I keep everything inside. Locked up tight. My therapist calls it “emotional constipation,” which is both accurate and humiliating. Vicky calls it “being a stubborn idiot,” which is also accurate.
“You know you can talk to me, right?” she said one night. We were both sprawled on the living room floor, surrounded by takeout containers and the debris of a truly terrible movie we’d just watched.
Vicky doesn’t believe in closed doors. She’ll barge into my room at seven in the morning, already mid-sentence about some dream she had where our childhood dog could talk and kept asking her for tax advice. She leaves half-empty coffee mugs everywhere—on the bathroom counter, inside the linen closet, once in the freezer next to the peas. She sings in the shower, and not well. She sings like a goose being slowly lowered into a woodchipper. living with vicky
“Then why don’t you?”
Tonight, she’s making pasta. I can hear her singing in the kitchen—still badly—and the rain has finally stopped. I’m sitting at the table, watching her dance around the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand, and I think: This is it. This is what it feels like to be alive with someone who loves you. I keep everything inside
“That’s why I moved in with you, you know,” she said quietly. “Not just because my apartment had mold. But because I was lonely. And I knew you were too.”
The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. Not the gentle kind that patters on rooftops and feels poetic. This was the angry, sideways kind that turned gutters into rivers and made the whole world smell like wet concrete and regret. Vicky calls it “being a stubborn idiot,” which
She drove us to the 24-hour diner on the edge of town, the one with the cracked vinyl booths and the waitress who calls everyone “hon.” We sat in the back corner, and Vicky ordered us both milkshakes—strawberry for her, chocolate for me—and then she didn’t say anything for a full ten minutes. She just let me sit there, stirring my shake with a straw, watching the rain finally stop outside the window.