???
Same car. Same apartment. Same passcode. It was as though life had kept perfectly still in my absence, which was ironic considering how strange everything seemed to me. Not just aesthetically speaking—the sterile, digitalized landscape of the city—buteverything. The quality of the air, the sounds, the smells, the people. Even the way I felt in my own body.
But the first sense of true derealization I experienced was only after Theo and I hung our coats in the built-in wardrobe by the hallway and entered the living room. It shocked me how broad, how open, how undecorated and white the apartment was. Everything looked disproportionate and daunting: the expansive floor-to-ceiling windowpane overlooking the city, the pale glimmer of the elaborate ceiling lights, the alien giant screen floating against the wall, and the way it lit up on its own and welcomed us with the time, today’s temperature, and various pieces of world news. Something about a scientist across the sea working out the problem of short-term memory. Cameras for eyes we would have soon.
I couldn’t help but think of my cozy little apartment on Arcade Street and my tiny, impossibly heavy TV. The way I would play around with its silver antenna, the countless black and white dots buzzing like flies inside the screen until the image would shift, color, sound, and motion bleeding through, and I would leap up to my feet, excited by this simplest of achievements. What an odd life I’d lived in there. Odd and warm and more familiar than anything out here.
Feeling the burn of Theo’s eyes on the back of my skull, I turned to find him by the kitchen island, preparing a glass of water for me. “You can sit down, you know,” he said, trying to sound pleasant and bracing, although the waver in his voice betrayed him. “Do you want some tea? Or maybe you’re hungry? I can order something.”
Carefully, noiselessly, I sat down at the edge of the black leather sofa. How many times had he and I made love on this very sofa? How many times had we made love? In college, in his dorm room, all the nights he had held me in his arms and asked me how I wanted it. But, of course, back then, I couldn’t tell him what I wanted. It was months and months within the relationship before I learned it was acceptable for me to express my own desires, and two whole years before I was able to tell him about my parents, about my all-consuming and at times irrational fear of him hurting me if I didn’t do all he wanted.
Now, unburdened by my childhood memories, I could only wonder, grim and infuriated, why I would ever be afraid of anything, let alone my own boyfriend.
The difference they made in a person. Memories.
“No, thank you,” I replied, clearing the rasp from my throat. “Water is fine.”
Theo handed me the chilled glass and settled down on the other side of the sofa. The silence of the house was almost as strange as the glaring unfamiliarity between us. As if the one year we’d spent apart had erased all the ones we’d spent together.
“So…” he ventured at last. “What exactly did you do in there?”
“I worked for a fashion magazine,” I announced flatly.
Theo blinked, once, twice. Then, to my absolute surprise,he burst out laughing—laughing so hard that his shoulders shook and his face turned bright red.
Half-laughing myself, I sighed, “I know. I know, it’s ridiculous.”
“What did you do?” he wheezed. “Model or something?”
I leaned a bit closer and slapped his arm with the back of my hand. “Oh, fuck off, Fraser. How vain do you think I am?”
Wittingly, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes, he drawled, “Well, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, when I was younger,” I protested. “Of course, I was vain. I was gorgeous.”
Lowering his hand, he looked at me, his expression a mosaic of emotions: tenderness, intimacy, regret, things lost to us forever. “Still are, I’m afraid.”
Another anxious, fluttering feeling spread in my stomach, and I averted my eyes. “Mm.”
“I can’t believe you did a Program,” he said in a quieter, more personal manner. “I really thought you were just trying to cut me out of your life.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to cut you out of my life, Theo,” I admitted.
Gratified by this answer, he gifted me one of his complacent little smiles. “We might as well get married then.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d suggested this. In fact, in the seven years we’d been together, this suggestion had gone through several degrees of seriousness, although my answer was always staying the same. “I can’t imagine myself being someone’s wife.”
“You won’t be my wife,” Theo countered. “I’ll just be your husband.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so true. If this hadn’t always been the dynamic between us.
Guiltily, I murmured, “Sounds like us, doesn’t it?”
Again, this silence. Silence was perhaps the very definition of our relationship, for the things we left unsaid were always more important than the things we didn’t.
“Tell me something,” he prodded then, his expression growing absent, his smile stale, fading. “The Program. Did it feel real?”
“As real as this life.”Morewas what I didn’t say for his sake.More real than this life has ever felt to me.
