What We Leave Behind

The kitchen was quiet when you called. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant murmur of rain against the window—water slipping down glass like the words we couldn't quite say to each other anymore.

"It's done," you said, and I knew immediately what you meant. Not the divorce papers. Those had been signed months ago. You meant the house. The sale. The place where we'd spent seventeen years building a life that, somewhere along the way, stopped being a life at all.

"I'm making spinach," I told you, which was absurd. Who announces spinach? But I needed something to hold onto, something ordinary. The leaves were wilting in the pan, green surrendering to heat, much like we had.

"Remember," you said, "the cable guy came the week we moved in. 2009. We were so young."

I remembered. Your hair was dark then, falling over your forehead when you laughed. Now there was silver at your temples, and mine had been cut short the week after you left—practical, severe, the kind of haircut that says I don't care what anyone thinks anymore, even though I care desperately.

"Are you still seeing him?" I asked. The friend. The man who had been your friend for years before he became something else, though you swore nothing happened until after. The distinction had ceased to matter.

You paused. "That's not why I called."

"Then why?"

"I found something," you said. "In the attic. A box of your old journals. From before we met."

My chest tightened. Those journals contained versions of myself I'd barely acknowledged—dreams deferred, heartaches softened by time, the person I was when I still believed love could save me.

"Burn them," I said.

"I thought you'd want them back."

"I don't. They belong to someone who doesn't exist anymore."

The spinach was overdone now. I turned off the stove and watched steam rise, dissolving into the kitchen air, becoming nothing.

"We were happy once," you said, and it wasn't a question.

"We were comfortable," I corrected. "There's a difference."

After you hung up, I stood at the sink, running water over the pan, watching the grease separate into iridescent ribbons. Some things don't wash clean. Some things leave stains you learn to live with, or you throw the pan away and start over.

I scraped the spinach into the trash and reached for my phone to book a haircut. Something different this time. Something for the person I was becoming, not the one I used to be.