Paul and I had actually done a pretty good job at synchronizing our belief systems for two people who were only together because one inseminated the other when they were both just a couple of years above the legal drinking age. When we met, I was a polyamorous riot grrl teaching English to Latin American refugees, and he was an unskilled labourer building the kind of tract housing we’re living in now. He was a hulking six feet four. Shy and polite, who danced purposefully with his shoulders. Not the kind of guy who’d normally finger a young woman on public transit, or join her at migrants’ rights protests. Acid, avocados, personal grooming, Tarkovsky—I kicked open a lot of doors for him, quickly. He was always a bit dazzled by how I carried myself socially; how I always seemed to be the linchpin in my group of friends. He once told me I made being important look like making a sandwich.

In those days, even his absence in the room could turn me on; his underwear on the floor, his sweat on the bedsheets, his smell on the pillow. We were full of the unreasonable happiness of a new couple. Sometimes I would be in the shower behind him and think, Remember what water looks like on his neck, with his thin gold chain and freckles, remember always, because maybe I knew these communal showers were a temporary thing, a chapter in our love, and they were, of course. But thankfully I did remember. I still remember what the water looked like on Paul’s young neck.

Paul had a beauty that begged to be remarked upon on a regular basis, and to not do so, to treat his beauty as something I could take for granted, felt luxurious and extravagant. What’s more, he had no idea he was beautiful, and no idea that I thought so, and I got an almost erogenous thrill at withholding those facts from him. I once told him he had a face like a cornflake—open and sunny, with dimples. This wasn’t received with the spirit in which it was intended. He looked his best when frustrated or concentrating intently. Whenever he bit his lip, I thought of a little toy train I used to have as a girl. The train had a face on it, and I used to pull it around on a rope.