Adiós

I don’t think its fair. You got to say goodbye once, 7 months ago. You packed up your stuff over the course of two days and drove until you got someplace where it was finally safe, a place where I wasn’t running down the street screaming and you weren’t convincing me to eat like a human and shave my legs.

It wasn’t like that for me. For me, there was that first night, where we sat next to each other at that bar on the Lower East Side and you drank pickle back whiskey shots and I picked at my salad and cried and the waiter looked at me like I was crazy, but I didn’t care because I loved you and you were leaving me first thing in the morning. Then, there was the next day, when I thought that maybe if I walked you to the bus station, I could convince you not to go. I didn’t think about how it would feel to walk back to our half-empty apartment alone. I didn’t think about what would happen if you said no.

There was also the following week, when you came back to get the things you had forgotten, like your chef’s knife and your school books, and you took me to a Thai restaurant and said that you didn’t think that I was smart enough. I cried into my noodles and we went home together and I felt so far away from you in our bed, two inches apart.

And then there was the time that I texted you to see if you still had my beach towel and you told me, plainly, that you didn’t love me anymore and I went outside and smoked exactly three cigarettes and called Kati who called you a robot and deleted you on Facebook and told me that I was the one who had made you cool in the first place. I invited you to dinners and parties and suddenly, you were best friends with all of my friends and writing me poems in San Francisco.  I liked the version of you that wasn’t the one where I found you at your grandmother’s apartment and there were bottles on the coffee table and everything was sticky and the curtains were black.

I said goodbye to you again when I met someone else and asked him to stay far away from me and he responded, “Why? Are you going to explode into sub-atomic particles?” and told him I thought that I might.  We listened to folk music, the sad kind, and I thought about how you never let me do that, not even when we were young, driving across the country in a dusty Ford Explorer full of heartbreak and illegal New Mexican fireworks. Instead, we listened to the Clash and the Specials and now I can’t stop crying when I hear Israelites by Desmond Dekker.

I said goodbye to you again when I realized that you had never asked me to be your friend. I said goodbye when I told you that my new apartment was above Kalustyans, that spice shop where you used to buy me peri peri sauce, and you never responded. I said goodbye when I packed up all of my shit to move out of our old apartment, finally, and found a giant stack of your paystubs from when you were a chef at that Balinese restaurant in Greenpoint. Remember that? You would bring me home black rice ice cream that would half-melt on the G train and then you’d hug me for ten whole minutes when you walked in the doorway because I was the best part of your day, and we were in love. You’d get mad at me for cleaning the apartment because you wanted to lie in bed and watch How I Met Your Mother and I wanted the place to be nice for you when you got home. You didn’t care if your shirts were folded, or if the ring inside the tub had been scrubbed away. You wanted me. 

Me, even though I only made $200 a week wrangling tourists at a late night talk show, me, even though I couldn’t stop crying for months or get out of bed, me, even though I either ate ice cream sandwiches or absolutely nothing at all for days. Me.

I said goodbye to you last Sunday when I went back to the old apartment to clean before the inspection. I scrubbed the walls with shaving cream and a Magic Eraser and washed away the time you came home from that WWII re-enactment and left your boots leaning against the side of the wall for too long, and the time that you accidentally sprayed the kitchen with Sriracha, and the time when we had everyone over for Passover and you invited that girl that you met at the airport and I was so mad that I wanted to cry, but instead I spilled wine and it seeped into the floorboards. I scrubbed away the ashes from the cigarettes I smoked by the open window for weeks after you left, the tops of my shelves where your foreign spices and weird noodles sat, the inside of my heart, and the outside of my stomach lining. I cleaned and I scrubbed and I bleached and I scoured until I couldn’t find you in the walls or the floors or the ceilings or the air vents. I cleaned until I couldn’t feel you at all anymore.

And then I went and got a manicure. I picked out this gunmetal grey color that I thought would look nice with the pants I had to pick up from the dry cleaners. “Armed and Ready,” said the bottle, and I believed it. And then I said goodbye again, just for good measure, because one more time wouldn’t hurt.

At least not a lot, comparatively speaking.