𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆

November 22-30. 130-122 days left.

She didn't go on Thursday.

She woke up and the alarm went off and she lay there with her phone buzzing on the mattress beside her head and she thought about the diner and the booth and the tea and the man with paint on his hands and the dog who'd sighed against her chest like she was someone worth sighing over, and then she thought about getting dressed, and then she stopped thinking and stared at the ceiling and the alarm buzzed itself hoarse and eventually gave up.

She called in sick to work. Martin, her boss, said "You're never sick" and she said "I'm sick" and he said "We have the O'Neal viewing at two" and she said "Martin, I am sick" and he said "Right, well, feel better" in a tone that meant this is very inconvenient and I'm too English to say so.

She wasn't sick.

She was something else.

She'd been something else for three days, since Tuesday night, since she'd come home from the walk with the dog and the fog and the seagull-with-eyelashes story and the sound she'd made, the snort, the awful, involuntary, mortifying snort, and she'd stood in her flat and taken off her coat and realized she'd left her scarf and then realized she'd done it on purpose and then stood very still in the hallway for a long time because she didn't know what kind of person does that.

A person who wants to go back. That's who does that.

And wanting to go back was the problem. Because wanting to go back meant wanting a next time, and wanting a next time meant wanting a future, and wanting a future was the one thing she'd specifically, deliberately, contractually agreed not to do.

So she didn't go on Thursday.

She didn't go on Tuesday either.

• • •

November 22nd was the anniversary. Two years since she'd arrived in St. John's with Dana and a suitcase and the kind of optimism that now turned her stomach.

She hadn't thought about it ahead of time. She never did. The anniversaries just showed up, the way weather showed up, uninvited and impossible to dress for. She'd woken up on Wednesday and known the way you knew things in your body before your brain caught up: a heaviness behind her sternum, a taste in her mouth like old pennies, a feeling like the floor had tilted two degrees and everything was sliding very slowly toward a corner she couldn't see.

Two years. Dana had found the flat online. Look, babe, it's cheap, it's got a window, we'll be right near the water. The window showed pavement. The "near the water" was a twenty-minute walk uphill.

Dana had made it sound like an adventure.

Dana made everything sound like an adventure, moving to Canada, starting over, leaving the grey little life in the grey little town for something bigger, brighter, something that had Dana at the centre of it, always Dana, because Dana was the kind of person who walked into a room and rearranged the gravity.

Mollie had loved that about her. Had loved being in the orbit. Had loved the way Dana looked at her in the early months, like she was something Dana had chosen, something precious, something worth the effort of crossing an ocean for.

Eighteen months. That's how long the looking lasted.

And the thing Mollie still couldn't forgive herself for, two years later, was that when Dana told her it was over she'd apologized. Like it was her fault. Like she'd failed some test she didn't know she was taking.

Dana left. Took the good towels. Left a Post-it on the fridge that said Sorry it didn't work out. Like she was cancelling a subscription. Like eighteen months of sharing a bed and a bathroom and the specific domestic choreography of two people who know how the other one takes their tea was something that could be resolved with a sticky note and an apology that wasn't one.

The Post-it was still in a drawer. Mollie couldn't throw it away. She couldn't look at it. It lived in the drawer the way a lot of things lived in Mollie's life: present, unaddressed, slowly turning into furniture.

She lay on the floor. The lino was cold against her back. The ceiling had a crack in it that she'd been meaning to report to the landlord for eleven months and hadn't because calling the landlord meant caring about the ceiling and caring about the ceiling meant caring about the flat and caring about the flat meant planning to be in it, and she wasn't planning to be in it. Not past April.

The high window showed pavement. Feet went by sometimes, boots, mostly, because it was November. She'd learned the rhythms. The woman who walked her dog at 7:15. The man in work boots at 7:30. A child, sometimes, in bright wellies, jumping in puddles on the way to school. She watched the feet and tried to feel something about them and couldn't.

Her phone was on the kitchen counter. She'd left it there on Thursday morning and hadn't picked it up since. She could see it from the floor... the screen lighting up every few hours, buzzing against the countertop, then going dark again. She knew what it was.

Reddit notifications.

The only way he had to reach her, because they'd never exchanged numbers, because exchanging numbers was the kind of thing people did when they planned to know each other for longer than five months, and she was not planning that. She was planning nothing. Planning was over.

She didn't read them.

She watched the screen go dark.

Outside, the woman who walked her dog at 7:15 had come and gone. The boots had come and gone. The small child in bright wellies was late today, or absent, and the pavement outside the window was just pavement, and the ceiling crack was still there, and she was still on the floor.

• • •