Then I stop.
No. Fuck that.
My eyes move to Damien’s leather weekend bag on the shelf. The one he bought on a trip to Chicago and talked about for three weeks afterward, mentioning it twice in the same sentence on more than one occasion, because apparently a bag can be a personality if a man is devoted enough to the idea. It’s expensive, and it’s coming with me.
It’s petty.
But you know what? I can live with that.
I start packing, and the speed of it catches me off guard. With how little time it takes and how little there actually is. But that’s the thing about growing up with nothing, about years of sleeping in rooms that were never really yours. You stop accumulating. The clothes go in first. My shredded jeans, worn soft at the knees. The oversized black sweater I’ve had for four years. A handful of other things pulled from my shelf without folding, shoved into a bag, the ruthless efficiency of a girl who has packed and unpacked in too many rooms to be precious about it now.
Then I head over to the small glass tray on the dresser with my jewelry, rings, and a thin gold chain, and carefully put them into an inside pouch of the bag. Then I take the novel from the nightstand I have been reading for a month and am only halfway through, still creased at the same page I keep falling asleep on.
I pack the cactus last.
I wrap it carefully in a hand towel, tucking the fabric around the tiny pot as if it were something precious. As if one wrongmove might break it. Then I slide it into the side pocket of his leather bag.
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
Not because of our ridiculous photograph in the next room, pretending to be a happy couple. Not because of the image Cassie sent me of that woman in the red dress, sitting across from Damien. Or because of the past few years I spent folding myself smaller, softer, and quieter, trying to fit into a life that was never built for me.
What makes me laugh is the cactus.
A four-dollar cactus wrapped in a hand towel like crown jewels. After all the pretty rooms, expensive wine, and empty promises dressed up as love, this stupid little plant is the only thing in this apartment that feels like mine. The only thing I look at and think, I kept that alive. The only thing from this relationship I cannot bring myself to leave behind.
I zip the bag, carry it to the bedroom door, and set it in the hall.
Then I go back for my green duffel because I am leaving with both. His for spite. Mine for history.
I stand in the living room and breathe.
I look around slowly, taking inventory, checking corners, shelves, and surfaces for anything of mine that might have drifted out here. There is nothing.
My eyes fall once again on our photograph. I walk toward it, pick it up, and look at us as a couple.
You absolute fool, Skylar.
You knew your heart was still broken when you gave him your number. You knew it was still bleeding when you let him take you to dinner, said yes, and kept saying yes, and you chose him anyway because he was safe and uncomplicated, and nothing about him was going to wreck you the way you had already been wrecked. Because clean hands, good shoes, and a man who asked follow-up questions felt like the sensible choicewhen the alternative was continuing to grieve someone you were supposed to be over. So you picked reasonable over real, called it moving forward, and told yourself that was what growing up looked like.
As if you could outrun it all by stepping into someone else’s life.
As if safety were something a man could hand you.
As if you, of all people, after everything, should not have known by now that the things you run toward to escape the pain have a way of becoming their own kind of pain. You knew better than that at the age of ten.
I throw the frame at the wall, and it hits with a crack that is deeply satisfying.
The frame splits on impact. Glass scatters across the floor in bright, skittering fragments that catch the light as they spread, little shards of something that was never as solid as it looked. The photograph slips free from the ruin and lands face down on the floor.
I leave it exactly there. Damien can see what I think of our so-called relationship. I grab my apartment key, work it loose, then place it on the counter beside the bowl where Damien keeps his mail, loose change, receipts, and every other tiny piece of evidence proving this apartment has always been his.
I expect tears to come, the ache in my chest to finally split open and announce itself, but they never arrive.
Maybe later. Maybe grief is just running behind tonight.
I load both bags into the back of my car, sit in the driver’s seat with my hands in my lap and the engine off, and wait for it again.
The pain stays absent. Part of me thinks it should be here by now. A relationship ending. A future now lying in shattered glass on a floor Damien will come home to at some point tonight.
