The Lightning in the Room

They'd been playing padel for years, Tuesday evenings like clockwork, until she moved to Berlin. Now her iphone sat silent on my nightstand, messages unanswered for three weeks. The screen lit up with another notification I wouldn't check—not while the storm outside made the apartment feel like the inside of a camera flash.

She was the bear of a person who hibernated through heartbreak, emerging only when she'd processed everything alone. I knew this. I'd watched her do it after college, after her mother died. But this time felt different. This time I was the one who'd said what couldn't be unsaid, standing on her balcony as lightning split the sky behind us.

"We're not just friends anymore," I'd told her, and she'd looked at me with that bottomless sadness people get when they're about to deliver a kindness they know will hurt.

The thunder rattled the window. I picked up her phone—we'd swapped them accidentally weeks ago, some cosmic joke I hadn't found funny even before everything fell apart. Her background was still us at the padel club, sweaty and laughing, drinks raised to someone's birthday. I thumbed through her notes app, found what I knew I'd find: lists of reasons and counters, pro and con columns, her way of thinking through everything.

"What are we?" was written at the top of the newest page. Under it: "He's my person. He's my person. He's my person."

The power went out. In the sudden dark, lightning flashed again through the window, illuminating everything for half a second. I grabbed my coat and headed out into the rain, toward her place three blocks away. Some things you don't think through. Some bears you wake up yourself.