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“It’s over,” he said, and pitched himself out of the car, even though I’d barely come to a stop outside Union Station. I can’t imagine he kissed me. But I can’t imagine he didn’t. He always kissed me. And then he was gone like he meant it, tearing across Front Street, all rage and long limbs.
In eight minutes, his train to Montreal would lurch away from the platform and my world would cleave into two. Unless I could hold it together.
I swung the minivan around a corner into an underground parking lot across from the train station. It was midday on a Toronto Tuesday and the place was packed. Seven minutes and not a spot in sight. I abandoned the vehicle at a crazy angle and ran up the ramp without breathing and into the January sunlight and across the road and through the heavy doors. The ticket lobby was vast and limestone-slick, glinting bronze under light pouring in from the Roman bath windows at either end of its hundred-foot vaulted ceiling. It was enormous and swimming with souls, each trailing their own carry-ons and crises.
We were there too, imprinted from the hundreds of passages we’d made to each other’s cities for all those ecstatic biweekly sojourns, the legacy of our pyrotechnic chemistry still messing with the lights. For six years I’d occupied this space in a state of anticipation and joy; now it was the opposite.
He had a two-minute lead on me. The possibility that I might’ve lost him already prickled my synapses, but I snuffed it out. I tore through the Great Hall, skating along its Tennessee marble toward the wide staircase that led down to the trains. He was at the bottom, his duffle bag across his taut shoulders, his posture concrete. I called out to him. He turned. His eyes were mean. Reflected in them, I could see the email he’d found that morning on my computer, a too-effusive note of gratitude to a former male colleague for bolstering me during a rough patch that had sparked his jealousy.
My eyes overflowed as I careened down the stairs, panting and saying, “I’m sorry!” again and again. He just looked at me, his winter coat rising and falling with his breath. I began to cry. People’s heads jerked up and they stole glimpses of us. We were a developing scene beside the ticket counter.
He didn’t budge. My stomach clenched in disbelief. He had flown, so I would fight. I would shame him with my drama, a public display that insisted on compassion. But his wrist was steel when I touched it.
How I had loved that skin. I remembered the first moment I caught sight of it, a tease through his open collar as he approached in a hotel parking lot at our very start. I remembered thinking: I can’t wait to be with that. Now there were five minutes left, tops.
He turned and hustled down the next set of stairs to the sub-basement, a holding pen for passengers organized according to their destinations. I followed, sobbing, to the queue for his train, which ended outside the women’s washroom. “Don’t go!” My ragged horribleness, all snot and misery, was a shame. The people around us— checking their phones, living their lives— adjusted their energy to accommodate ours. There wasn’t a soul in that cavernous underground cell who wasn’t tuned in to our performance. We were a farce.
He looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “No more,” he said in a voice conscious of all that humanity. “I’m done.” I knew that tone. Sam could accelerate rapidly and we’d sped before. But now he was on fire. Something about this time was making the roots of my hair ache.
Trains rumbled above.
I pushed in to fill up all the space beside him. I pleaded with him with my voice and my eyes. I said, “I’m so sorry!” in great, heaving gulps. But I meant: Save me. I am slipping under the waves. You are my life raft. Do not let me sink to the bottom of the ocean. My hair was plastered to my face with my tears; he stepped away from my pull. “Please don’t go!” I said. All the eyes in that sub-basement flicked to me. The curious, the entertained, the sorry.
“I am leaving now and this is goodbye,” he hissed. He was beautiful, his features at their peak in his rage. Ironically, his smile lines were their most pronounced when he was pissed.
“Will this be the last time I see you?” I asked. It was a tectonic question. A final slam against his resistance. Having to say so out loud would shock him. Surely.
He told me, “Yes. It will be the last time you see me.”
He used to give me the scuba-diving signal we’d learned in Cuba that lets your partner know you’re watching out for them. See me? he would indicate across prickly public spaces. I’ve got you. His gaze now was vacant. He’d withdrawn his investment.
The crowd leaned in for my response to his terrible declaration and I did not disappoint. I reached for his face and wept, never not looking at him. And then I paused a shuddering moment in that cold, final place and took him in. Just in case.
That he allowed all this theatre terrified me. I felt, inside that drama, inside that station, worse than I had ever felt. How could he be leaving? How could we be ending? How could one person lose an entire other person, a person who was so essential? The vastness of the questions floored me, flattened me to the tiles outside the women’s washroom.
Boarding began, and the underground procession whose ranks included a furious man who was a container of all our life together, all the moments that were ours alone, readied to board a train. Two minutes.
“Please,” I wailed. But the line’s momentum pulled him with it and he was swept up in the rolling luggage. “Don’t go!” I choked from beside the women’s washroom, from the saddest patch of the black universe. But he did.
And so I sank down down, into the waves, no longer attached to him or anything. I could be swept into terrifying anywhere now that nothing secured me to this earthly plane. I was at everything’s mercy, churning away from what gave me my shape. I was unmoored.
I don’t remember if he looked back. But I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have. He always looked back.
This was where heartbreak began.
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