In North Carolina for E’s wedding. I love being here, it feels like a second home. I wander through and see all the things from all the years we lived together (9?? 10??) - a wooden stool; a pair of night tables that BT and i had a huge fight about going to pick up; my old lamps I found on Craigslist; a print Laurel brought me from Oregon once when i picked her up from the airport, that hung in the three kitchens E and I shared in New Orleans; the cutlery I found at a thrift store in rural Lousiana while we were shopping with Joel and Summer for Mardi Gras costume; R’s bowls from Toronto via DC; my sister’s old kitchen table from Ottawa via Montreal then DC; the wooden kitchen island I bought for the second apartment I rented in DC; E’s shower curtain from the apartment with her ex (that beautiful shower curtain.. more than either of us had ever spent on a shower curtain).

Maybe it made me melancholy. In the middle of the night I woke up and listened to the fan whirring, thinking of other places I’d listened to fans. How BT and I used to fight over the exact placement of the fan because he could not handle the air touching him even a little bit and I couldn’t sleep without some airflow in that third floor walk up in sweltering Montreal July.

I thought about E’s parents getting very old next door. I thought about how we are happy now and how many more times we have left to be heartbroken, how it never ends until it ends.

1:26 p.m. - 2024-07-24