commitment

fiction

“I don’t love you anymore,” he says, not to her nor anything in particular in the room but simply out loud. He looks at the counter steadily with a lack of emotion that he actually feels or is feigning to speed up the process that he views to be socially necessary but practically superfluous. He is careful not to look directly at her. She is halfway through skinning a potato at the edge of the counter and stops mid stroke. Her blade chafes into the sorry potato.

“I see,” she says after a pause. She turns to look at him, to see the look on his face as he sits there at the coffee table as he has for the past three years, in the same seat and same manner. He never noticed it but he never sat parallel to a the table; he was always angled possibly to face the TV at the opposite corner, even during dinners when the TV was off, where he was, in any case, just facing her. There he is now, sitting with his chair angled so that his left elbow rests on the table holding his coffee and as his right hangs off the table. He feels tired.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she adds. He glances at her face and she makes sure to look him in the eye and smile slightly, to assure him that she takes no offense at his statement. She continues her strokes at the potato and watches it reveal the clear white underneath its porous skin.

He was watching her sleep one day two months ago in March when he realized his feelings changed. It was one of those nights where he woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep for hours and he memorized the way each shadow fell on the brownstones. There was maybe one window lit across the street at any given time at night but that very night the whole street seemed to be asleep. He looked at the empty rooftop across their apartment and imagined what it would be like to sit at its edge, swinging his legs above all the people below. People never looked up enough to see all the things. People looked down at other people.

That day he imagined himself sitting on the edge of the rooftop across, which was always unkempt and gray because it wasn’t open to the tenants in the building, but instead of looking down at the streets he looked up into his own apartment window. Past the wirings of the precarious fire escape and the half closed curtain in their window, her figure was curled sideways in bed, one arm folded uncomfortably over her stomach. She had always slept this way with one arm held tightly towards herself and he knew this—but through the window and in the moonlight that familiar uncomfortable posture seemed strange and even repulsive, as though the arm carrying that discomfort was holding him. He could feel the arm pressing on his stomach and became agitated at the feeling that invaded his sitting on the rooftop, the swinging of his legs and the looking down on the people.

He thought to himself, “I must not love her anymore.”

For the next two months, he kept looking at her as though he had never seen her before. The way she brushed her brunette curls to the side every morning felt pretentious and the way she bit her lower lip as she perused a serious headline felt unnecessarily coy. He followed her hand as she put down his coffee cup at the table one April morning and noted how stiff they looked, as though she were always anxious and wound up about something. She had then noted to him how April mornings always felt pollinated to her, a little thicker to breathe. This was prophetic for him and he furrowed his brow as his breathing suddenly felt heavier at this acute awareness of how his body was aging, parallel to the changing season outside—something he would have never brought into consciousness of his own volition.

She noticed his eyes wandering toward her in a renewed kind of curiosity she hadn’t observed since the first year of their relationship. When they first started seeing each other three winters ago in New York she had caught him studying her while she was occupied with the menu. She always took care to look at each section of the menu and look up recommendations on her phone, and it overwhelmed her but she was always committed to the research. Before she could approve his choice of the much raved about lobster ravioli, she realized his unflickering gaze. She looked back steadily to see what he’d do. She had caught him before, just two weeks ago, facing her in the window. She tried to read his expression but he turned blank.

Across the dinner table from her, he didn’t look away. She smiled at this perceived change in intent. He had asked her what she found so amusing and she decided to not tell him about her discoveries—about the lobster and about him.

It was through his gaze that she learned he was falling in love with her. She initially felt it invasive: he noticed everything. He saw the small wine stain on her dress before she herself did and he noticed she got thinner after an exhausting summer two years ago, when she moved apartments and picked up an extra weekend shift as a barista. He’d grabbed her wrists in the park, after not seeing her for a week, and commented on how much smaller they felt in his hands. Later, she’d grow to enjoy his gaze as a reminder that she wasn’t invisible like she sometimes felt on the the city streets: she may be in a wine stained dress, but there was someone to notice that about her because to that someone, she mattered.

She observed his gaze change from one of curiosity to one of affection to something that was lighter in meaning during their three years together. A Friday night in last December, it was snowing when he came home. She heard the door close as when he came home, he heard him shuffling in, heavily, with in his snow boots and a down jacket. When he surfaced from the foyer and entered the living room he had specks of white on his hair. She singularly moved to bring him a towel, tussle his hair, and hand him a cup of tea. Somewhere in the swift movement she made from the counter and to him sitting on the couch, she realized she was unhappy.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want him there or that she resented having to care for him—she quite liked it. She had always liked caring for him. As she sat with him at the sofa discussing the company his team was looking to invest in at work, she thought about how alone she felt, despite his being there. His work was interesting and he had the same easy demeanor but something felt missing that made her search every corner of her head and the apartment for an answer.

He was tired and was going to take a shower before dinner, he told her. She watched him as he leaned over to kiss her and moved past her into the bedroom, shedding his layers of clothing on his way. She sat there a moment longer and held onto that sensation on her lips. That was it, she supposed. She didn’t have an urge to kiss him when she saw him after a long day, to rest in his arms and trust that he could make her feel better about her work and her anxieties.

He looks at her curiously, wondering if somehow his statement had come across as insincere or simply incomplete in meaning. Then, he thinks, perhaps she feels the same. That thought comforts him as he sips his coffee and watches her continuing strokes at the sink, her hair brushed to the side like always and her back straighter than the cutting boards on the counter. He closes his eyes and imagines that she is biting her lip while at work. He likes that he knows without seeing, and then he thinks about the unpredictability that exists outside of their apartment, beyond their emaciated fire escape and the empty rooftop where the moon shines like always.