One Dozen Alternate Realities in Which I Am Not Incapacitated When You Move A Thousand Miles Away Without Saying Goodbye

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1. In Which I Install the Air Conditioner Myself

“You’re not supposed to be here ’til Friday,” I complain, out loud, when it arrives two days early. I blink at the Frigidaire box as if it might be a minor hallucination, but there it still is on the checkered floor of the lobby of my apartment building, all forty-one pounds of it, the “THIS SIDE UP” arrow pointing defiantly at the wall. It’s sitting next to the mailboxes like something innocent and far less cumbersome—a magazine subscription, perhaps; a flyer promising to save me money on car insurance. I timed the order so that it would arrive the same day you were supposed to arrive, and I have no contingency plan for transferring it from the floor of my lobby to the window of my sunroom, now that it’s here two days early, now that you’ve decided you’re not coming at all.

You were supposed to be here in forty-eight hours. In forty-eight hours, you were supposed to walk off the train from St. Louis, a city close enough for us to maintain an unidentifiable love story. In forty-eight hours I was supposed to be sitting in the empty lounge, Chicago’s Union Station in the middle of the night, trying not to throw up, searching masked faces anxiously, struggling to identify yours because as usual I’d have left my glasses at home. In forty-nine hours you were supposed to be asleep in my bed, your body pressed into mine like a boot into damp soil, that’s the whole reason I bought this a/c, the only one that guaranteed delivery before Friday. You were supposed to help me install it in the window, and I hate asking for help but I asked you anyway because you love being asked, especially about something like this, some manly task that would allow you to prove those arms don’t just look good, they really work, too.

“Do you have a screwdriver?” you’d asked me, skeptically, when I texted you about it.

“Of course I have a screwdriver,” I scoffed. I was offended like someone handy might be offended, as if I’m the kind of person who snakes their own drains and changes their own tires instead of calling AAA, but you said you couldn’t wait to help me install it. You said you were looking forward to these kinds of ordinary, mundane activities: shaving my head as I sit on the bathroom floor, pushing a plastic cart ahead of us at the grocery store, folding sheets that come out of the dryer soft and burning. It didn’t matter, you said, that nothing is open here, you just wanted to be in my general vicinity one last time before you moved away for good, one last time when we were close enough to reach out and touch.

I believed you, almost, and still I fired back, not kindly, “Hopefully the car doesn’t fall off the jack”—a sarcastic reference to the first time we tried and failed to love each other, back when I was still living in St. Louis and our first breakup was months away. It was mid-January when I got the flat and watched you lower yourself onto the ground while I stood on the curb, stomping my feet against the cold. Three times you cranked my car up on the jack and three times it rolled right off. I called AAA and called them again to cancel when you finally figured it out.

“Tell them your butch-ass partner got it,” you joked, pleased with yourself, and the next morning the lady at the tire shop you recommended said it was the most flats they’d ever seen in one night, and I felt like I was part of something bigger than me, bigger than us.

Pausing on every landing, then again on every floor, I manage to lug the a/c up three flights of stairs over the course of forty-five minutes. Once it’s in my apartment I shuffle it onto a blanket so I can drag it over to the window, while my dog prances around with his tongue lolling, as if it’s you that’s going to come out of this box. I open my toolbox and stare at the array of screwdriver heads, all twenty-four of them. I select the smaller Phillips, but when I try to use it there’s a sound like a whip and the head crumbles into the top of the screw, just crumbles like it’s made of sand and not some kind of hard, indestructible metal, as I had assumed.

I blow the dust off the top of the unit, gently, the way you used to blow on the end of a stick of incense after lighting it, a feeble cover for all the blunts you rolled on your IKEA coffee table. I keep trying different heads until I find another one that fits. With the top rail secured, I hoist the whole apparatus up into my basket chair, then balance it on my knee while I ease it into the window, which doesn’t even have a sill. Perched there precariously, all forty-one pounds, the a/c looks dangerous, like it could kill us all, which is true and not an exaggeration, in the right context. I inch it further and further back and once everything is in alignment I can’t believe how much of its ass is sticking out the window with nothing supporting it, at least three-quarters of all that bulk, coolant and coils and metal, and if it falls out of the window it’s going to bring at least two others down with it and there’s no way that wouldn’t reap some kind of awful consequence—all those combustible chemicals mixing with gravity.

But the top window slides into place over the top rail as if the two pieces were made for each other, and the accordion side panels click shut knowingly with barely a tug, and it’s been chugging along devotedly all day long, four mortal screws standing between three-hundred square feet of comfortable recycled air and an explosion on the concrete.

2: In Which I Follow in the Footsteps of Fiona Apple Circa 1996

My friend Mars is talking about her ex, the Big Bad Ex. We all have one and it makes me glad that you’re not mine, that I never loved you as hard or as long as I loved someone else first—a sickening, triumphant feeling like pushing on a bruise to see where it hurts.

“I could never be with someone who doesn’t think I’m a genius,” Mars’s Big Bad Ex recently told her, adding her unsolicited opinion that Mars’s current girlfriend looks like a real estate agent. It’s a snarky normie insult that makes me cackle, then cringe, thinking of all the similar words I’ve selected and sharpened and administered to convince myself I am superior, I am singular. My own Big Bad Ex once called me a “black hole” and I imagine myself swallowing you both, spitting you out into separate alternate universes where nothing makes sense.

I don’t miss you, that’s the truth. Another truth is that any truth may be an illusion: the consequence of the weather or self-medication or ignorance of proper mourning mechanics, so that three years later I’ll wake up in the middle of the night missing you in the roots of my teeth. “I can’t do the distance,” you said. You wanted to move in with me and I wasn’t ready, would maybe never be ready, and I hope it will hit you later, too, once you’re settled in Boston with a new job and a roommate—how this is your fault as much as it is mine.

“I am the common denominator,” I explain, when Mars asks why I’m not friends with any of my exes. She insists it’s just a coincidence, that all of them have their reasons and that doesn’t make it my fault, but that seems unlikely, statistically speaking. When I confess, “I behaved badly,” Mars laughs and asks, “Were you careless with a delicate man?” A reference to the second line of Fiona Apple’s 1996 hit “Criminal,” perfectly placed.

After our last fight I told you I wish you all the best, but I lied. I hope nobody ever fucks you the way I fucked you that afternoon in January when we found our way back to each other, a year after you changed my tire in the snow. “Apocalyptic,” I texted Mars, after, when she asked if it was good. You said you’d never had sex like that and I wonder if you were telling the truth, or if it only felt like the truth at the time, or if it was true then but it’s not anymore.

“I know I’m a jealous, unforgiving person but I think what this has taught me is that I’m gonna have to get comfortable with polyamory,” I sigh to Mars. “My sex drive isn’t high enough to meet the needs of the average person, let alone someone who injects fifty milligrams of T into their ass every Monday night.”

Mars makes a disgusted kind of sound. “Who told him the world is supposed to meet all of his needs,” she scoffs, more a statement than a question. “Who told us that’s what we are owed by love.”

Yes, I was careless. Yes, you were delicate, so much more breakable than I realized. What if we just accepted that our stomachs will sometimes be empty? How would that change absolutely everything? “I love the way your brain works,” you told me, earnestly, after reading one of my essays—not “you’re a genius,” but close enough. When Mars says, now, “I think he’s still in love with you,” I don’t have the heart to correct her.

3: In Which I Turn 30 and Nobody Notices Except My Sister,

who FedExes me a burned CD and a framed picture of me and my dog, beautifully homemade with oil pastels; and my best friend Jocelyn, who sends me a Himalayan salt lamp and a derby pie via priority mail.

For a while it was you and me and the dog, a miniature makeshift family more forgiving, more safe, than any I had ever known. You asked me, before the big fight, if I wanted to do anything special to celebrate my birthday, but I didn’t expect you to contact me today and you don’t. You promised we’d spend the day together, but instead I sit at the farm-to-table restaurant around the corner, reading alone while the waitress jokes about how exciting it is to be carded at the age of 37 with the men at the table six feet away. “I was the same as you,” writes the narrator of the book I’m reading, “less a person and more a hole cut away from everything.”

Tonight, the lamp will sit there glowing soft like a lantern in a cave above my turntable, helping me sleep. Joce says it’s something about the salt in the air.

4: In Which I Construct a New Family Out of Inanimate
Objects and Appliances

I trudge over to my dresser for a sweatshirt—that’s how cold it is even when I crank the a/c to LOW. All my favorite shirts used to be your shirts. This one releases a trapped, decayed sort of smell when I shake it out, probably from the moving boxes. You once told me, when you picture me, it’s this exact ensemble I’m wearing—your hoodless sweatshirt that says END GENDER over some extra-long Fruit of the Loom briefs—and I felt so seen I started crying. I pull the fabric to my nose and sniff but I only detect detergent. I can’t locate where the bad smell is coming from.

You still have my Taco Bell t-shirt, the one my mom wore when she was pregnant with me. I wore it for a week at the end of March and then sent it to you in the mail, smelling like baby powder and Lever soap, when COVID meant we couldn’t be together for your birthday. Remember how you cried when you had to wash it because you and your roommates got ringworm from the stray kitten? Remember how you lost the pack of cigs I left behind the last time I was in your general vicinity, right before COVID started, close enough to reach out and touch? “Cancer sticks,” you called them. When you first booked your trip you asked if I had nice toilet paper and I told you it was fine, not the kind they use to stock elementary school bathrooms but also not the kind that’s plush, padded with multiple layers. You asked me to get your hot sauce from the fridge when I went back to clean my old apartment, scrubbed the walls and baseboards with bleach for two whole days, so hard and long the skin peeled off my hands, and I did. Now it will sit in my new one until it expires and I rinse it down the drain.

Someone switched the faucets in my shower so that the crank labeled COLD is actually hot and the crank labeled HOT is actually cold. When I turn on the hot water by accident, there’s a sound like a garbage truck and a smell like hair caught in a blow-dryer. I am momentarily afraid, then put my face up to the screen in the window and realize it’s all coming from the outside. The sound like a garbage truck is an actual garbage truck, which is a bummer, metaphorically speaking. I take a cold shower with the window open and the door closed behind me so the cold air from the a/c can stay trapped in my sunroom, hover around the bed. I keep a wary eye on the wasp that’s been hanging around outside the window for two days, looking for something I hope it doesn’t find. When I get out of the shower I notice two ingrown hairs around the rim of my right nipple; I try to dig them out with tweezers, but all I find is blood.

Joce texts me, “For real,” and I can’t remember what she’s replying to but it’s nice that she agrees. I keep referring to the Himalayan salt lamp, incorrectly, as a lava lamp. It makes me feel calm when I think of my leftovers in the fridge, how pad thai tastes when it’s a day old, heated up in the microwave—your favorite way to eat Kraft Mac & Cheese. “Can microwaves sense the weight of things?” I asked Joce the night before, but she didn’t know, and neither of us bothered to look it up.

Most of the time I feel nothing and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night wanting to howl. “Where are you,” I might wail, vaguely, beating my fists against any surface, even though I know the only answer that matters is: not here. There is a safety in things, obviously. Material possessions, familiar objects, the way they behave reliably and are always there where you left them. My life is happening all around me. You’re the boot. I’m the soil.

The day after you canceled your trip I ran out of toilet paper. I bought a four-pack on sale for ninety-nine cents and it feels exactly how I’d expect ninety-nine-cent toilet paper to feel.

5: In Which I Excel at the Small and Meaningless Tasks I
Assign Myself

Along with the toilet paper, I buy a sixty-pack of antacids and a cantaloupe and a bouquet of cheerful summer flowers. I cut up the cantaloupe and the flowers and arrange them artfully in square glass vases which I then distribute evenly around my apartment, one in every room. I plug extension cords into other extension cords and hammer nails into my freshly painted walls and when they don’t go all the way in I pull them out and move them a few inches to the right or left and hammer them in again. The property manager has yet to label my mailbox so I write J CONNELLY on a piece of painter’s tape and plaster it above the keyhole. I drink tap water out of plastic cups and deposit dirty utensils into the dishwasher sleeve, no more than seven to a socket. Sometimes I move them around. Whenever I need to write something down I remove all the pens from the chipped coffee mug on my desk and take them apart, then line up the ink capsules so I can see which ones have the most life left in them. I keep the ink levels consistent. I swallow an antacid and the relief is so immediate I wonder whether the pain was psychosomatic. The callous on my big toe is so sharp I can use it to scratch an itchy bug bite on my other calf. I underline this sentence in the book I’m reading: “The hours would be years again and he would mostly just be scared.” In the margins I write, insightfully, “a very good sentence.” I copy it down word for word on the next page. I use a slightly modified version of it in a journal entry, hoping I’ll forget, when I read it later, that it was never mine.

6: In Which I Start Swiping Right on Cishet Dudes on Tinder

One guy calls himself a “relationship anarchist” and messages me about a socially distant art walk today. I don’t tell him I plan to continue sitting here next to my a/c, wrapped in a gingham comforter at the start of July. Already, responding to messages feels like a chore. When Joce asks how Tinder’s going, I tell her, “It’s just what I do when my heart is broken.” I swipe left on anyone I think you’d find hot or interesting, anyone who looks and sounds nothing like me.

Another guy informs me the term “indie” doesn’t mean what it used to mean when it was first coined in the ’70s-’80s, simply to distinguish independent record labels from major ones. “I am far from a historian in this area, though,” he backtracks, sheepishly, when I reply, “wow.” He asks if I prefer asynchronous or synchronous communication and I don’t know what he means.

Another guy asks if I want to “connect” this weekend. He says he works in “cannabis— legit cannabis,” as if street dealing is not legit. You once told me you haven’t been financially stable since you got clean and quit dealing years ago, that you used to keep cash everywhere: under the couch cushions, rolled up in one of your five pairs of socks, in a paper bag on the shelf in the freezer.

Another guy says he used to be a “blackout boy.” Me too, but he’s referring to curtains, not alcohol. He found that in the winter it depressed him, the heavy fabric blocking out the sun, so now he wakes up with the daylight. I learn this after noticing a 6:45 a.m. timestamp on one of his messages. “Sorry you were awake at dawn while I was sleeping thirteen hours like a fucking teenager,” I type, and he replies, “Honestly that’s hot.”

It’s been many years, but here is a stereotype I remember about cishet dudes: they are easy to thrill. “I guess curious if you are someone who likes a regular exchange of messages throughout a day, or if you like playing text tag, responding hours later,” the indie music historian is explaining. “Sometimes I like talking throughout the day and other times it seems like the worst possible use of my time.”

I’m not sure I have any real interest in “connecting” with cishet men—it just seems like the logical conclusion of being so wildly attracted to you. I don’t know how you’d feel about me doing this, if it would feel validating, or if it would make you feel insecure, or, more likely, if you wouldn’t have any opinion whatsoever, now that we are so profoundly disconnected. I was always trying to guess your feelings. I was always helping you name and navigate them and at the beginning it made me feel special, like I understood you in a way no one else could, but the beginning only lasts so long, even when it happens twice. Pretty soon it’s the middle, where I’m screaming, “Trying is the bare minimum,” and you’re so enraged you can’t speak.

My Tinder profile says, “Please be able to name a feeling”—a vindictive little dig which has been a big hit with my matches. I find myself repeating the same jokes and anecdotes so frequently I’ve started saving them to my phone clipboard so I don’t have to scroll and scroll and copy and paste or, worse, retype. I guess I’m more of an asynchronous communicator, except when I’m obsessed with someone. Maybe I will never become obsessed with someone again. Maybe I will start eating fiber and learn about boundaries.

Pretty much everything feels like the worst possible use of my time. I chew on a Sour Patch Kid and swipe right on a beaming white dude named Kyle. It’s not a match.

7: In Which I Dream My Mouth is Always Full of Dirty Water

I keep releasing it accidentally everywhere I go—on a crowded train platform, at a picnic table populated by all my exes except you, in the juice aisle at Jewel. When I wake up, I take my dog out and see an old man vomiting onto the sidewalk, clutching a plastic bag of groceries, knuckles white, hands shaking.

8: In Which I Keep Mistaking the Smart Car Parked Outside
My Building for Yours

It looks just like the one you’re trying to sell for three grand except it’s not missing the door panel and every time I see it I want to scream, “Just because that’s how much you owe on it doesn’t mean that’s how much it’s worth.” Yesterday I spotted the owner, for the first time, and he was so completely not you: white and nervous and bespectacled, flop of light brown hair unruly on his pasty forehead, button-down shirt tucked into belted khakis, everything just a little too big on his wispy frame.

A truth I must consider: you, too, are singular. You’d probably ask me what that means because you were always asking me what something means, forcing me to slow down, choose better words or fewer of them, and I loved this about you. You’d probably ask me what that means, and while it’s true that I could say “not like anyone else”—clean, simple, there, done— I’d probably say something about how you eat peanut M&Ms by biting off half the chocolate and gently pulling out the peanut with your front teeth, how you eat Oreos by piercing the cream with a fork and can’t stand it when the volume on the TV is set to an even number. I’d say something about the vague pleasure you get from a dentist scraping around your gums, the weighted-blanket kind of pressure you prefer to soft touches, how the first night we met you asked me to sit on your feet. I’d talk about how you’ve pulled your friend’s dead body out of a wrecked car but you can’t be in the same room with a spider, how you always ask before you take, how you’d rather call than text, how you hate pears and Christmas songs and tags on your clothes. I’d remind you of that time you offered to “take the sticks off the grapes,” try to explain what your face does when you first wake up in the morning or what it does when someone puts on a Nicki Minaj video or what it was doing that night in Boystown when that drunk woman kept falling all over you and apologizing, but I wouldn’t be able to articulate it. Your face is a whole language, I’d say, and you’d rub at your eyebrows as if trying to rearrange them, you’d demand different words. Your face is a whole language, I’d repeat, frustrated and urgent as if the sentence was about to expire, and you’d probably shrug, then teach me something about Morse code.

When I spotted him, the Smart car guy was carrying a cardboard tray and had left a sign in his windshield: DELIVERY IN PROGRESS. When we first met, you were still making money delivering for Postmates. You were using they/them pronouns and your birth name with an extra x at the end and it seems impossible, now, that I ever called you by a name other than the one you’ve chosen for yourself, that you ever said “I love you” in my general direction.

9: In Which I Go On Several Dates with a Violinist Who
Never Kisses Me

She, too, is so completely not you, so much so that it takes me aback, the first time I see her standing there on the corner with the sleeves of her t-shirt cuffed and the black tattoos trailing down the back of her neck, blond hair cropped short, face clean and clear and open. We sit in the park drinking coffees out of plastic cups while I sweat through my binder and try to remember if it was this easy with you, that first night at the Gelateria when the snow fell in fat heavy flakes outside the window. Does every beginning contain its own doom, I wonder, waving goodbye to her from across the street, thinking about all the times I’ve fucked up a good thing.

A week later she’s in my apartment, studying my wall of books and talking about slowly getting rid of all of hers. “I have a problem holding onto things I don’t really use,” she explains. She says her tastes are simple, that she likes superhero movies, young adult fantasy novels, stories where there are characters who are unequivocally good and characters who are unequivocally bad. She informs me that Sour Patch Kids are vegan, and Junior Mints, too, but not Andes Mints, which list all kinds of animal products as ingredients, including lactose. I didn’t realize lactose was a thing unto itself, not just a category of other things. She says you’re either a Friends person or a Seinfeld person, which is correct, but she’s a Friends person, which is incorrect. I can’t imagine you watching either of these shows. “White people TV,” you’d probably say, wrinkling your nose the way you did when you declared that the word “dichotomy” sounds like a chip dip, and you’d probably be right.

Another week and I’m taking the 50 south from Ravenswood to the end of the line, swigging vodka out of a water bottle while “OK Computer” blares through my headphones. “I might need to drag you to Jewel,” the violinist apologizes, via text, because she has no food in the house besides rice cakes and peanut butter. “I consent to being dragged,” I reply, a little drunk already, trying too hard to be charming. Later, when I tell her fresh basil is one of my favorite smells, she pulls some off a plant on her deck and leaves it on the counter to add to the pasta. I watch as she makes salad in an actual salad spinner, a phenomenon I’ve never personally witnessed. I haven’t eaten a vegetable in weeks, just mushy red grapes that I mostly drop into the trash by the handful, and whatever fruits and syrups are liquefied in a V8 Splash. I admit I hate salad, then eat some anyway, sitting on her roof in McKinley Park smoking cigarettes with no shoes on.

“Most of my life I wouldn’t have minded if I got run over by a truck,” she’s explaining, “but now I’m finally in a place where that sounds like it’d be a bummer.” You said something nearly identical once you’d been a year on T. I watch something dark and roach-like make its way through the mess of noodles on my plate and ask the violinist if she ever gets goosebumps from being moved. It always made you feel special when you’d bite my ear and goosebumps would erupt all over that side of my body, but you should know I wrote in another essay that it never turned me on, and I wasn’t lying. I get goosebumps all the time with very little prompting. Maybe all it means is that I’m prone to overreaction, that I’m generally pretty easy to thrill.

I’ve written all kinds of nasty, completely true things about you which you’ll probably never read. The violinist isn’t sure, re: goosebumps. Of course I didn’t like the gluten-free pasta she made, or the whole bag of spinach she boiled with the noodles. As I’m packing up to leave, I find the basil on the counter where we both forgot about it. On my way to the train, I rub it between the pads of my fingers until it’s limp and smells like nothing.

10: In Which I Re-Watch All Six Seasons of Lost in One Week

I thought my DVD player would have turned itself off in the night, but the light is still green now, more than twelve hours later. I try to remember which episode was playing when I was falling asleep, but it all blends together so I pick one at random: “Deus Ex Machina.”

“Everything Is Bad: A Memoir,” I text my sister, who responds with a sad face emoji. I text Joce about re-watching Lost. All six seasons are available on Hulu, but there is something about a stack of plastic DVD cases that bestows a sense of authority, omnipotence, upon the binge-watching experience: my own private deus ex machina, 5,000+ minutes of forced dialogue and contrived narrative and familiar plot devices swooping in to save my hopeless situation.

“But how do you put up w that obnoxious doctor?” Joce asks, surprised and impressed. I reply with one of those shrugging dudes and then, “The gang’s all here,” as if this is an acceptable answer.

On Lost: the obnoxious doctor spends his flashbacks stalking his ex-wife, a beautiful blonde. In the present, he is a prisoner, and his warden asks him what he wants to know about his ex—a woman he’ll probably never see again. He hesitates, then wonders out loud, “Is she happy?” The warden, another beautiful blonde, smiles.

I was 14 when I started watching this show, sprawled on my mom’s leather couches in the family room every week, doing chores or homework during the commercials, waiting for her to holler, “It’s back on!” I’m more than twice that old, now that I’m watching it again, and I wish I had a clearer memory of the way it hit me back then, as someone closeted and suffering and craving attention the way only a teenager can crave attention.

On Lost: it’s been three years since a woman lost her husband to the hostiles. Now she’s remarried, having a baby with a different man. The anxious father asks a trusted friend, “Is three years really enough time to get over someone?” The trusted friend, a fan favorite, waxes poetic for a minute about a “girl he knew once”—another fan favorite. Then he admits, to our shock: “I can’t even remember what she looks like.”

I wrote “craving attention in the way only a teenager can crave attention,” but that’s not necessarily true. Remember all those times you admitted you were “acting out” because you weren’t getting the right kind of attention from me? I don’t know what it is about the two of us that makes us revert to these versions of ourselves who didn’t have any control over anything but I know that hole was still yawning even when you were calling me seven times a day, mailing me cardboard boxes full of loose lavender and quarters.

On Lost: “Everything breaks if you apply the right force,” says a sad old white man getting drunk at a bar. “Some people are just supposed to suffer,” says another.

I’m tricking myself into believing I am surrounded by people I love who love me back, as if investing in a TV show isn’t inevitably a one-way relationship. This one ended over ten years ago and I was never one of the angry fans who felt cheated by the nonsensical flash-sideways or how several seasons of nearly scientifically accurate time travel culminate inside a church, of all places. I was just so grateful to have been part of the story, so grateful for that achingly beautiful score, and all the things it taught me about what we can and cannot change.

“Do you think I am difficult to love?” I text Joce, who has known me for nearly half my life. She waits several episodes before replying, long enough that I’ve forgotten I asked the question. “I don’t find it difficult,” she concludes, finally, as if this is an acceptable answer.

On Lost: the obnoxious doctor finds a bummed-out woman tending her garden. “That is one stubborn tomato,” he proclaims. “Guess nobody told it it was supposed to die.”

11: In Which I Am Haunted by the Sound of Flapping Wings

It starts the day after you cancel your trip, when I’m carrying my laundry through the alley and I spot something fleshy and shiny on the asphalt next to the dumpsters. I think it’s a toy of some kind, a doll, with that peach-pink gloss and a shape almost human, but when I bend down I see it for what it is: a baby bird fallen from the nest, splashed onto the ground below, beak open as if screaming for help, a mangled pair of closed eyes that never had a chance to see.

I climb the stairs back to my apartment and that’s when it starts, the tinnitus of flapping wings. Sometimes it sounds like a moth trapped between the blinds and the windowpane and sometimes it’s more like a fly buzzing around the ceiling fan, getting tossed around this way and that, and just now it was something much larger, a baby bat, maybe, hurling itself over and over against the wall above my bed.

Of course there is nothing there, nothing and no one. We are fully inside of it now, the inevitable ending, “black mold like a map of the world on his bedroom wall,” my ex-roommate once said of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Edgewater. No, drop the metaphor: we should call a spade a spade. We should admit it’s been over for months, for half of itself, that the quiet calamity of it has been seeping out everywhere, contaminating us both with the shame-stained grief of failing twice. Blame it on distance or COVID or our history, the other people you were fucking or my fear of commitment or both our lunatic tempers; it doesn’t matter. You were supposed to be here, just for three days, three days before we agreed to officially call it, but I guess it’s impossible to pretend that kind of thing isn’t happening when it’s no longer hiding in the corner by the ceiling but rather splattered there in plain sight, the literal writing on the wall.

Remember all those times I “behaved badly” and you didn’t leave? You said you weren’t going anywhere, but I guess we only have so many chances. I guess by the time you’re settled in Boston you’ll hardly remember I’m someone you once loved more than you’d ever loved anyone, someone you once believed you’d never stop loving. Of course that was never a sustainable claim, of course I know you were 26 when you said it and you’re 26 still, that it will be two more years before you’re even as old as I was when we met. It’s possible you were simply mistaking one set of emotions for this more popular one, but by the time I finally earn the right to say “I told you so,” it will no longer feel like winning.

In the corner of my eye the pages of a chapbook flutter in the blow of the a/c. The book won’t stay closed without something heavy placed on top of it. It’s made of cheap material, a paper cover. I keep thinking the movement is liquid sloshing around, the lukewarm coffee in my mug, perhaps, but the mug is opaque; what I think I’m seeing would be impossible.

12: In Which I Dream There is a Cave Cricket in My Bathroom

It’s a caricature of a cave cricket, outsized to nightmarish proportions, all shine and leg and as big as my head. “Somebody kill it with fire!” I shriek, and my sister appears out of nowhere. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she tells me, not unkindly, and she cups the cricket, which is abruptly cricket-sized, in her bare hands. She uses her elbow to lift the screen of the bathroom window and dumps the cricket gingerly outside, where the wasp must not be hovering in wait, where the cricket must grow wings and fly away.

I wake up to my whole body flinching at what sounds like my a/c falling out of the window. I’m still convinced it’s going to lose its balance. I can’t understand how it’s sitting there so calmly, as if the majority of its weight isn’t hanging out into open air unsupported, but it turns out it is, in fact, still sitting there calmly, and the sound was just my dog jumping out of the basket chair across the room. My sister would never touch an insect with her bare hands or even a ten-foot pole; I don’t know what my subconscious is trying to tell me. She’d never tell me I was being “dramatic,” either, even if that was a fair assessment, and for this I am grateful.

I can be dramatic, though. I can be hysterical. When you canceled your trip I cried so hard I threw up. A few hours earlier, right before the fight that ended it once and for all, you told me you wanted closure. You told me closure—that meaty fantasy of a proper goodbye—was the whole point of this three-day visit, of coming together, some sort of definitive marker: there, then, over, done. But there will always be what-ifs. Sometimes they will loom like caricatures and sometimes they will be normal-sized and sometimes they will be gone, like facts we used to know, or seasons.

My dog trots over to the bed and whines aggressively, as if he needs a gilded invitation to sit where he’s always sitting. I ask him if he misses you and he cocks his head like, “Who?” Maybe closure is a myth created by straight people and linear time. Maybe closure is a specific kind of ending, one with more knots than loose ends, and who told us that’s what we are owed by love.