engineer who lives in Hoboken.”
“So why don’t you like him?” she said. “Is he actually nice?”
“Yeah . . .” I thought about it for a second. “He is pretty nice. And what’s sort of cool about him is that you think he’s this normal engineer guy but then he knows everything about all these random things. But I can tell that he doesn’t have any real issues. And that’s kind of what I don’t like about him, you know?”
She tried to absorb this. “You are fucking psycho,” she said, looking at me with not the slightest smile and tugging at the frayed edges of her sweater.
“I know,” I told her. “I sound crazy.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t sound crazy, you actually are crazy.”
Since I was the older sibling and a very mature adult, I would refrain from reminding her that she too had her own issues. Emma was famous for having nine hundred male friends, and zero boyfriends. When we were growing up, they would come over to our house, act like they virtually worshipped the ground she walked on, and she would carry on framing photographs they had taken for her and setting up the television with some show to watch together. Many of them even confided in me, looking to me for some insight. I merely sympathized and explained that Emma was different. I think the whole idea of a relationship terrified her. It was too illogical.
But I wouldn’t say any of this to Emma. We weren’t sisters who were best friends. We were sisters who were sisters. We had the same natural tendencies. Our voices were impossible to distinguish. Certain small gestures were identical. But in other ways, we were complete opposites. The way that we reacted to what happened with our parents was different. We both felt the losses, but we managed them separately. I tried to shield myself from future pain by studying everyone around me. Emma watched horror movies before she went to sleep at night. When she got older, she went out. A lot. One morning when she was seventeen, I found her passed out in the kitchen of Arthur’s apartment. She claimed that she had inhaled too many helium balloons at a party, which seemed totally plausible to Arthur but not to me. I found out later that she’d slept with someone’s boyfriend and got herself banned from a graduation party.
Then there was one time that she got high with her friends in our shared bathroom in Arthur’s apartment and left a candle burning overnight and caused a small fire. Even months later, the incident didn’t leave her so easily. She’d feel anxious over something and then say: “I think it’s also the fire.” She asked questions about it. How fast can fire spread? Do you think I could have burned down the whole apartment? Is it because this apartment is old? What happens to a fire in a new apartment? Is it true that doorknobs get hot the fastest? She passed her hand over the candles at restaurants and tried to put them out with her fingertips. She had nightmares about explosions and the apartment burning down. Arthur took her to see a psychiatrist, who told her that it wasn’t about the fire but what she associated with the fire. The doctor said that the shock of the fire was causing Emma to reexperience the trauma of our father leaving. She explained that shock could remain in people’s systems for a long time, and it could manifest itself in a variety of ways.
When our mother died, I thought it would all go to hell, but Emma went away to school in North Carolina and actually came back more grounded. It was as if she’d gone through a tunnel and come out the other side. She decided that she wanted to be a CEO. “Of what kind of company?” I asked. Apparently, it didn’t matter. “I don’t care. I just want to be the boss,” she said. She came up with ideas. I was a bad judge of them. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking her seriously. In my mind, she was frozen at age twelve. Who would listen to her? Even sitting in my room now, when she said, “I have to jump on a conference call quickly,” my first thought was: That’s hysterical.
She went back to the computer but remained astonished, even as her eyes focused on the screen. She got up.
“Eve.” She sighed. “You want to be disturbed, be disturbed. I can’t stop you.”
“I’m not being disturbed. I like Ben. He’s nice, but he’s also kind of boring to me for some reason.”
“Because he’s not addicted to heroin?”
“No . . . we just aren’t . . . the same person.”
“So?”
“So . . . he isn’t my type.”
“Because he’s not addicted to heroin.”
“Stop.”
“Go to C-squat. Shoot heroin. Live there among your people.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. Her anger arrived without notice. “We had some bad things happen to us. And I’m sure some psychologist somewhere could have a field day with the connection between our dad leaving and our future relationships with men, or the loss of our mother and how that somehow echoed the loss of our father years earlier. But you’re choosing to hang on to this.”
“I don’t think that—”
“It was like that time when we were younger and we went to the grocery store and you picked out a loaf of bread and then you decided later that you didn’t actually want the loaf of bread so you put it back with the olives, and you felt so bad that it wasn’t with the other breads that you made me go back to the store with you ‘to put it back with its bread friends,’ so that it would have a greater chance of being purchased. And then, even after we put it back, that night, you were all ‘What do you think happened with the bread? Do you think someone bought it? Do you think some nice couple took it home with them?’ You named it and gave it a whole personality and kept talking about it like we abandoned it. And it was kind of funny, of course. But it was also kind of like you projected all your own psychological issues onto this loaf of bread, instead of realizing, like a normal person, that bread doesn’t have feelings. It was like you wanted to have this big abandonment issue. Well, fine. It’s there for you if you need it, that’s for sure. And nobody is going to take it away from you. Except for you.”
I was watching her like she was sharpening a knife in front of me. She kept going. She controlled the conversation with authority, an “I’m an adult now” voice that only came out on certain occasions, when our mother used to tell her what size sweater to buy or what to eat for breakfast.
“You feel an obligation to be this way,” she went on. “And honestly, I understand why you were like this. But now? Still? I think you’re just scared of what would happen if you didn’t have this to fall back on. It’s been in your system for so long and you’ve become awfully good at accommodating it. It’s like, a long time ago, you decided you’d never be happy.”
“Listen,” I interrupted her, not sure how she’d gotten me so riled up. “I’m not going to sit here and have you psychoanalyze me. Everyone has issues. You have yours.”
Why couldn’t Emma just tell me that she felt the same way? That would actually help. I would think, See? We are all just humans trying to get by! Life! We are all just a little bit overwhelmed. I wanted to explain about Ben, in a way that would make sense to her. I almost told her about his lame attempt at fate or “meant to be” as a reason why I could never date him. She would have found this to be utterly preposterous. I wanted to scream: I might disappoint him. Yes, I could envision a time when I would disappoint him. It was like an invisible wall that I couldn’t break through. Or wouldn’t break through. I didn’t know which anymore. That was the most frightening part, that Emma was right. I was the one who was keeping this problem around.
When she finished changing her clothes into “going out” attire, a black sweater with holes and red lipstick, she stepped back from the mirror and surveyed me.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that,” she said. “If you don’t like this guy, then fine. But don’t be one of those damaged people, because that’s what happened to us, but it isn’t who you are. Do you have any candy?”
For a split second, her face looked just like the little girl she used to be, who wouldn’t leave me alone, who doted on me and followed me around until I let her in on my games. It was a time before—before she had her own friends, before red lipstick and thrift-store jeans and road trips to San Francisco with some guy with angular features who I worried would kick her out of the car by Vegas.
“You always wanted to understand everything,” she said, banging around in my kitchen. She came back with a fistful of jelly beans. “Like, take Dad for example. You wanted to understand what he did, but I always felt like he was like a turtle.” She crossed my bedroom and shoved all her clothes into a bag.
“What?”
“He was an unknowable mystery. Who knows why a turtle does what it does? I have no idea. Would you even try to understand? Do you ever watch a turtle roaming around and think, Hmmm, I wonder why it went that way? I wonder why it ate that plant? I wonder why it likes that rock?”
“No,” I said, with a smile.
“Exactly. You have to think of Dad as a turtle. And we as a civilization just don’t understand the psychological motivations of turtles that well.”
“You can’t yell at me for personifying bread and then compare Dad to a turtle.”
“We are sisters after all!” she replied, and then came over to me. I opened my hand instinctually. She dropped a few jelly beans into my open palm, the flavors that she didn’t like but that I did.
When she was ready to leave, I walked her down the stairs and out the door. As I watched her moving along Fifth Street and farther away, I felt an unexpected pang. She must have been feeling it too, because after she’d walked about halfway down the block, she turned to look back at me and I thought, We are sisters after all. This is what it’s like to have a sister. You’re not having a great time together. You sit across from each other and you talk about the issues of the day—whether some guy she’s texting with is really busy at work, how busy can a person be? Or is he blowing her off? You give her advice that she half takes. You say variations of what your mother used to tell you both. You say, Focus on work; make a date with someone else; stop worrying about things you can’t control; a watched pot never boils! It is almost always the case that one of you is single and the other is not. The one who is not gives the advice, careful not to seem too smug or condescending. The one who is single tries not to seem hostile, to just take the advice because, really, she can’t afford to create any enemies right now and she knows that you have the best intentions but she also can’t be bothered to mask her annoyance. If you were her friend and not her sister, she would pep up a little bit more, she would be more upbeat, more receptive, and more outwardly grateful. She would say things like “Thanks!” and “That’s really helpful!” But she’s your sister, so she sits there with a frown on her face, as if your advice is some kind of imposition. But she’s not not listening. She’s not not paying attention. So you can feel free to keep speaking, if that suits you, if that thrills you. And then you both sit there in semicomfortable silence, secretly wishing you were with a friend and wondering why it’s awkward and then consoling yourself with the fact that at least you’re not alone. You think: Why does she have to be in such a bad mood? Couldn’t she put on the slightest bit of an act for me? I’m a person too. Doesn’t she realize that? You glance at the clock and think it’ll be a relief to part ways, to have only one of you in the room to deal with. Sometimes it’s a little bit too much, having two people together with such similarities. So you part ways. And at first it is a relief. But then you realize it’s a little bit harder than you thought it would be. You hadn’t anticipated that the separation would make you feel anything. But it’s only apparent during the process of separating. It only hurts when she walks away. You smile widely, you wave at each other in an overly enthusiastic way that makes you both laugh, because, yeah right, like this is such a big deal? You give each other strange exaggerated looks of being frightened for no reason, because you’re not actually frightened. But you both know. It’s a “good luck out there!” kind of look. It’s not about anything specific. It’s about life. It’s an acknowledgment that you’re moving through it separately and hoping the best for each other. She keeps walking, and eventually you can’t see her anymore. It’s official. You’re apart. But she’s not abandoning you. She’s back to her life and you’re back to yours. And that’s fine. You still think, you still feel, on some visceral level, like you could almost cry, but then it passes. A few minutes pass and it’s okay. It’s really okay.
After she left, I went back inside and called Ben. “All right,” I said, when he picked up. “Tell me about the sandwich.”