What Remains in the Empty Apartment

Standing in Marcus's apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes, I'm struck by how little remains of eight years of friendship. The leather couch where we watched the playoffs — gone. The handmade ceramic mugs from that weekend in Asheville — packed. What's left are the things he didn't want: a dusty baseball signed by some minor leaguer, the one we caught at a game three years ago when he insisted we stay until the ninth inning despite my early morning meeting. We were drunk on cheap beer and the false certainty that we'd always have time for each other.

On the windowsill, the goldfish bowl. Marcus bought it on impulse during a depressive episode, naming the fish "Existence" because, he said, "it just keeps swimming through its own shit, hoping for food." I feed Existence one last time. The fish surfaces, mouth opening and closing in that perpetual O of surprise. I think about telling Marcus I'm taking the fish, but I won't. Some things should be allowed to die.

The fox was his metaphor for himself — scavenging, adaptable, beautiful but untrustworthy. "Foxes don't have friends," he told me once, drunk, "they have alliances." I'd laughed, assuming it was self-deprecation. Now I wonder if it was warning.

He slept with my wife. Not an affair, exactly — one night, after I'd cancelled our anniversary dinner for work, she went to him for comfort, and things went wrong in that predictable way they do when people are lonely and hurt and someone has been waiting in the wings for years. She told me immediately, crying. They didn't speak after. Marcus moved out two weeks ago. I haven't called him. I haven't asked what he expected.

I tape up the last box, labeled "BASEBALL & MISC." I'll throw it in storage unopened. Maybe one day I'll throw it away unopened. Maybe I'll open it and find that the ball was never signed at all — just another story he told because the truth was too boring.

The goldfish watches me from the windowsill. I lock the door and leave the key under the mat. He can come back for it, or not. Either way, the lease is up next month. Either way, I don't think I'm his friend anymore.