What We Divided

The apartment smelled of things past saving. I stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Matthew fold his running shoes into the box marked His.

"There's spinach," I said, nodding toward the crisper drawer. "It's yours. You bought it."

He looked up, surprised. "I thought you liked spinach."

"I did. Before."

Before the corporate restructure. Before the move to Chicago. Before I learned that ambition and intimacy are sometimes mutually exclusive. The spinach in that drawer was wilted, blackening at the edges—much like us.

"You sure?" he asked. "I'm not going to have a kitchen for weeks."

"Take it." I picked up the straw hat from the counter, the one I'd worn to his sister's wedding last summer. We'd stood by the hotel pool, margaritas in hand, both pretending we weren't checking our work emails. "I'll keep this."

"We're going to the same hotel," he said quietly. "Next month. For the conference."

"I know."

"They have that pool."

"I know, Matthew."

On his bookshelf, the bronze bull sculpture caught the late afternoon light. We'd bought it after our first big market win, the year we stopped being partners and started being co-conspirators in the pursuit of more. Its horns were dull now, coated in the dust of neglect.

"You're taking the bull?" I asked.

"It reminds me of when we were winning."

"We're still winning."

"Are we?" He met my eyes for the first time that afternoon. "I haven't seen you run in six months. You used to love it."

"I don't have time."

"You don't make time."

The accusation hung between us, heavier than the boxes, heavier than the bronze bull, heavier than the years of compromise and incremental sacrifices that had somehow become a life.

"The spinach," I said, "is rotting."

"Yeah." He closed his box. "It is."

I walked out with my hat and a stack of unread books. Behind me, in the apartment that no longer held anything that could not be replaced, Matthew placed the bull in His box, next to the running shoes and the spinach that neither of us would eat.

Some things, I realized, cannot be divided. They can only be left behind to rot, or carried forward, heavier than before.