Cheap Red Wine and the End of Everything

Cheap red wine and the certainty that nothing could touch us. That’s what I keep coming back to—the two of us pressed together in some small room, laughing at everything, believing the city was ours and probably the world beyond it too. Nights like that feel infinite when you’re inside them. Your face made everything around me sharper, more livable. Whatever had been grinding me down just quietly stopped.

It’s hard to accept that nothing holds still. The talks got shorter without either of us noticing. The looks changed. The silences shifted from comfortable to cautious to something colder, and then came the jealousy, the small misreadings that metastasized, and eventually the flat indifference that’s somehow worse than any argument. Hard to reconcile that version of things with what we had—sharing something that felt like a single pulse—and now we can’t get through a conversation about nothing without it feeling like a bruise.

At some point you have to cut the last few threads and stop pretending they’re still load-bearing. I kept putting it off. Every time I tried, something surfaced—a memory, a photo, the specific way a certain smell could drag me straight back to a better evening—and I’d lose my nerve. But there’s a moment where staying becomes its own kind of damage, where you’re not preserving anything, just refusing to let it end with any dignity.

So I sat in that room—the one that had become a kind of shrine to what we used to be, photos and papers and the residue of a shared life—and went through all of it. Quietly. Then I stepped out, closed the door behind me, and the sun hit my face. And I thought: it’s not as bad as it felt in there. We were real. That doesn’t disappear just because we’re not anymore. Somewhere else, in some other version of things, I think we see each other again. Until then—take care of yourself.