“Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
-Jhumpa Lahiri
“The Namesake”

It had felt differently lately, everything had. He had gone through his days with a boring shuffled step, his soles dragging along as he went about the mundane activities filling the hours between sleep. The schooling no longer seemed interesting, the lessons a bore, the assignments far more labour-intensive than they had ever been in the past. Work seemed a chore as well, the conversations filling the bar he worked at seemed uninteresting and bland. His relationship had seemed to fray in the last few weeks, maybe he wasn’t trying hard enough, maybe she wasn’t either.
            She had felt a shift as well. She had felt more like herself than she ever had before. She had forever been worried of who exactly this person was going to be but as she matured, she began to realize she loved who she was. She also realized she wanted to explore this newfound love without him.
            He recognized this and felt happiness for her, hope, because she had struggled for so long.
            He had been there for that struggle, and now she was swimming, how could he not be happy? Well, because he was sinking, and it tore at him because he felt like she wasn’t going to be there to help him as he did for her. This was something he would never say, because it felt selfish to him.
            They still loved each other. It was strange, growing up, and loving someone, but knowing you weren’t meant to be together, at least not right now. There were small fights, little jabs, but to sum it up there was just less of everything else.
            He stepped into the room they had spent the last two years sharing, her laptop illuminated the air around her desk and met his wetted eyes. She was reading a book he had gotten her for her birthday, that had taken her half a year to finish, and glanced up from the pages with a look he hadn’t seen before. Solidarity. She was sure. She was sound and he nearly crumbled to the floor knowing that he was anything but sure, anything but solid in himself.
            He had given pieces of himself to others for his entire life and feared what remained would turn to dust right there and then.
            An ambulance screamed past the window sending red and blue lights to the cream-coloured ceiling she had wanted to paint. The bare walls seemed to be 80 feet tall, and he felt a pain in his chest knowing they would never fill them together.
            She lay her book on the bedside table; the bookmark slashing through the midsection of his favourite novel and a tear reached his cheek as he wondered if she would ever finish it.
            He turned quietly to the bathroom understanding it would be a long night, maybe the longest of his life. The same chest of drawers sat in the closet, the clothes wrinkled and stuffed in with haste, he added another to the collection and stepped onto the cold floor.
            With his teeth brushed he stepped into the dark room, her laptop was closed, and she lay on her side looking at her phone; absently scrolling through timelines he knew she didn’t care about.
            He had never loved anyone or anything like this. He meandered his way to the bed through an environment that now seemed unfamiliar to him, wondering what the point of anything was, questioning why anyone would ever open themselves up like this.
            She placed the phone down and turned to him holding her arms out, their hands meeting like shaking leaves in the darkness. He lay beside her and held her midsection close to his, she was trembling beneath his arms that he had promised to grow in the gym but had not.
            They lay there for hours and wept. Tears stained the pillow still lined with her face wash. They said choked apologies, promised they had never felt this way before, clutched and grasped at each other feeling a different heat passing through them but one that was real, nonetheless.
            They fell asleep slowly with pounding heads, the blood thumping in front of their ears. His mind filled with thoughts of everything and everyone and her.
            He knew why people did this.
            Why you open yourself up.
            This was special. People traverse through life in fear of being hurt, but he knew that he wanted to feel, feel everything.
            He understood that you open yourself up not for the last night, but for the first night and every single painful, lovely, agonizing, beautiful night in between.

Jack Lowe-Carbell is from Vancouver, British Columbia. His first novel is being published in February, 2024