I got happy/sad when he said he was leaving. Happy/sad in that way I get whenever something I’ve been really conniving about works.

I’d been pushing him away in a million obvious and several thousand less-obvious-but-not-exactly-subtle ways. Every morning, I made coffee for one; I hadn’t asked him for his half of the bills in months; I never went to bed at the same time as him; I wouldn’t kiss him before, after or during sex; I left empty boxes of tampons all over the apartment; I’d vacuum when he was napping; I constantly threw away his Brie before it was bad; eventually, I had to ask him to stop singing in the shower.

After over a year of tolerating his voice, his doo-wop as he soaped himself up—doo-wop, which cracked and pattered with the logic of a bonfire—I pulled open the shower curtain and said, “Please stop.”

I hated it, I said. It was driving me crazy, creating knots in my shoulders, unleashing toxins that my brain had managed to bury deep in my anatomy beneath trans-fats and chewing gum.

“You used to love it,” he said, in a sad little boy way, shampoo about to drip into his eyes.

“I used to lie.” I had to be cruel. And since I hate being cruel, I had to be somebody I hated.

He nodded and said, “Sure.” Like it was his idea to stop in the first place.

But he was too sweet to notice anything, except my hair. He’d loved my long hair like it was mother’s milk. He’d draped a strand across his chest every night. Petted it as he sank into sleep with a quiver. It was his security blanket and mine was my hand buried under the stomach of Brown, my cat. Brown slept at my side like he’d been trained to since he was so tiny I was afraid I’d crush him. That’s how we all slept every night until I went away for work one weekend.

I knew he loved my hair more than anything. It was dead. It was easy to love, I figured. So one, day without permission, without warning, without much thought at all, I decided to chop it off.

“How do you want it, honey?” Raoul—the dark, fey, some-type-of-minority Supercutter who drew my name on a ticket—asked.

“Off at the chin,” I said and began to tear up, which made Raoul instantly love me. By the end he was sure I was doing the right thing, an he thought I had to push him away as nicely and quickly as possible for my “healthiness.”

Also, Raoul thought I looked “too too hot” with my new short hair. “It sharpens your chin, makes your eyes sexy as hell,” he told me as I slipped him a ten, which was the biggest tip he’d ever gotten. I hoped that all he had done was make me look more like a boy. I hugged Raoul, and as I did, I cried, cried so much I had to apologize.

Raoul grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry, honey. Tears are fantastic for my skin.”

But it didn’t work.

When I got home, he stared at me for a full minute. Then he had me stand right under a lamp, so he could interrogate it, strand by strand. Then he professed undying affection for my new hairstyle in the most sincere tone of voice I’d ever heard. His tone made Mr. Rogers sound like an insincere prick. He’d won again.

When we first met he’d made me promise not to ever cut it. He did it every time right before he went down on me. The one part of sex he was good at.

And I had disobeyed that, violated our oral contract, betrayed him. And what did he do? He fell in love with me all over again. It was even worse than the first time. He took pictures of me from every angle. The printouts were all over the house. He framed several. He made screensavers of me. He begged me never to grow my hair long again and turned every day into a decision. A decision I couldn’t make.

Whenever he was nice, I got sadder. I couldn’t be cruel enough. So, I had to think about Brown. I had to think about that Monday morning when the taxi dropped me off. A fading pink flyer with a staple through Brown’s nose, dangling off a telephone pole. It was the picture of Brown I loved, the one where he was smiling. A picture I’d been edited out of. We never saw Brown again.

He had no idea how the cat got out. He looked everywhere at all hours and cried about it every night for a week until I said I’d forgiven him. Then it was like Brown never existed. He was just gone.

A few weeks after my haircut, I didn’t come home all weekend, just stayed at my sister’s. I showed up Monday night, and he started apologizing. When I forgave him, he invented new things to apologize for, but he couldn’t do anything wrong. That was really the problem. That was really painful thing. Painful in that ironic way. Like I knew I wasn’t in any real pain and he was, and that was the painful part.

He just needed to leave, and I wanted to stay because the less I loved him, the more I loved our little apartment. He’d found it, but it’d become mine. The chances of finding freeway-adjacent hardwood floors with central air, a little garden that allowed pets seemed infinitely lower than the chances of falling in love with another sad guy. And I could live without love. My apartment was something else; it took the thought of losing it to make me see that. Whenever I thought about having to leave, I had to swallow or walk out of the room. I had to contain myself, so I wouldn’t just tell him to take his Barcalounger, his two framed Diego Rivera prints, his ice cream scooper and go.

“Are you sleeping with someone?” he finally asked, first thing in the morning, right at six AM, right as the alarm went off.

“Why?” I asked, turning into my pillow, staring off aimlessly as I imagined ruined women had to, unable to just say the truth: no. Even the idea of sex with another man repulsed me because I knew it would just make me think of him becoming sadder and sadder until he’d just cry tears out every pore. Tears that wouldn’t stop.

Just cry. And leave.

“I don’t know. Sorry,” he said, jumping out of bed and pulling his jeans on. He began wearing a shirt to bed a few weeks after I stopped sleeping nude. I considered buying him pajamas around then—those long-sleeve pajamas dads used to have to wear. But even that was too much of a mixed message. It was still a gift.

So, we lived in limbo, like that was making things easier for either than us. But it was. It was easier than talking about it. That talk was what I lived to avoid.

And then when he stopped trying. He was almost cute again, but I knew it was coming. All the pictures of me had disappeared. He was packing.

As it got closer to that moment, I couldn’t eat. On the actual day, I couldn’t even drink water. I didn’t want anything in my body.

He asked me to sit down. Then he told me he was going, and it was over.

I nodded at him, as serious as a nod could be.

Half of my brain had forgotten the last four months and almost slipped into the “being rejected” mode. I nearly told him everything. But then he took his hand in mine and stared at my eyes, intent on me seeing his tears forming. The other half of my brain, I’ll call it the happy half, felt his spongy hands smearing his sweat into me. The happy half told me, “Don’t cry. Don’t yell. Don’t be too serious. Don’t be glib. Don’t smile. Just nod.”

He was looking for something, anything inside of me to hold on to.

And he kept staring and staring and staring saying with his eyes what he finally had to say with words: “So, I guess you have nothing to say?”

“I hope you have a nice life.” It was the most sincere thing I’d ever said. I made Mr. Rogers sound like a selfish prick.

“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” he said.

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