2020-02-09 / 3:01 a.m.

It's three in the morning here. Two thousand miles away, it's still yesterday. He hasn't passed through that physical and metaphorical space where his voice just landed in my ear, telling me about how he thought he'd lost the letters that I had sent, or how when he moved out of his apartment on Military Road, he had a lump in his throat because of how I loved the light through the window in that apartment, but only in the evenings. To that time when he told me he'd have paid a thousand dollars to take that couch with him because I sat there in the evenings waiting for him to get home, watching the warm light, and feeling a thousand different things that I never told him about. But I know that he also loved that couch because it's where we last had sex and then fell asleep. The day before I had to come home, where I'd live in the future again, two thousand miles away. It's where we sat all day together and didn't say much of anything and just watched the second season of Big Mouth because we both knew that I had to leave but neither of us wanted to face into the fact that we might never see each other again. I hated and loved seeing him cry.

We don't talk much anymore.

I came home and missed him so much that I couldn't talk to him. I fell in love with another man. He fell for another woman. I wonder if she loved that light in the evenings in the same way that I did.

Mostly, I feel like I've moved on. Because of the economy, he moved away almost eight years ago, and I understand it but I also resent it because I've missed him every day since. I got sick and couldn't move away, and he got financially stuck and couldn't move home. I think that maybe I wouldn't be so sad about it if we had fallen out with each other. If he'd said some stupid shit about how he wished I hadn't gained weight, or if I'd been nagging him about his drinking, and we'd drifted, and started to resent each other because life happens and sometimes people aren't compatible. But we didn't. I got sick and he got stuck. He calls me 'til three in the morning and tells me about the letters he thought he'd lost, and almost cried about, and I tell him about how I miss his squeaky door in his old apartment because then I'd know where in the world he was when he walked through it and had me on the phone.

Maybe it's better this way.