He is helping me move. He picks up my bags, and carries my boxes into his shiny new Audi. My books, my clothes, my little sidetables, and my funny shoes. We are deconstructing the "we" into its constituent parts, into "you" and "I". I watch as he chisels down the and.
In the middle of the night, I wake up and feel an overwhelming urge to see him. My car was still in the shop. The old apartment is not far enough to keep me away. And I still have a key. So I walk and unlock his door and sit on his couch, the one with specially made upholstery that I had ordered just a few months back. I let my eyes fall on the dining room, in which sit the chairs I had hammered together and then varnished.
My taste is imprinted even in the cloth of his drapes. There are still faint nicks on the kitchen counter from when I had learned to hand-make pasta. I have never been that kind of girl, but I had carefully shifted myself so I could fit into his spaces. I stand up to leave, quietly, so he might never know where I've been. It is his apartment now, all of it.
And yet I glimpse at myself everywhere too, and I start to wonder when I will recede, and fade, and be replaced. It makes me sit back down again.
He wakes up and steps out of his room – the one with the wall I had painted red, and in which resides the Japanese bed I had painstakingly hunted down. He looks at me and frowns. "Do you want to sleep on the bed? I can take that couch."
He is neither cold nor friendly. His voice is smooth, with no grooves to collect me, no pockets with tiny smiles. He doesn't treat me like a stranger. But I am not his anymore. And he isn't mine. Even half-awake, he is breaking "us" apart. He is still chipping our "ands" down.
"Could you take me home?" I ask him. I stumble on the last word, but when I let it loose, I feel as if I am the one holding mallet and gouge, and that I have somehow missed, and hit myself by mistake.
He nods. He is tired. He puts on clothes and grabs his keys. He takes me home, and I tell myself I'm not sure why his lack of argument still makes me sad. But in the end, I know this is what gets to me most. That he drove me home and let me out, and let me go. He let me go. And he made it look so easy.