The Breaking Point

She left her iphone on the kitchen counter when she walked out—just a sleek black rectangle reflecting the overhead light, mocking me with its silence. I'd spent three years watching that screen instead of her face, and now the irony tasted like bile. Or maybe that was just the spinach I'd forced myself to eat for dinner, part of some pathetic attempt to become the kind of man who deserves to be kept.

I turned on the baseball game, the volume too loud, filling the apartment with the crack of bats and roar of crowds I didn't care about. We used to watch together, her pressed against my side on this same couch, commenting on players' asses and making up stories about their lives. Now the announcers' voices echoed off walls that felt suddenly cavernous.

At midnight, I went running. Not the measured jog of a man maintaining his health, but a flat-out sprint through city streets slick with summer rain, my lungs burning, my phoneless pocket light without the weight I'd carried for a decade. I ran until my chest heaved and I couldn't tell sweat from tears from rain, until I collapsed on a stranger's lawn and stared up at a sky that refused to offer answers.

The spinach had been her idea. The baseball, our ritual. The running, my punishment. And the iphone—that was everything. The portal through which we'd courted, fought, made up, and finally, disintegrated. It sat on my counter still, dark as a tombstone, gathering fingerprints in the empty room where someone once loved me.