I finished packing up my books yesterday morning. Scatterbrained as I was, I included those from the library. I stuck my winter clothes in the metal trunk that had for many years served as a table in an even smaller apartment. In the afternoon, before picking Lila up from daycare, I looked over the books I was going to leave behind because it had never been clear whose they were. I went back and forth between my bedroom and the library countless times. Oblomov had died by the time I was finished. Nobody is surprised Vincent and I are separating. I realize it’s a catastrophe everyone saw coming, like the economic collapse of a small country or the death of someone terminally ill. We alone had clung for months to the possibility of a change we didn’t even know how to bring about, nor was it in our nature to see through. Nobody made us get married. No unknown hand grabbed us from our family aquariums and placed us in this apartment without our consent. We chose each other for reasons that, at least at the time, felt compelling. The reasons we are leaving each other are much less clear, but equally irrevocable.

War in the Trash Cans

War in the Trash Cans