I write in a journal for years, talking to God, talking to myself–until one day I stop. 

My last entry, a pros and cons list, an inventory of your mannerisms that is supposed to convince me to stay; I know I am going to, anyway– cons are just things that need improvement, not actual deficits. 

September 26th. The Last Day. I don’t have a journal entry for this, but I’ll remember it all the same. I watch you clean up your office, a room with a desk that’s become your bedroom, your waste basket of a space, a dumping ground for crumpled paperwork and moldy cat food cans. Six years ago, this wasn’t a concern on my cons list, but I was neurotic over the seatbelt you never wore in the car, because compromising your own safety was at the top of my list. I ignored the signs then because reality isn’t a game of what’s good and what’s bad, it’s everything mixed together in a stainless steel bowl–baking cookies that taste bitter of too much baking soda. 

Perfect isn’t realistic and neither is my account of who you are, of who you were. This is who we are now. 

The day we move into our farmhouse. August 15th. Three years ago doesn’t seem that long, but it’s a lifetime when it comes to waiting, like watching the wallpaper peel off of our one-hundred-year-old plaster walls. We redecorate with cheaply bought furniture from the internet that comes in pieces and talk about buying the place. You walk the property line over and over again while you talk to your dad on the phone. He only visits us once but complains about our well and the tap, bringing bottled water, which I don’t mention is laced with BPA. I hid upstairs, my 30-minute baked chicken recipe going cold in the pan. 

She just has anxiety, you tell them. It’s just autism, I hear through the door. 

You heat up the canned green beans they brought because that is somehow better than the garden-grown beans I’ve tossed with oil in my hands. But, my family’s different because you tell me that they don’t love me the way that your family loves me and food made with the embodiment of ourselves doesn’t define our worth, and neither does a clean house, but these things don’t make me feel better as I sit upstairs alone eating and listening to the mumbles of conversation. 

I’m sure they say, she’s not good enough, why her? 

When September 26th comes, I remember this day. I want to apologize for the water, for calling the green beans Haricot Verts, because I love the French language but we’re not French, and you’re the first person I want to tell about my sadness, my heart breaking and leaving as it walks right out the front door of our home in size nine shoes. 

“I still love you,” I say through a closed door. I mean it. “Please, I know we can be better. We can fix this.” I mention couple’s therapy for the hundredth time, though I know you won’t go, you won’t try, it’s not for you. You’re not the problem, and therapists can’t help you fix what’s wrong if there’s nothing wrong with you. 

I push the door open. I push your boundaries, and you slam them both shut, back in my face. 

“It’s none of your business. You never really loved me. You only loved the idea of me.” You tell me. 

There’s a lot of things that aren’t my business these days.

It’s not my business that you started smoking again after five, going on six years now, even though it’s against the rules of our lease, and my name is the only one on it. I remind you of this and you pretend to forget, or maybe you really do, but that’s none of my business either. I beg you to quit because the smell hurts my nose, and I love you and I don’t want you to die because that’s what cigarettes do–they kill you from the inside out. You must be a cigarette because that’s exactly what you’re doing to me.  

I mope, drooping like an unwatered plant, as I work my way back to our bedroom. My bedroom. This is where I belong now, right? Your nightstand is bare, the drawers empty. I take the time to change out the knobs to something else, ones I bought last year that you said were too feminine. I’d kept them all this time because maybe I’d hoped you would change your mind. I screw them on, one by one, watching the round circles of dirt that fall around the old knobs, eroding in my hand without effort.

I spend hours vacuuming and dusting your side of the room until I decide it’s not your side of the room anymore and I shouldn’t think of it that way, but I can’t not think of it that way, because who am I without you? 

So I rearrange the bed, the nightstands, and the bookcase. I put everything backwards, because that feels right. Soon, it begins to feel forward–normal. But you told me that normal isn’t a real word, it’s called neurotypical, and I’m not that. That’s what you are. 

The last day, our house is a big. Fucking. Mess. My house. I stack a box of mugs that I carefully packed up for you because I’ve always secretly hated that you have twenty mismatched discolored pieces that crowd up our cabinet. I pack up food from the pantry so you won’t go hungry. I know that you’re leaving with nothing, and even though you chose to leave behind the couch, the bed, the nightstand, me–I don’t want you to walk away empty handed. 

I still have more to give you. 

I finish with the remaining boxes that you left downstairs, packing up everything that I know you’ll forget, and I don’t want to have any reason to drag this out, to see you again tomorrow, to make today the day before the last day, so I help even though you tell me not to help. I disappear when you come downstairs, finding a quiet route up to my bedroom where I sit with two dogs and read a book about a world better than this one. I listen to a crash, the dropped mugs cracking like someone falling through cracking ice on our kitchen floor. My kitchen floor. I don’t come running and ask if you’re okay, even though I want to. 

It’s not my responsibility anymore. 

I read a few chapters, the dog curled at my feet barking at a different voice, a stranger in our home. My home. I listen through the door while you move furniture down the staircase with someone you barely know because you refused my help when I offered it to you. You’re carrying a desk that my parents gave you for free, and I hear a clatter–seven, identical times, before the weight of it falls to the bottom of my staircase, in pieces. When I see it laying out in my yard later, I want to ask you how you can break everything you touch; but that’s none of my business. 

Through the upstairs window, the outdoor light illuminates your steps as you walk down the path in my front yard. This is it. Something makes you turn around and look, and I think maybe you’ve forgotten me. 

“The cat.” You yell up. You stuffed her in a cardboard box like a stack of dish towels, and she managed to escape. Though I am in a new blank space, the trace of smoke lingers, yellowing my lungs. Can I keep her? Here, where she’ll be valued and remembered. No. The air has to be purified. I think about the way you dump her stale cat food into the toilet bowl instead of the garbage. 

We argue one last time. She stress pants, watching you out of the fogged-up glass, realizing she’s leaving everything she’s ever known. I am sad for her. We are one in the same. You stuff the cat back in the box, tape it shut, remind me that I still owe you three hundred and eight dollars. 

This is what our worth has come down to–three hundred and eight dollars. 

I stand outside the moving van and hand you a check. You hand me a key. I’ve been waiting for this key for a long time. I’ve tried getting copies made, but it’s not the same as the original. Once I hold this in my hand, it becomes my business. 

But, you don’t hand it over right away, holding it out in the air as if you’re taunting me to grab it. 

“It’s not like I cheated on you. Maybe after things are better, we can get back together and it will be different.” 

You feel the tension and don’t know what else to say. I believe you, though it doesn’t matter. 

You didn’t betray me, but I betrayed myself. 

Two months later. You want to remind me of the days before the last day, so you send your mail to my house. One afternoon, I open a package because it’s my house and there comes a time when I stop reading the labels on parcels because living alone does that to a person. Inside, packed perfectly in a neat little box, is a white bottle with your name on it. I don’t mean to open it, to pry, but it’s too late. Take two to four hours before sexual activity, the bottle reads. Maybe I laugh because I’m so stunned that no other sounds come out. Then I sit for a while, before deciding to send the package back to the sender. 

When you send me a text asking for your medicine, I tell you to get your shit together. I don’t beg, I don’t plead, I don’t invite you to my home to pick up your bottle of ‘medicine’ because medicine makes you better and no pill is going to change who you’ve become. 

Seven months later. It’s our unofficial anniversary. Seven years–the day we were planning to get married in front of our family, our friends, on our front lawn. I sit on my front porch and drink some tea while I write. My ring finger is bare, blank, as I grasp my warm mug and sip my favorite brew. It’s unseasonably warm for April, and even with the spring chill in the air, I don’t need a sweater or a blanket to keep me warm because there is a warmth inside of me that I’ve never experienced before. And it’s strange, being aware and alive again, like one of those overproduced home decor signs that tell you to grow where you’re planted. 

They say that the human body regenerates so quickly that, every seven years, the person we were isn’t the same physical embodiment as it was seven years prior. Maybe the same mental embodiment, too. It’s strangely comforting to know that no part of my body will have been touched by you. I am slowly regenerating, creating new life where the dead parts had taken root inside me. 

I think about this while I peacefully enjoy my mundane Saturday, my seventh year. I paint, I embroider, I read, I take the dogs for a walk.

I do all the things I love without judgment, without care. 

I begin to fall in love again, with vibrancy, with joy, with walking in my home as I step hard and strong like a rooted tree, my branches growing deep as my toes squish in the freshly vacuumed carpet, and I noisily make my way downstairs, humming. Alive. I begin to fall in love with every imperfect part of myself for the first time in seven years. Now that I can–without you.