My bedroom, once bright and free, is now choking in amber and pontification. I’m landlocked by my white stucco walls and acquired vintage furniture. You’re there too. We are sitting on my white duvet, on opposite sides like strangers, as if you aren’t familiar with the pillows at my side, or the language of my body while I sleep. The distance is notably heavy, cold, even. My cat’s there too, in his litter box, raking through the tiny pellets like a gardener in soft soil. The sound of the falling pebbles acts as white noise for our rather sour conversation, saving me from the faint ins and outs of your paced breathing as you tell me the words that have been stuck in your throat for God knows how long:

“This isn’t working.” The first move. A minor tilt of our axis, but no tilting of an axis is ever minor, as they say — we’re smart enough to know this.

When you texted me earlier that day, saying “We need to talk,” I paced back and forth around my room, creaking the old floor of my overpriced apartment. I folded the clothes that littered my floor, I tried to read a book, I tried to watch a show, I tried deep breathing exercises, anything to distract the impending doom in my chest — all to no avail. 

“I think we should stop seeing each other,” you say slowly, like peeling a painful hangnail. 

“It’s not you, it’s me … I’m not ready … I just want to be friends …” As my focus shifts in and out of disbelief, I catch you saying cliches I’ve heard countless times.

As a writer yourself, I kind of hoped you’d be more creative while you break up with me, but they are cliches for a reason, I suppose. Circling our lives, becoming vacuous, until that one fateful day when you realize they’ve been true all along, and not just derivative passed-down sayings made for movies.

When we first met, I thought we’d use different cliches. The ones that would get written so fervently when no other words meant enough. I can’t live without you. You’re the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. 

I remember our eyes meeting that first time at that random birthday party. You shook my hand after hearing my name, a strange but sweet formality, and the future with you seemed so abundant and warm, like it could swallow me whole, and I would let it. But sometimes, like now, my dreams don’t get to reach as far. You always did let me down in little ways.

“When did you start feeling like this?” I ask. You don’t answer. 

Instead, you’re talking down to me about what’s “not working” — my abundance of desires, my family troubles, my neediness, my gap in historical knowledge — while eyeing my dust-ridden and forlorn guitar that sits in the corner as if it’s calling your name.

I can’t help but smile at the thought of you strumming it in the middle of breaking up with me. How the strings would bend as you’d play an inappropriately suited song — “Ventura Highway” probably, the only song you know offhand. Singing, “Tell me how long you gonna stay here Joe?” while I hold back an ugly mixture of sobs and confused laughter. 

“I don’t think we’re good for each other. I don’t know if we ever were. Maybe, I don’t know, we just liked each other as something to do.” You say that last part like a question, detached from the rest of your dogmatic statements, like the blow of it could be strong enough to hurt us both. 

We sit in our uncomfortable beats of silence, me unable to grasp the reality of what’s going on, you unable to understand why I’m so upset.  

“I’m sorry,” you say, feigning sadness like you know what it means. And the words start to feel like a useless parable. That’s when I knew there was no changing your mind. 

People talk about how long it takes to forget a person — six months to a lifetime. It’s been a year now and I still think about you and your blue eyes. How they would close when you laughed. The way your wrinkles creased around them, and I couldn’t help but think about growing old with you.

With time, loneliness starts to feel like it has a purpose. And all I can think is that this will ultimately make me a better person, sooner or later. In my head, there’s an earworm of “Ventura Highway” on constant repeat. Karma, I guess.