I wish I could say that the hardest part was letting go of him, but the truth is that I never let go. I just squeeze harder when I feel the bubbles start to pop on my skin, when he starts to shimmer and glitch out. The bed always breaks my fall, and then I spend minutes lying there with my feet dangling off the bed and my waist bent ninety degrees. I wish I could say that he’s gone, but he isn’t. He’s still there, just somewhere else, and someone else.
There are a few things common between this universe and the other one. He always notices when I don’t eat enough at the cafeteria. The difference is that in this one, he just frowns a little, shakes his head a little, and goes right back to eating. In the other one, he frowns deeply, shakes his head stubbornly, and makes sure I get another helping. “You need to eat well if you want to stay healthy,” he scolds me, waving a fork. And the moment that kills me, it’s when I start eating and he breaks into a smile.
It’s most confusing if the shift happens when I’m asleep. I’ll wake up, call him, and then immediately catch myself. Do I call him ‘muffin’? Crap. What did I call him for? And then I awkwardly ask if he’d like to hang out. Half the time, he responds with “Of course!” because he finds it adorable I’m still so nervous about asking him out, like it’s my first time. Half the time, he responds with “Sorry, my schedule’s kind of full right now. Next time, maybe.”
No, I’ll never let go. And yet he’ll disappear one day, for good. No surprise there. And he’ll stay in the other world, whether I like it or not. The question is which one will go, and which one will stay. It’s not something I like thinking about, but the thought drills itself into my brain nonetheless, and I start crying onto his shoulder. I tell him about it as he runs his hand through my hair. “I’m not going anywhere for now,” he says. He doesn’t understand.
It becomes an obsession, a choice, a coin toss. Do I want him gone in this world, or that world? How do I cope with either reality? It’s tempting to think that the more distance exists between us, the easier it’ll be to see him go. But that’s just not how things work, sadly. It just means a life that’s half-empty. It’ll always be half-empty, and then it’ll be all empty.
He drums my head. “You think too much,” he tells me.
“The other you would agree,” I tell him.
“Tell the other me that he’s a bro,” he says. “And tell him he has shit taste in life partners.”
“What if he says the same about you?” I ask.
He leaned his head back on the wall, looked up to remember something, and when he finally remembered, he said, “Make that two cups of coffee very hot and sweet.”
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