Past Tense

Rebecca and I were together for over two years. We ended it because we couldn’t beat the clock—different places, different directions, the slow accumulation of absences until there weren’t enough presences left to count against them. What I remember: the bike path to Jengen, our cat Koko, a private joke about a lonely island and a monkey butler that made sense to exactly two people on earth. We understand each other better now than we did at the end. We visit sometimes.

Anastasia came out of a friendship, which should have been the warning. We tried to be a couple and spent most of it arguing. The friendship was better than the relationship and we both knew it but neither said so until too late. What I remember: Türkheim station, organic fruit from the market, putting Muse on late at night and not needing to fill the silence. We write occasionally. The distance does the rest.

Jennifer was less than six months. We were too alike—same patterns, same defenses, the same ways of avoiding whatever needed saying. What I remember: McDonald’s runs, red hair, her enormous cats. We’re on decent terms now, which is more than I expected from how it ended.

VICE ran a feature once with eleven photographers and their exes—a photo, a paragraph, what was left. I kept reading it long after I’d gotten the point. The format makes everything sound cleaner than it was. Maybe that’s exactly why it works.