They were moving-out boxes.
I stood in the hallway, the hallway that had become the most heavily trafficked twenty-two feet of residential carpet in Tampa Bay, and watched him through the open door. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a roll of packing tape and a system of organization that bore no resemblance to any system I would have designed. This meant clothes were mixed with kitchen items, books were stacked beside shoes, and Princess Consuela was inside an open box grooming herself on top of what appeared to be ablender.
He hadn’t seen me yet.
So I leaned against the doorframe and didn’t speak.
Because sometimes the most important thing is to let a person arrive at their own decision.
And because watching Benji do anything, even pack badly, was still one of my favorite things in the world.
And because the sight of him surrounded by boxes in an apartment he was leaving hit me in a place that I wanted to sit with before I named it.
His apartment had become, over the past three months of separate living, a kind of elaborate fiction. He slept in my bed five nights a week, sometimes six. His toothbrush was in my bathroom. Biscuit the stuffed manatee lived on my nightstand. His good knives (three, all better than mine, a fact I had accepted with the grudging respect of a man conceding a material advantage) were in my kitchen. Half his wardrobe had already migrated to my closet.
Despite all of this, the hallway crossings had never stopped.
They’d slowed from the frantic forty-nine of the first week to a more sustainable rhythm, averaging eight to twelve per day—but they’d never stopped, because stopping would have meant accepting ourseparation as real, and neither of us had ever fully accepted it.
Our separation had been the correct decision.
It had been the healthy decision.
It had been a decision of two responsible adults who understood that a relationship built on proximity alone was a relationship built on sand.
The separation was also, and I had concluded this with the same evidentiary rigor I brought to clinical diagnoses, completely ridiculous.
We lived twenty-two feet apart and spent ninety percent of our time in the same apartment. We maintained two leases, two sets of utilities, and two kitchens, one of which (his) contained a stove whose light was never on and another (mine) whose stove light had been on continuously since the 1920s.
The notebook beside my whiteboard contained six months of data, including crossing frequencies, time-of-day distributions, duration of visits, and reasons stated versus reasons actual. The data told a clear, unambiguous story. We were two people who had tried to live apart and who had succeeded only in living together from a slightly different starting location.
“I’m not renewing,” Benji said without looking up.
He’d known I was there.
Of course he’d known.
He’d spent ten months learning my sounds the way I’d spent ten months learning his. The sound of my shoes on the hallway carpet and the particular quality of my breathing when I was watching him without announcing myself were data points he’d catalogued and filed alongside everything else he knew about me, which was everything.
“I know,” I said.
He looked up. His face was doing that thing, that complicated thing he did when he was confused or perplexed or at a complete loss. But the complications were different now than they’d been ten months ago. There was less fear in the mix, less performance and more of the real person underneath, the one who sat on kitchen floors and held manatees and said, “I love you,” in crowded bars without rehearsal.
“The lease is up at the end of the month,” he said. “I could renew and we could keep doing this thing we’re doing.”
“You could,” I agreed without committing to a side.
“Or . . . I couldnotrenew and could carry these boxes twenty-two feet across a hallway and put my stuff in your apartment and sleep in your bed every night instead of five out of seven nights.I could hang my curtains on your windows and put Princess Consuela’s carrier wherever we decide Princess Consuela’s carrier should go, which is going to be a negotiation, because you have opinions about carrier placement, and I have opinions about carrier placement, and our opinions are not the same opinions.”
“Our opinions about carrier placement are fundamentally incompatible.”
“They’re incompatible, and we’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Because that’s what we do. We figured out the shampoo and the Post-it notes and the kitten binder and the coffee ratio and the stove light and the blue mug and the hallway. We figured out all of it. We can figure out where to put a cat carrier.”
“The cat carrier should go in the hallway closet. There’s a shelf at the correct height.”
