The September We Drifted Apart

The empty water glasses sat between us like unfinished sentences. That was the September we stopped swimming in each other's direction. You'd started leaving your vitamin supplements on the counter—those orange bottles with promises neither of us believed in anymore.

I remember the night the cable went out during the storm, how we sat in the blue-gray light of the television not watching us. Your dog—that loyal, beautiful disaster of a creature—slept between us on the couch, a warm fence we both pretended wasn't there. She knew before we did.

Then came the morning I saw you with him. The fox, you called him—clever, adaptable, always hungry. I saw the way you looked at him across the coffee shop, the way you used to look at me when we still believed in forever. He was all sharp angles and new possibilities, while I was just the comfortable weight you were learning to shed.

The vitamins expired eventually. The cable got fixed. The dog learned to sleep on your side of the bed alone. I wonder sometimes if you're still swimming in that direction, or if you found what you were looking for in the fox's den. Some nights I wake up reaching for the ghost of warmth that used to be there, but I just end up knocking over the empty water glass beside my bed.

We say we want to be healthy, we say we want connection. We line up our little bottles of optimism and wait for the magic to kick in. But sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit we've become strangers who used to love each other, and let the current take us where it may.