Didi Wood's Editor's Pick:
As a writer and editor, I spend a lot of time wondering about what sets apart one story from other, similar stories. This story takes a familiar subject — the end of a relationship - and, with a fresh perspective, evocative details, and probably a bit of magic, renders it vital and moving.
Today you ended it.
Which means that yesterday will be the last time you will have been called "my girlfriend" aloud. Today is the last time we will use the phrase "our apartment." The couch will become "yours" and the nightstand will become "mine" and the things we bought together will be too hard for either of us to take with us. Like the bookshelf that we bought giggling at the antique store because I said that my grandmother had owned the exact same one. We duct taped it to the roof of my car that night because we didn't have anything else to strap it on with; and though at the time I had convinced myself otherwise, it turned out you were right. It wouldn't fit in the back seat. In the end, we'll sell it to someone online, a girl about 20 who will come to pick it up with her boyfriend. The only thing she'll say is: "Is this it?" You'll nod yes, and she'll say, "Thanks." And then it'll be gone.
We'll pick times to get our stuff from the apartment to avoid running into each other. I'll come by on a Monday afternoon a week from now knowing that you'll be at work. After I've shoved the last of my things into my car, I'll sit on the floor and drink the refrigerator's last beer and look at the leftovers of our life together. The apartment will look stripped. Patches of white where you hadn't completed repainting the walls. Half the place packed into liquor boxes. It will look like a puzzle with half of its pieces. When I leave the apartment, it will be the last time I will ever see the place we lived together. I'll slide my keys under the door and be forever locked out.
Two weeks from now you'll call me at night from our old bed. You'll be lonely and you'll say that the sheets feel empty; that the queen bed we bought to fit the two of us feels enormous, like the big flat of the Midwest, where you were born. I'll come over straight away, and we'll sit on the couch together, with your head in the V of my shoulder, watching old 60s reruns. Nothing will happen between us. After all the talk of the bed, we'll both fall asleep on the couch that night. That night will be the last time you ever call me on the phone. And five years from now, you will erase my number.
We'll have sex together one last time 5 months from now. We'll randomly end up at the same rooftop New Year's party in New York together, and something between the champagne and starlight and the twinkling bridges, we'll fall in love with each other again for just a moment and make love right there on the roof when the party makes its way back inside. Afterwards, I'll ask to come back to your place and you'll say to me: "I don't know if that's a good idea."
The last time we'll see each other will be 3 years from now. We'll bump into each other at random in a totally different part of the country. You'll have come in for a friend's wedding and I'll have moved there for work. You'll look as beautiful as ever and I'll have started wearing my glasses again. It will have been over 2 years since I was in the city that we shared. You won't even have known that I'd left. We'll say: "It was great to see you" and "Likewise." And then you'll walk away, turning back just once to smile and wave. For the next week, I'll keep thinking I see you. I'll keep hallucinating you in the face of every dark haired girl in Chicago, wondering if at any moment we'll run into each other again. When it doesn't happen, I'll go out of my way, swapping to an El-train in the opposite direction of my house, just to go back to the spot I saw you. I don't know if a part of me will really believe that you will be there, but I'll feel a little crushed when you don't show, as if I've been stood up. That moment the week before, on the edge of the park, with the sun setting in your hair, and the city rising around us, will be the last time we ever look at each other.
45 years from now will be the first time I forget your name. 50 years from now will be the last time I speak it aloud to anyone. 60 years from now I will remember the that day we spent in San Francisco, watching the fog rolling in over Sausalito and your arms around me too. It felt like I was in the middle of the everything, the centrifuge of the planet. That will be the last time I ever think of you.
It all starts right now.
Ryan Scammell is a writer and independent radio producer in New York City. He produces a podcast called Audio Polaroids at www.audiopolaroids.com.