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She is sitting in her living room after work, after a reheated dinner. It is dark and quiet; she hadn’t noticed the sun going down. She’s trying hard no to think about him in that city, with that woman. She lets herself wonder how he talks in bed, at night, the tender, low pitch of his voice in darkness. The thought is sharp inside her. She tries to keep her mind blank.

She has the kitchen phone in her hands, her thumbs running over the numbers. She is staring intently at her coffee table, the disarray of magazines and junk mail, and trying to convince herself she is strong enough to lose him again. She thinks she’s done it once, so surely she can do it twice. It’ll hurt less this time, if he does leave, because she knows what to expect: how she’ll ache for his voice, his smile, his mouth for weeks and weeks; how she’ll stand in her bedroom and swear she feels his hands on her waist and feel so immensely hollow when that feeling goes away; how she’ll learn to go numb. This time she’ll try to learn faster.

If she wasn’t trying so hard to be a stronger person, a better person, a wholly independent person, she might have called him and said this:

“Please don’t leave me again. I’m so tired from loving you and all I really want to do is rest my head on your shoulder and stay there for a while, a few years, forever maybe. Just be with you and be warm and be calm. This thing is so much bigger than us and I feel like we keep bumping into it, just hitting it straight on and then running. It happened a year ago and it’s happening now. In the interest of being more direct with what I want: I want you to stay. I want you to stay here and be with me. I want you to stay here and love me. I need you to stay here and love me.”

She picks up the phone anyway. But when he answers, there’s loud music in the background, the deafening sound of people trying to hold conversations over that loud music, and she can tell he’s with Karen by the way he’s talking to her: no warmth, little familiarity, like she’s his sister or nothing more than a coworker. So instead she says simply, “Um, good luck tomorrow. And have fun tonight, I guess.” And he says, “Oh, thanks! Thank you. Yes. Uh, I gotta go now though, okay?” She can’t even manage an, “Okay,” in response before he hangs up.

She goes to bed early, thinking of him. She turns over on her side and tries to imagine his body against her own, his breath against her hair. She tries to imagine how he’d tell her that he loved her, his drowsy voice full of gravel. She tries to sleep.


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