“I annotated the feeding schedule.”
“You drew a heart, Peter.”
“The annotation is supplementary to the primary content. The feeding schedule is the relevant information.”
“You drew a heart on a Post-it note. You, Peter Loupier, who once told me that emojis were ‘the vocabulary of people who have run out of words,’ drew a heart on a feeding schedule. For kittens.”
“The heart is not an emoji. It was not drawn for the kittens. It was drawn for you. The heart is a hand-drawn symbol that I included as a—”
“It’s anemoji, Peter. It’s a heart emoji rendered in analog. You’ve gone analog on me, and I’m here for it. You’ve crossed a threshold that cannot be uncrossed.”
“I’m not discussing this.”
“I’m going to discuss this for the rest of my life. I’m going to tell our friends and post on Insta and have photos made and hung in galleries around the world. I’m going to tell Mia, and Mia is going to cry.”
“Please don’t tell Mia.”
“Oh, I’m going to tell Mia, and she’s going tomake it her phone wallpaper.”
I drew a second heart three days later.
On a note about the grocery list, tucked after the reminder to buy more of the coconut-argan conditioner (which was now listed simply as “conditioner” because it had ceased to be Benji’s conditioner and had become the conditioner, the only conditioner, the conditioner that I would deny preferring and that I ordered in bulk from an online retailer whose shipping notifications I had configured to arrive silently so that Benji would not discover the bulk ordering and interpret it, correctly, as evidence of total capitulation).
Two hearts in two weeks.
It was a rate of accelerated emoji deployment that would have been imperceptible by Benji’s standards. It further represented, by mine, a seismic shift in personal communication philosophy. I was becoming, very slowly and against every instinct I’d cultivated over thirty-two years of precise, unadorned expression, a person who drew hearts on Post-it notes.
Benji was turning me into an emoji-wielding monster, and I was strangely fond of it.
Then Terri called.
It was a Wednesday.
I was at the clinic, between a routine spay on a young tabby and a follow-up on Gremlin, who had developed the unsettling habit of ambushing staff members from inside the supply closet.
My phone buzzed, and Benji’s name appeared on screen.
Benji: Terri called. Apartment’s done. Everything passed inspection. I can move back whenever.
I read it twice, set the phone down, picked it up, and read it again.
Three words in the center of the message held my gaze.
Move back whenever.
I performed the spay.
My hands were steady, because my hands were always steady during procedures. Surgery existed in a compartment that operated independently of whatever was happening in the other compartments. What was happening in the other compartmentswas a rapid assessment of the fact that Benji’s apartment was repaired and the arrangement that had produced the Post-it notes and the stove light and the 3 a.m. kitchen and the sparkle emojis and the two hand-drawn hearts that I had placed on notes about kitten food and conditioner was now officially over.
I texted back after three drafts.
Me: We should talk about this tonight.
Benji: Yeah. We should.
There were no emojis or exclamation points or sparkles.
The absence was its own kind of data.
