Just to read the label.
For informational purposes only.
The label read:SPF 30. Lightweight. Non-greasy. Formulated for combination skin.
I didn’t know I had combination skin, whatever that was, and which the label seemed very confident about. The ingredient list was long and contained words I recognized from veterinary dermatology, which was either reassuring or concerning depending on how one felt about the overlap between human and animal skincare. In my professional opinion, this was more significant than most people realized.
I put the bottle back on the shelf.
The reading for informational purposes wasconcluded.
On the third morning, I used it.
In my defense, the weather had been aggressive.
Tampa in late spring operated under the apparent conviction that the sun was a personal challenge to be met with maximum intensity. My walk from the parking lot to the clinic had started producing a tightness in my skin that I’d been attributing to dehydration but that might, possibly, upon reflection, have been attributable to the fact that I had been washing my face with bar soap and hoping for the best for three decades.
I applied the moisturizer after my shower, following the instructions on the back, which were straightforward enough that even I could handle them, as Benji had so generously noted.
It absorbed quickly.
It didn’t smell like anything in particular.
It left my skin feeling like skin, only slightly better, in a way that I found annoying because it suggested that Benji had been right about something, and I would have to live with that knowledge.
I wrote, “I don’t need a moisturizer,” on a Post-it and stuck it to the fridge.
Twelve hours later, after a full day at the clinic during which Ayesha had looked at me over her salad and said, “Your face looks different,” and Carlos had said nothing but had glanced at me twice, which from Carlos constituted a thorough investigation, I added to the note, “It’s not terrible.”
Benji’s response, waiting for me the next morning in his looping, chaotic handwriting with four sparkle emojis, should not have made me feel anything.
It made me feel something.
I filed it away and moved on.
The thing about living with Benji Kwon was that the man was impossible to keep at the distance I’d designed.
I had systems. I’d built said systems carefully over years of solitude, each one serving a specific purpose: the routine, the quiet hours, the Post-it notes instead of conversations, the blue mug, the newspaper, the twelve-minute showers, the animals, and the schedules and the whiteboard that organized everything into rows and columns that made sense.
These systems were not walls.
They were architecture.
They were the structure of a life that functioned, that got up every morning and went to work and came home and fed the animals and wrote, when it could, and slept when it couldn’t, and did not,at any point, require another person to hold it together.
Benji did not attack the systems.
That would have been easier to manage.
If he’d been loud about wanting in, if he’d pushed against the boundaries the way I’d expected him to,I could have pushed back and the structure would have held.
Instead, he found the gaps.
He found places where the architecture had thin spots that I hadn’t noticed or had chosen to ignore.
He found them not by looking for them but by being himself, by moving through my apartment with an energy that was so fundamentally different from mine that it illuminated every corner I’d been keeping dark.
And he cooked.
