It doesn't happen until it's been a month since she moved out. She's unpacking the last box and, having decided to make an occasion of it, drinking a bottle of wine. She's not thinking about how depressing drinking alone is. Instead she is swaying gently to the music filling her tiny apartment, staring contemplatively at her colorful array of paperbacks, trying to determine how to organize them on the living room shelves. She doesn't have many books, she realizes with a sinking feeling, and almost all of them predate the new millennium. At the bottom of the box there are two moleskins, filled to the brim with loopy, girly handwriting and clean curly lines and she feels ancient glancing through them (she can't bear to read, to trace a fingernail over the pages, to breathe in the perfume Roy had gotten her for their first Christmas as a couple) They were meant to be thrown away when the box was first packed, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to do it. She doesn't want to remember, but she doesn't want to forget either. The radio plays something soft and sad and she says, wait a minute.

Or it happens while she's taking a shower. She's always taking showers because her bathroom doesn't have a tub. Her shower is a neat little square, so small she couldn't find a plastic rug to put in it to avoid slipping and cracking open her skull, but she's living life on the edge these days, so she doesn't mind.
It's been months and she's never had the opportunity to wax nostalgic about taking a long hot bath. She's always hurrying somewhere, the embodiment of busyness and impatience, rushing through ice cold showers, half dried hair in a messy bun as she tries to locate something or the other (she's always losing things in this tiny joke of an apartment and still can't remember that the light switches are on the left side of the doors), the remote or a sketch and always ends up with unpleasant surprises (wednesday, 8 am: a half moon apple in the depths of her sofa, responsible for the most recent ant attack). Roy used to complain that she was a neat-freak but here she is tripping over the vacuum cleaner while trying not to burn her eggs. The delay gives her a sense of empowerment, the clutter is her trophy.