Whenever the weather drops even ten or fifteen degrees in South Florida, everything becomes muted. The sky seems to hang lower, everyone speaks softer, and all the girls have pretty scarves draped over their bare collarbones. 

I didn’t wake up in my bed today. It was chilly and his breathing patterns were as foreign to me as the sheets I was tangled in. I reached for him and ran my fingertips down his face.  It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad; for the rest of your life you will always be in a different bed, fingertips feeling a different face, and if you get lucky, you will have a small fluttering in your stomach that comes and goes when you feel them deep inside you.

He woke me up like a restless small child, pulling me towards him. “I can’t sleep anymore he said, wake up with me..”  I was naked in his bathroom, brushing my teeth I think, and I looked over at him and the dog staring at me.  I’ve began calling them the boys without even thinking of it.  The dog weighs 30 pounds more than me and is so big he is basically a human being. Both their faces were tilted to the side and it made me laugh a bit. 

“Don’t worry, he said to the dog, we’ll get you a girlfriend soon.” My heart dropped and I noticed my own eyes widen in the mirror.  I’m good at having a broken heart and a new love in close succession but this time it’s too fresh and raw. At about this exact same moment I got a text message from the one before and it was vague, emotional, and completely obnoxious. And I would be  lying if I said it didn’t tug at my heart a bit and make me wonder what I was doing, briefly, naked in someone else’s bathroom. I shook the thought instantly and kissed the dog’s head and leaned against the guy on his bed and buried myself into his neck, a new neck, a new smell, a new life.

After several hours, a walk with the dog, pancakes, a long kiss, a brief nap on a train ride, traffic that made me dig my fingers into the steering wheel, a class, and a half written blog post, I ran into him.  I wasn’t surprised, really.  On the train, I had a feeling that I would see him. I had to say hello.  He didn’t see me, in all honesty, but I had to say hello.  It kills me, it literally makes my stomach hurt that you can exchange approximately 1 billion words between you and a lover and then you cannot summon the energy to say even just one.

It did not go well. It did not go poorly. It was invitations on his end and no’s and fake half smiles on mine.  We sat outside. We looked at a fountain. He told me he missed me. I told him he should stop drinking so much.  He told me to go to an art event with him.  I told him I would never. He told me he thought we were getting back together.  I told him drunkenly having sex for one and a half days does not change the fact that he left me.  He told me he wanted me back. I told him I will never be able to be with someone who had to leave me to know they wanted to come back to me.  

I gave him a brief hug and he told me he smelled my neck. I didn’t tell him I still smelled like someone else from the morning.

“Hug me tight,” he said. “Tight like this is the last hug we’ll ever have, ever.”  I squeezed halfheartedly not saying what was repeating in my mind: that I had already hugged him, like it was last hug we’ll ever have, ever, several times over now.