At night we’d hang out at the park behind his house, drinking IPAs and tossing rocks at the tennis court fencing until he got bored and went home to have sex. Each month he told me he wasn’t sure if he still loved me, expecting me to talk him out of it. Instead I tried to diagnose the problem using terms I’d learned from an endless slew of therapy sessions, never understanding that he was trying to politely break up with me.
Still, he never left. Our romance was ruled by a lack of inertia. Or maybe he still loved me—I was never sure what to believe.
We moved in together after five years of dating. We lived in a freestanding house in a quaint walkable neighborhood, ten minutes from a grocery store and five minutes from a beer garden. Things get rocky when you weave your lives together. He wanted to spend his evenings alone or on dates with other men, and I wanted to spend mine reading long posts online about drama happening to people other than me. I didn’t do the dishes and he hated doing laundry for two people. It was never going to work.
After a year of living together, inertia kicked in and he broke things off with me. I scrambled to find a place within my budget: a tiny studio apartment on the fourth floor of a ghost-like building, where most of the residents were vacationers in for the local music festival.
Love, whatever it was, seemed pointless to me. I was more interested in stability. I figured you could fall in love with anyone if they were willing to cook two to three times a week. He believed love was all spark and sex on Wednesdays. If, on a weekday night, the only thing the two of you could think to do together was watch an old episode of Survivor, well, game over.
I disagreed, but nobody ever loved me past a lazy weekday, so I concluded he was right.
Once, late at night, covered in sweat after a show, I ran into him. We walked around the park and he apologized for leaving early, telling me he wasn’t in the right headspace to see me. I lied and told him I wasn’t upset. “I didn’t even know you were there,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask why I decided to go in the first place. We passed a tennis court and took turns tossing rocks and politely inquiring about each others’ lives. He told me he was thinking about moving cities and I told him my mother was sick with cancer; her prognosis grim.
We hooked up and I wrote bad short stories about it for a month before growing out my hair and moving to West Texas where the sky and earth were flat and nothing ever seemed to change.