Member-only story
All Our Lost Stories
Goodbye never lasted so long.
It’s another night where I don’t know if you realize I’m here.
The apartment has shifted around me in the months that have gone by. The furniture we picked out together, the artwork we collected from every trip out of state, even the curtains we argued about in a little outlet shop in the boonies — all of these things have disappeared, one by one, as if they’re memories you’re shedding piecemeal.
I don’t even watch anymore as the life I once knew fades inch by inch. I tell myself I stopped caring the night you bundled up all my clothes and put them in trash bags to go to the donation center down the street. You didn’t even flinch as I screamed at you. My words were lost in a storm only I knew. It was almost as if some part of me held back just to protect you.
If I had really done what I wanted, the whole building might have gone down in flames.
That almost happened the night you brought her home.
She was everything I wasn’t: a dark beauty to my pale wisp of a self, brunette hair falling in soft waves compared to the wheat braids I had always worn during my days at the studio, a defined style to her fashion when I had been the type to wear whatever was comfortable at the time. In her, I saw what you might have chosen if we hadn’t…
