The ceramic is smooth where it isn’t chipped. It smells faintly of coffee and something sweeter underneath.
I put it back exactly where I found it. Lipstick mark facing out.
Her kitchen is small, a little cluttered. But it’s lived in, and that makes a difference. It smells of dish soap and citrus, and underneath everything, cinnamon—always cinnamon, it lives here the way her scent lives in the rest of the apartment, permanent and particular and hers.
I open the fridge slowly, the way you open something that doesn’t belong to you. Leftovers in mismatched containers stacked with no specific logic. Oat milk. An apple going soft at one side she hasn’t gotten to yet. Condiments crowded in the door. And on the middle shelf, a sticky note in her handwriting—Eat me before Wednesday, Sophia—a reminder, an argument with her own future self about leftovers, small and domestic and so entirely her that something in my throat tightens.
On the counter, there’s a grocery list started and abandoned midway through. Bananas. The good dish soap. Shampoo—she’s written the full brand name, underlined it, like she’s told herself before and keeps forgetting. And at the bottom, circled twice, coffee.
I stand there with that for a long moment. Then I photograph it but don’t ask myself why.
I move to the bathroom, and it smells overwhelmingly of her—concentrated, layered. It’s the vanilla and orange-peel of her shampoo, the clean scent of soap, and something underneath both that I think might just be her skin.
I don’t rush. I look at everything. The brands on the shelf above the sink, arranged by some logic only she understands. A razor with a pink handle. Two hair ties around the faucet. A half-finished candle on the edge of the tub, something floral. Peony? And her lipstick, placed on the vanity right next to her perfume.
There’s a slight increase in my pulse as I take the lipstick, ignoring the perfume beside it. Perfume is for other people, for the world she walks through, for crowded rooms and first impressions. Lipstick is different. This has touched her.
I open the black and gold-rimmed container, twisting it outward. It’s already shaped to the curve of her lips, worn down on the left side slightly more than the right, the precise angle of how she applies it. I’ve watched her do it through glass, through distance, and now I’m holding the evidence of it in my hands.
I run my thumb across the surface. Slowly. The way you touch something you have no right to touch and do it anyway because the wanting has outgrown the knowing.
The color transfers to the pad of my thumb. Cherry red. Bright against my skin. I look at it for a long moment—this small mark of her on me—and feel a dangerous heat coil in my stomach, a sensation I refuse to acknowledge.
I twist the lipstick back down. Cap it. Place it back on the vanity exactly as I found it. Angled slightly left. Touching the base of the perfume bottle.
I look at my thumb for another moment then leave the bathroom, pulling the door exactly as I found it, and carry that small red mark on my skin through the rest of her apartment like something I stole without taking.
Her bedroom door is open, and I stand in the threshold the way I stood at her front door, taking the time to absorb the weight of it. The gravity of a line that can only be crossed once.
I go in.
The bed is unmade.Of course it is.She never makes it on weekdays, only Sundays. I know her rhythms by heart now. The ivory sheets are twisted toward one side, her side, the left, and there’s an indentation still in the pillow where her head was this morning. I don’t let myself look at it for too long.
I look at it for too long.
The mattress gives slightly under my weight as I sit on the bed. I press my palm flat against her sheets—cool now, hours since she left, and I sit there with my hand on her bed in the middle of the afternoon while a familiar ache spreads beneath my ribs, the one I’ve taught myself to ignore.
My gaze moves across the room, taking in every shape, every corner, every item. Her clothes from yesterday are on the chair in the corner. A black cardigan draped over the back. Two scarves she barely manages to hold on to when the breeze picks up. I’m surprised she doesn’t lose them more often, always three steps ahead of herself.
I stand and cross to the chair. Touch the cardigan first. The fabric is worn soft in the way that takes years of choosing—of reaching for the same thing on cold mornings because it’s the one that works, the one that feels right. I lift it from the chair, hold it, then bring it to my face. And breathe in.
It’s her. Entirely, completely, devastatingly her. Impossible to frame or crop or filter away. This isn’t surveillance footage. This is her, distilled to essence, and I’m standing in her bedroom with her cardigan against my face, finally understanding something about myself I’ve been refusing to understand for too long.
I was made to be unmovable. But her? She doesn’t even know she’s moving me. I didn’t even know it before now. Never been able to label it.
I’m not going to be able to stop.
I fold it carefully. Place it back on the chair like it hasn’t been moved an inch. That’s when I see it. On the nightstand. Small. Unremarkable to anyone who didn’t know to look. A notebookwith a worn cover, the corners soft from handling, a pen tucked into the elastic band.
I sit back down on her bed and open it the way you open something you already know will change you.
The elastic band first, slow, like rushing would make it more of a violation than it already is. The cover falls back, and her handwriting appears—small, slightly slanted, pressed firmly into the page like she means every word she commits to paper.
I turn pages slowly. Not reading everything. Just…moving through her. Feeling the weight of each page between my fingers, the slight texture of her pen strokes from the other side. Dates at the top of each entry. Months of her. Years of her. A whole interior life I was never supposed to see.
I don’t read everything. I’m not ready for everything. I let it fall open where it wants.
December 30th, 2021
