Third Inning of Us

The baseball game droned on in the background—ninth inning, bases loaded, the kind of tension that used to make him grab my hand across the coffee table. Now, the space between us felt measured in something other than inches. I watched him push his food around his plate, the spinach wilting under the heat of whatever we weren't saying.

'You're doing that thing,' I said, finally.

'What thing?'

'That thing where you pretend everything's fine while you're actually three states away in your head.' I took a sip of wine that had gone warm. 'It's like watching a goldfish forget the same rock every time it swims past it. We keep having this conversation, and you keep forgetting that we already had it.'

He set down his fork. The metal clinked against ceramic, sharp in the sudden quiet.

'Maybe some things are worth repeating.' His voice was soft, careful. The way he'd sounded when he told me he loved me for the first time, outside that dive bar in Chicago, baseball caps pulled low against the rain.

'Maybe some things aren't.' I stood up, my chair scraping the floor. 'I'm not interested in being your rock to swim past, Mark. I'm not interested in being the person you come home to when you're done wherever it is you go when you're not here.'

The game on TV erupted—someone had hit a home run. The crowd's roar filled our living room, but neither of us moved. We just stood there, suspended in the silence between us, while somewhere far away, strangers celebrated something that had finally gone right.

Later, I would pack my things. Later, I would realize that love isn't about the big gestures or the dramatic declarations. It's about showing up, again and again, even when you'd rather be anywhere else. And he had stopped showing up months ago, I just hadn't wanted to see it.

But in that moment, with the spinach cold on our plates and the goldfish drifting in its bowl on the mantel, all I could think was that some games, you just have to walk away from before the bottom of the ninth.