It happened on a plane. No one cheated or lied, and there was no screaming fight. There was no shatter of glass, only the shatter of hearts in emotional-whisper form coming from aisle 10, seats B and C (the middle and window seats). They had upgraded us to the emergency-exit row, which offered extra legroom but didn’t bode well for the people on the plane if there was going to be an emergency landing during the next three hours and thirty-four minutes.
“I don’t think we can date anymore,” I told him.
“Date” was an understatement. We hadn’t “dated.” We’d been partners for two years; we’d lived together; and we’d shared a bed every night. And we’d had plans to buy a hairless cat and get married at City Hall. But I felt trapped.
I learned that you should never break up with a person two hours into a five-hour flight.
We stopped having sex. My therapist said it was because I thought of him and his behavior as baby like, and no one wants to have sex with a baby. I tired of fighting, too, about the important things and the small things. I wanted our drapes open and the windows open, too, to let in the wind and the light. He wanted them closed. I wanted to stand in the front at the concert, brain enveloped by art and sound. He wanted to stand in the back near the exit. Neither of us had been able to come one way for the other, and both had remained stubborn in sticking to what we’d thought was right.
We decided that I would stay in the house and that he would be the one to move after we’d untangled our lives. Logistics and the reality of the San Francisco rental market meant that we would continue to live together for 26 more days.
Day 1
The plane landed (safely) without our needing to help anyone during an emergency landing, and after I learned that you should never break up with a person two hours into a five-hour flight. We ordered Vietnamese food to be delivered and shared a car from the airport. I didn’t wash his dish, because we had officially become roommates who happened to also share a bed. He was silent with white-hot rage or indifference — I didn’t know which. Ambivalence is far worse than open displays of emotion, and I wished he’d thrown Tupperware and screamed a little, but he went to bed at 8:00 p.m. instead.
Day 2
I canceled our vegan subscription meal box and ate macaroni and cheese from the pot and Xanax for dinner, because sometimes it’s important to give yourself exactly what you want. Whether you need it or not. Whether it’s good for you or not.
Day 4
We’d been avoiding each other, but ignoring inanimate objects that reminded us of one another was more challenging. His slippers are what got me. They seemed to follow me around the house, lurking in every corner, from the kitchen to behind the door in the bathroom.
Day 6
All I could think about was who was going to keep the duvet cover and Cornelius, our fern, but I didn’t dare bring it up. I’d obviously preferred the duvet cover to the fern, but my preferences didn’t matter there. I was the one who did the breaking up, and when you’re the breaker, you wait to see what the broken claims as their consolation prize(s) so that in a few years they can tell one of their friends, “At least I got the duvet cover.”
I hoped it wouldn’t be the duvet cover.
Day 7
I could have done it on the couch. Or in the pantry, I guess, but the bed was warm, and the white-noise machine was soothing, and I don’t want our roommate to walk in on me when she fetched chips to emotionally eat in the middle of the night. So I did it in bed: while he slept six inches away from me, snoring, I masturbated. After all, I had paid rent through the end of the month, hadn’t I?
Day 9
I attended a wedding alone even though he had tailored a suit for the occasion. “These are my friends from college,” I said, uninviting him, disregarding the suit but offering to pay for it, and canceling the reservation for our expensive rustic cabin. The wedding was a three-day celebration of love, and I wanted to die. I was a 29-year-old cock-block sleeping on the floor of my friend and her boyfriend’s rustic cabin inside a sleeping bag that had last been washed before I went through puberty (I thought).
It was cold at the wedding, and no one had expected it. Guests were wearing denim jackets over their black-tie attire, and I kissed a man in a meadow. He was hesitant to lie on the ground and ruin his suit, but I’d already committed myself to ruining my dress from the start — it was cheap and stupid, and I looked like a baby-shower cake with tits.
Day 13
Back at home and in our shared bed, he asked me if there was anyone else. Is that why we’e breaking up, he wondered? I told him no but didn’t tell him about the dry-humping that had happened in the meadow. I also didn’t tell him that the thing we liked most about ourselves was the thing we liked least about each other.
Day 16
Cornelius started turning brown. I still watered him even though he was our shared child that I liked to neglect. His furry limbs hung from the tub, turning brown. I refilled the watering can five times — six times — after folding the shower curtain above the rod. I wondered if he’d known that his dad had never loved him. I wondered if his dad had known that I did love him.
Day 17
As we got closer to the end of the month, I began staying up later, past my bedtime, to avoid the increasingly hostile pillow talk and to avoid his questions of “Why, why, why?” But I still used his fancy eye cream every night, careful to place it back exactly where I’d found it.
The great division of socks occurred.
Day 19
He continued to buy me figs but didn’t close the drapes anymore. I felt awful that I’d gotten my way even though it took breaking up to get it. I’d been the one who had always wanted his openness.
“It’s not special because you want to know these things about everyone,” he told me when I asked him about the corners of his childhood, but I didn’t know any other way to be.
Day 22
Cornelius was alive but not thriving. We had this in common. And the ex — he started to pack his things. He packed two records that were mine, and I let him keep them. He took the record player, too, since he had insisted that I get rid of mine when we moved in together, because his was better.
Day 23
I officially abandoned all dreams of owning a hairless cat.
Day 24
The great division of socks occurred. He insisted that I return all his socks that had made their way into my drawer over the past year two years. I emptied the drawer on the floor and returned every Hanes sock I could find, except one that I had tucked away in my dresser for fun.
Day 26
“Who will take care of you?” he asked. Me. Me.
Day 27
He left. He evacuated our home at the exact time I told him he must leave. He left the room clean and the windows open. He stacked my shoes, folded my clothes and bought my favorite snacks and wine from our corner store — now just my corner store. This display of tidiness and order and these purchases served to remind me that this was my choice, that he was a nice man and that I was the terrible one — the breaker. He hadn’t realized that with him I’d been a ghost of anything I should have been.
Later, I walked by a man on the sidewalk holding a sign that read, “I love pussy.” I consider asking him out.
