Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
ONE.
You are at a Waffle House in Atlanta on a Sunday morning. I only know this because now, instead of listening to the details of your days on breakfast walks to the deli-grocery in Bushwick, I watch your life through pictures.
I’m waking up in someone else’s bed in Brooklyn, two subway stops away from your apartment. You always called me a morning person, a real pain in the ass before 7 a.m., but today I am meek, well-behaved, quiet. I realize the person I was when I was with you is also in a Waffle House in Georgia right now. I realize that you are not traveling alone. I left too many notes on your pillow in the mornings. I looked at you too softly, even on the days when I was angry. I, too, am traveling with pieces of you (Key lime pie, Bruce Springsteen, your face full of dimples when you really smiled, the way you used to squint your eyes before you got your new glasses). You left, but you are still in my dictionary.
You are at a Waffle House in Atlanta. You left, but I'm waiting for you to leave me, my thoughts, my life. I've been running from you — last night I slept with your complete opposite (makes only average omelets, never misses football on Sundays, doesn’t think I’m funny).
I roll over and mumble a good morning. The pillow we’re sleeping on is littered with tiny black hairs that remind me of the premature grays you used to dye out jet-black. I think about how only six months ago I was vacuuming them off my floor, pulling them from my own pillowcases, finding them in my sink.
TWO.
You are driving my drunk ass home. It’s the middle of July — an “on-again” period for us — and finally, at least to me, it seems like we’re getting somewhere with this thing. We’re on the Southern State and I’m making you listen to Louis C.K.’s French toast joke for the 3 millionth time. I play it so often that I don’t even think you find it funny anymore, but I laugh harder and harder. You let me listen to it whenever I want, because you say you love hearing that horrendous chicken-squawk laugh I have.
Once we hit stop-and-go Brooklyn, I make you kiss me at every red light. You happily oblige, but you don’t hold my hand at all, not for one moment, even when I rest it on your knee during the drive.
That used to be our favorite pastime, holding hands on the drive home, and you’d hold on even tighter when we hit those shitty Brooklyn potholes. I lean my head against the window — watching your hands on the ten and the two. I’m wondering how much time I actually have left with you.
THREE.
You're on my family vacation the first week in August and it's the first time I've seen you really, truly smiling in weeks. Usually you're hunkered down over the computer, hiding away in a corner, hung up on the phone for work, constantly in between being needed somewhere, by someone — your eyes squinted in frustration because you still haven't gotten new glasses.
You have an army of screaming children clamoring at your heels like bloodhounds, so you hop the fence to the front yard and declare yourself pitcher in a kickball game. (You did have a great arm in high school. A lefty — another thing that made you tricky.)
My 6-year-old cousin smacks the ball when you pitch it and it goes flying over my head, into left field. Maybe if I'd been paying attention it wouldn't have been a home run, but I was on another planet, thinking about how I wish we could spend every summer this way: you pulling clams out of the bay, poking at crabs on the grill, getting a shitty night of sleep together on the air mattress, brushing our teeth next to each other and pitching to my freckle-faced cousins in the front yard.
That night, you are on the back porch blowing up the air mattress yourself. The pump is broken, and we have nowhere else to sleep. You’re crisscross applesauce on the ground, mattress in your mouth, cheeks puffed out, smiling up at me. In that moment, I know you do love me. In that moment, I know sometimes even that isn’t enough.
FOUR.
You wipe the snot from my nose after watching me crumble onto my shitty Ikea futon. We have been fighting for two days now, and all you want to do is get out. You have plans to meet that British girl who used to leave dark-pink lipstick stains on your cheeks. You left me on the subway platform at Bedford to go home with her back in June, and tonig