Your life fits into three boxes and a garbage bag.

Clothes. A few books. Some things you don’t need but can’t bring yourself to throw away. You pack methodically, without looking too closely at anything. If you stop, you might start thinking. And if you start thinking, you might not leave.

The house is quiet. Too quiet. No slammed doors, no shouting. Just the sound of you tucking pieces of your life away, bubble wrapped and boxed and ready to try again somewhere new.

I watch from the doorway. You don’t acknowledge me. You haven’t in a while.

You pause, a sweater in your hands. It’s one she bought you years ago—one you never wore. You shove it into the bag anyway.

Your mother’s door is closed like always, but you stop and knock this time.

And you wait – then you knock again.

Shadows dance beneath the door and for a moment you realize you don’t even know what you want to say to her. After all this time. After all this pain.

But the dance dies down, and the shadows bleed away, and it doesn’t really matter what you had to say.

You should say something. Goodbye. Thanks for nothing. Something.

But the words don’t come.

So you pick up your things, and step outside, and the taxi driver helps you with your boxes and your bag, and you don’t turn back, even though you can feel your mother staring at you through the window, face red with tears, cold coffee stained into the recesses of her brain, and all she can think about is the night your father went away.

—

The apartment is smaller than in the pictures. The kitchen is barely a hallway. The carpet is thin, the walls an off-white that looks gray in the dim light.

You drop your bags by the door and stand there, staring at nothing.

The silence stretches.

I linger in the corner, uncertain. I have followed you for so long. But here, in this space, I do not know if I belong. It suddenly occurs to me for the first time that you may have been trying to rid yourself of me as well.

And for the first time in a long, long time—

“So can you, like, talk or anything?”

I freeze.

You are looking right at me.

The words hang between us. Heavy. Unbelievable. Impossible.

I want to answer. But I don’t know if, or even how, I can.

You blink, rubbing your arms against a sudden chill. “Never mind.” You exhale sharply, shaking your head.

But you do not turn the TV off. You do not chase the silence.

So I do not leave.