The Art of Leaving

The morning after she left, I found myself staring at the bottle of vitamin D supplements on her nightstand—the expiration date still six months away. She'd been religious about taking them, said the gray Seattle winters made her feel like a plant starving for sunlight. I'd mocked her for it, another thing in the growing list of small resentments we'd stopped mentioning aloud.

Her childhood teddy bear sat next to the vitamins. Mr. B. She'd brought him to our first sleepover, drunk on cheap wine and new love, confessing she still slept with him whenever she felt alone. I'd found it charming then. By year three, it had become just another thing in the way, its glass eyes judging me from the dresser as we stopped speaking in anything but logistics and grievances.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open. The storm had been brewing for days, much like us. I'd been tracking it on my iPhone compulsively—weather apps, her social media, the way her location would sometimes appear near that coffee shop where we'd first met. Pathetic, the kind of behavior that would make you wince if you saw it in a movie.

She hadn't taken her charging cord. I plugged my phone in and stared at the lock screen. Three missed calls from my mother. Two emails from my boss about the quarterly report. And one notification from the pharmacy: her prescription was ready to pick up. Iron supplements. She'd been anemic for months. I'd forgotten.

The bear seemed to look at me differently now, not with judgment but with something that looked terrifyingly like pity. I realized I didn't know when she'd stopped taking her vitamins, or why she'd needed the iron, or what books she'd been reading lately. We'd been living together, sleeping together, growing apart together, and somehow I'd stopped noticing the person right beside me.

The lightning illuminated the empty closet, the drawer she'd cleared out, the way the morning light would now hit only my side of the bed. Some mornings you wake up and you just know: you're going to bear this weight for a long time. You're going to survive it, but you're going to feel its absence like a missing limb.

I took one of her vitamins. It tasted like dust and goodbye.