As we grew older, we spent more time apart, even when we were both home in the apartment. He despised aging and didn’t trust his crumbling body. The love I’d felt for him faded and detached. There was nothing to hold it in place. No more mystery. Nothing to learn. Wonder was replaced with awareness. By the end, it wasn’t just familiarity. I had a total and complete understanding of him.

He used to say I was moody and too sympathetic for my own good. He said I avoided confrontation and that he’d spent years trying to make me less anxious, less meek and mild, and that I was always in some kind of inner revolt. He worried about trivialities just as much as I did. The difference was, unlike me, he could hide it.

Before he died, when he was very sick, he told me how frightened he was. He was terrified of becoming obsolete and forgotten. He’d never admitted being scared before that. Never. He said when you’re so close to death, when it’s right there, the depth of fear is enormous. He didn’t want to die. He desperately wanted more time. He said he had so much more he wanted to do. He said he was scared for me, too, scared that I would have to go through the end of life alone.

He was right about that. I am near the end now, and I am alone. Very old and very much alone. I have been both for some time, surrounded by the listless stacks and heavy piles of a life already lived: vinyl records, empty flowerpots, clothing, dishes, photo albums, magazines about art, drawings, letters from friends, the library of paperback books lining my shelves. It’s no wonder I’m stuck in the past, thinking about him, our days together, how our relationship started, and how it ended. I feel enveloped by the past. I’ve lived here in the same apartment for more than fifty years. The man I moved here with, the man I spent more time with over my life than anyone else, would tell me in private moments, right here in the apartment, while lying in our bed, that my being too sensitive would be my demise.

“You were the sensitive one,” I say now, to the empty room. “You were the fearful one.”

I’m not left with anger or resentment or pity. It’s an anticlimax—a mourning for my own naive belief.

I look around my living room.

There are piles of notebooks and sketch pads, drawings and photographs. The first piece of art I ever owned is buried in here somewhere. A gift from my father. It’s a tiny framed print of the tree of life that’s small enough to fit one hand. I never hung it because I didn’t want anyone else to see it.

There are two bookshelves full of paperbacks. I’m losing my attention span; it’s hard to read novels now, or books of any kind. I used to read a book or two a week. Literary fiction, historical novels, comedies. I devoured books on science and nature.