“Are you sure you don’t want these?” The young woman at the charity shop counter smiles as she rummages through your clothes. “They’re nearly new. They must look great on you.”

“They were my partner’s.”

I’m expecting some kind of sympathetic look but she keeps smiling inanely while pawing the clothes, as if she didn’t hear.

“He’s dead.”

The words, said fast and without forethought, shock us both.

“I’m so sorry.” Her smile retreats like a snail into its shell, and her cheeks flush.

She starts folding the clothes, a dance around our awkward silence, then pauses over the sweater I bought you last Christmas. “He had wonderful taste.”

“Yeah, he did. For the most part,” I say. “I’m glad they can be of use.”

I’m almost at the door when she calls after me: “Wait!”

I turn and she’s waving something at me. I walk back and realise what it is.

“It was in a shirt pocket,” she says.

I stare at the key she’s holding out to me. For a moment I’m superstitiously afraid to touch it but then I take it.

“Thank you,” I say.

I can almost hear your voice.

I told you so.

I don’t want to hear it.

 

I hesitate outside our door. This moment before stepping in used to be full of possibility. Maybe I’d find you by the window, poring over impenetrable ledgers and stacks of invoices. Maybe you’d be taking a break and making coffee while the sounds of Frank Ocean filled the apartment. Or perhaps I’d detect the lingering scent of your not-as-secret-as-you-thought cigarettes and know you’d had a tough day. You might be out and I’d phrase a message casually, walking that razor-wire tightrope between checking in and controlling.

Now I know exactly what’s behind that door. Nothing.

I unlock and walk into silence and empty space. I am an astronaut.

 

I take a shower and wash my face with the exfoliating scrub. I remember you telling me once that it was apocryphal that the human body regenerates all its cells throughout a lifetime, just a dumb thing stoners repeat to each other. But, you said, the skin does regenerate by necessity—the epidermis is replaced every two to four weeks.

I curl and uncurl my fingers and realise what that means. I last touched your skin six weeks ago. Except… I didn’t really. That skin I touched you with has been shed. This body has never really touched you. That moment is gone and it could only ever have been kept alive by renewal, by touching you again. And I can’t. You’ve slipped through my fingers forever.

 

I’m watching Beef on Netflix again. An act of masochism, like a spurned teenage girl listening on repeat to a song she used to play with her first love. The first time I saw this—with you, on this same sofa—was the last time I remember us being really together. Not just that we were physically there together, not even that we were enjoying it together. We talked about it.

I asked you if they’d got the Asian American experience right, and you’d tell me little moments of your childhood I’d somehow never heard before, facets of experience reflected in the show. You’d ask me if that last episode really captured depression well, and I told you that it did a better job than any of my therapists had ever managed. We both cried during the last scene and then we realised we were both crying and laughed.

We didn’t have sex that night but you cuddled in close to me and I felt a light somewhere deep inside me as I fell asleep, like a warm candle glowing deep inside a dark, cold cave.

Now, I go to the fridge to get a beer and see the key on the counter, where I left it—a tiny accusation.

The last time you came home, you were late. I sat, waiting, drinking too much, and finally had to buzz you in because you couldn’t find your key. You stank of cigarettes, whisky and—I thought—a stranger’s aftershave. When you headed straight for the shower, my suspicions boiled.

“Maybe your key’s on someone’s bedside table?” I spat when you emerged. “Or their floor?”

Your fury came in hot, whisky-inflamed. You said you’d had the key, definitely, and that the one time you fucked someone else was before you’d even moved in. We hadn’t agreed any rules, and you were sick of me bringing it up and all the accusations.

I should have apologised, but I didn’t. Do you want to know the truth? I was just glad to see passion in your face. I was glad to see you fighting for us. I wanted the fight.

I didn’t know where it would go though. I didn’t know you’d start to list all the things you’d done to help me, like you’d been keeping an inventory the whole time. I didn’t know you’d bring up the fact I’d not worked in four months and you were eating into your savings to help me keep my apartment. I didn’t know that you lived your whole life like an accountant and had done your sums and filed me in the deficit column. I didn’t know I would hit you.

Not hard, not really. And I didn’t mean to. But I did. I hit you.

The fire in you snuffed out instantly: summer into winter, no fall in between. You didn’t say a word as you methodically packed and I followed you around like a mangy puppy—groveling, bargaining, weeping. At the elevator door, I reached for you and you flinched.

“If you go, you’re dead to me,” I said. What desperation. What a cliché.

You turned, bags in hand, frost-faced. “I am.”

If you were dead, people would call all the time, stop by with sympathy. They’d ask if I was looking after myself, invite me to events to keep me busy. But nobody’s calling.

It would be easier if you were dead.