42
SAMANTHA
I HAD NOTHING left in my tank. Nothing. I went from a hundred to zero, instantly.
He was in California and I was in Minnesota. A fucked-up Shakespearean tragedy.
He wanted to look at flights to see who could get to who faster. He could get home to Minnesota by eight, I wouldn’t be able to get to him in California until tomorrow.
I didn’t care. I wanted him to stay put because he was too sick to travel more than he already had—but he absolutely refused to lose the time with me. We argued about it for twenty minutes and then he told me he was already in the Uber on the way to the airport. So three hours after he’d landed at LAX, he was heading back, sick, in LA traffic to get a flight home.
Of all the things that had happened the last few months, this was somehow the thing that broke me.
I felt like our relationship was cursed, like we’d angered some god who was jealous of our love and vowed never to let us be in the same room at the same time ever again.
I cried the whole way to his apartment and when I got there, I cried harder.
Not because he wasn’t there, or because I was probably clinically depressed, but because it was clear how sick he’d been and how completely and utterly alone he was.
His trash was overflowing with empty medicine boxes, his bed was unmade, his laundry was piled up. Xavier didn’t live like this. He was neat and clean and very much had his shit together.
He needed me and I hadn’t been here.
I would never be here.
I sat on the edge of his bed and sobbed.
I know it was ridiculous, but there was a very real part of me that wanted to let him go. If he was free, he could find someone else. Someone who could be here for him and take care of him. Janessa maybe. They could get married and Mike would be his brother-in-law and everything would be perfect. He deserved more than what our relationship could give him.
But I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t break up with him. I loved him too much to leave him, and I loved my mom too much to leave her. There was no solution to any of it. We just had to live with it.
And Xavier had to live with it alone. It crushed me.
I don’t think I’d truly grasped what it was like to not have family until he told me on Christmas that he usually didn’t spend the holiday with anyone.
The way that information tore my heart into pieces was compounded now by seeing how he was living.
It wasn’t me dating a ghost. It was him. He was in love with someone invisible.
I rallied myself and started cleaning, driven only by the thought of him coming home after his four-thousand-mile round trip to a dirty apartment. I stripped his bed, bleached his shower, Lysoled, washed his dishes, vacuumed. Threw open the blinds, did his laundry, ordered groceries to make him food when he got here.
There was a manic energy to my work. Like if I could just get all this done before he got home, it would be okay. It would somehow make up for the fact that he had been sick and vulnerable and alone because he picked me to be in love with, the girl from a different hemisphere.
But I knew no matter how clean I got his grout, none of this would ever be okay.
It was the one thing I wished I could forget.