“No worries,” I said, and meant it.

I turned off the faucet and looked around for something else to do.

Separate Ways

Separate Ways

My new bedroom — upstairs, down a narrow hallway, next to the bathroom — was completely empty, except for the small stack of boxes in one corner. Its emptiness was a provocation, a template for a room more than a room. It was supposed to be filled with comforts, materials, plans.

The third day, Erin came over. When she left in the morning, long before it had become light outside, I didn’t argue or ask her to stay. She murmured something to me about having somewhere to be, and could I call her after class, maybe we could do something fun? I think she thought I was asleep, so it was like she was talking to herself. She went on and on, getting amused and then frustrated by my lack of response. She always said I didn’t listen, so I’m sure this didn’t feel all that unusual to her.

I heard the bedroom door close. A few seconds later, the slam of the heavy front door. I got up.

Sometimes I imagined people from school talking about me. I imagined them in apartments in far-flung cities passing over my name in casual conversation, the last, Huh, I wonder what happened to her, tapering off into a final, I literally have no idea. It felt like rebirth, in a way.

Erin and I had had sex in the new bedroom, which had been weird. The second time we ever had sex, years ago now, was in the fourth floor bathroom of the linguistics building, which had been weird in the same way. Places empty of associations but carrying the stains of long human use, adding to a silent ledger, the building’s mute memory. Lesbian sex between two eighteen-year-olds in a stall that smelled like chemical cleanliness and urine.

In my room there was the yellowing gray carpet on the floor, and the white walls studded with little pinprick holes that used to have thumbtacks and nails in them.

I opened the window and went back out to the sloped roof, blinking at the beginnings of the blue morning light. The air smelled like pine and decay and truck exhaust, and it carried some dampness that promised rain. The previous day I had removed the lopsided, broken Venetian blinds dangling over the windows and left them in a heap on the curb. From the roof, I looked down at where they lay, covered with yellow maple leaves from the neighbor’s tree.