28. Distance and Decisions #2
“You keep telling yourself that,” Jake says, shaking his head. “But if it was just an ’emergency shelter,’ you wouldn’t look like you’ve been hit by a freight train. You gave her the choice to leave because you didn’t think you were worth the choice to stay. ”
I spend the next four hours obsessively cleaning the engine.
I scrub the chrome until I can see my own tired reflection.
I check the pressure gauges. I reorganize the trauma kits, checking expiration dates on bandages and vials of saline that I know are perfectly fine.
I do everything in my power to keep my hands busy so I don’t check my phone.
I’m waiting for a text that I know isn’t coming, or maybe I’m waiting for the one I’m too chicken to send.
Every time the station phone rings, my heart stutters, a pathetic, hopeful little spasm that I crush under the weight of logic.
At some point, I find myself kneeling by the radiator near the bay doors, and my hand brushes something small and plastic.
I pull it out. It’s a little feather-on-a-string toy, one of Bowie’s favorites.
It must have gotten kicked under there when Mandy brought him by the station last week to show him off to the guys.
The feathers are bent, and the string is frayed from where the cat had chewed on it.
I should throw it away. It’s trash. It’s a reminder of a cat that isn’t mine and a woman who isn’t here. Instead, I tuck it back under the radiator, a tiny monument to the two weeks that I’m never going to get back. It’s a piece of evidence I’m not ready to suppress yet.
I spend the rest of the shift in a fog, moving through the motions of the station, listening for the bells that never seem to ring when I actually need the distraction.
We get one minor call, a trash fire in an alley, and I tackle it with a ferocity that makes the rest of the crew look at me sideways.
I want the heat. I want the smoke. I want something that requires my total attention so I don’t have to think about the folded sweatshirt on the bed.
The 24/48 rotation, which used to feel like a clean, masculine rhythm of service and recovery, now just feels like a countdown to returning to a space that doesn’t fit me anymore. Every hour at the station is an hour I don’t have to face the fact that my life has been hollowed out.
When I finally get back to the loft that evening, the sun is setting, casting long, bruised purple shadows across the brick walls.
The light is beautiful and tragic, the kind of light Mandy would have wanted to photograph or sketch.
I walk into the kitchen and see a single coffee mug sitting on the wrong side of the cabinet, which I missed this morning.
It’s a white ceramic mug with a small chip on the rim.
I remember her using it three mornings ago while she talked about a new logo, her hands moving like she was shaping the letters out of the air.
There’s a throw blanket on the couch that isn’t mine, a soft-knit thing in a deep forest green she must have bought during our shopping trip to Target.
It’s draped over the arm of the sofa, looking abandoned.
The apartment is reorganizing itself, but it’s doing it in a way that highlights the negative space where she used to be.
The bookshelves look emptier without her design magazines.
The air feels thinner without the scent of her hair.
I sit at the counter and pull my phone out. I open our text thread. It’s a graveyard of careful, abbreviated politeness.
Move go okay?
Yes, thanks. Everything’s fine.
Good.
Good.
We’re performing normalcy for an audience of two, and we’re both failing the audition. The intimacy of the last two weeks, the whispered secrets in the dark, the shared meals, the way she looked in my shirts, feels like a fever dream that broke.
I start to type. I miss you. I delete it.
I start again. The cat left a toy. I delete that too.
I want to tell her that the loft is too big. I want to tell her that I’m terrified I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life by being ’noble’ and letting her go back to a life that doesn’t include me. I want to tell her that I lied when I said I could go back to being just friends.
Instead, I think about the ring sitting in the navy velvet box in my top drawer, hidden under my socks.
I think about the way her hand felt in mine during that anniversary dinner, and how for a second, I didn’t have to pretend at all.
I’ve spent my whole life being the one who rescues people, the one who provides the shelter, but I never learned how to be the one who asks to be kept.
I’m a hero in a uniform and a coward in a kitchen.
I type out a message, my thumbs heavy and slow.
I hate every word as I write them. I hate the distance I’m maintaining.
I hate the way I’m giving her the out she never even asked for, just because I’m too scared to hear her say she doesn’t want to come back.
I’m a man who runs into fires, but I can’t even tell a woman I want her to stay.
Hey. I packed a box for you. Can talk about arrangements to pick up / drop off your stuff whenever. Sounds like you’re settled.
I hit send before I can lose my nerve, watching the ’delivered’ status appear with a sense of profound self-loathing.
It’s polite. It’s abbreviated. It’s exactly the kind of wall Jake warned me about.
And as I sit there in the darkening loft, waiting for a reply, I’ve just built the tallest one yet.