These are the things I felt about the end of my marriage, which seemed like it had come quickly and not quickly enough at all. It had only taken a few weeks between the time I told Bobby that I was leaving and sleeping in a new apartment on the sofa we had bought together. New furniture comes in waves, but I had packed and unpacked my moving boxes in the span of a weekend. I was that eager to destroy the evidence of my decision—to make it seem as if I had been in my new apartment all this time and a dislocation had not occurred. There is something to be said about being the person who gets to move on in a new place—to start fresh, as people like to say. Meanwhile, the person who has chosen to stay behind is trapped among remnants of a familiar and distant life as they try to piece together a new way of being in an apartment that was once inhabited by someone they loved, or maybe even still love.

But the person who hurt them might have left behind a toothbrush, or, worse yet, a small collection of hair loosely bundled in a corner that wouldn’t be discovered until weeks later. This small, tumbleweed-like tuft is particularly painful because it is both an intimate part of a loved one and a reminder of a previous life. I tried to be dutiful in not leaving behind parts of myself, of my body, but there are always strays.

ONE OF THE FIRST NIGHTS I slept in my new apartment, I dreamed of being in a hospital waiting room. There were other women in there with me, pregnant and not, and we were waiting for our names to be called. Thumbing through issues of People and Us Weekly as we waited. The phone kept ringing. Two women in pink scrubs wheeled a gong out to the waiting room. I was trapped in Daphne’s cancer ward, but no one seemed to be sick. These women were happy—blonde, brunette, a sea of white women on high alert. They all seemed to know why we were here.

The first nurse looked at her chart and said, “Hillary Johnson?” Hillary, a twentysomething in a striped boatneck shirt, blue capris, and a headband, jumped up and threw down her magazine. She was ready to win a game show. She was ready to hit the gong.

“Five years!” the nurses cooed.

Hillary clapped her hands and said, “It’s true!”

“That’s the wood anniversary,” one of the nurses said.

Another nurse looked at her and said, “I’m still on paper.”

“You’ll make it,” Hillary said. “You’ll all make it.”

The women around me clapped and looked on with envy. The woman next to me, who was dressed in a black sheath suitable for an interview, leaned in and whispered, “I’m a newlywed.”