Lauren must have returned at night or early in the morning. I don't know which. I didn't wake up when she came home.
When I do wake up, she is on the other side of the bed, Thunder in between us. Lauren's back is facing me. It scares me that we are able to sleep during this sort of turmoil. I think of the way it used to be, the way fights used to keep us up all night and into the morning. The way we couldn't sleep on our anger, couldn't put it on hold. Now we are on the verge of defeat and... she's sleeping.
I wait patiently for her to wake up. When she finally does, she doesn't say anything to me. She stands up and walks to the bathroom. She goes to the kitchen and brews herself a cup of coffee and gets back into bed. She is next to me but not beside me. We are both in this bed, but we are not sharing it.
"We're not in love anymore," I say. Just the sound of it coming out of my mouth makes my skin crawl and my adrenaline run. I am shaking.
Lauren stares at me for a moment, no doubt shocked, and the she pulls her hands to her face, burying her fingers in her hair. She is a beautiful woman. I wonder when I stopped seeing that.
"I wish you hadn't said that," Lauren says, not looking up, not moving her head from her hands. She is frozen, staring at the blanket beneath her.
"Why?" I ask her, suddenly eager to hear what she thinks, desperate to know if maybe she remembers something I don't, to know if she thinks I'm wrong. Because maybe she can convince me. Maybe I am wrong. I want to be wrong. It will feel so good to be wrong. I will wallow in my wrongness; I will swim in it. I will breathe it in and let it overtake my lungs and my body, and I will cry it out, heavy tears so full of relief they will be baptismal.
"Because now I don't know how we keep going," she says. "I don't know where we go from here." She finally looks up at me. Her eyes are bloodshot. She pulls her fingers out of her hair, and clasps her hands together. I start to say, What do you mean? but instead, I say, "How long have you known?"
Lauren's face drops into an expression that isn't so much miserable but, rather, lifeless. "Does it matter?" she asks me, and honestly, I'm not sure. But I press on. "I just figured it out," I say. "I'm just wondering how long you've known you weren't in love with me."
"I don't know. A few weeks, I guess," she says, staring back at the blanket. It is striped and multicolored, and for that, I am thankful. It will keep her attention. Maybe she won't look at me.
"Like a month?" I ask.
"Yeah." She shrugs. "Or like a few weeks, like I said."
"When?" I say. I don't know why I get out of then bed, but I do. I have to stand up. My body has to be standing. "I just told you when," she says. She doesn't move from the bed. "No," I say, my back now up against our bedroom wall. "Like, what happened that made you realize it?"
"What happened that made you realize it?" she asks me. The blanket's stripes have failed to do their job; she looks at me. I flinch. "I don't know," I say. "It just sort of flew into my head. One moment, I didn't know what was going on, and then suddenly, I just... got it."
"Same here," she says. "Same thing for me."
"But, like, what day? What were we doing?" I don't know why I need to seek this information out. It just feels like something I don't know-- her side of this. "I'm just trying to get some context."
"Just lay off it, okay?" Back to the stripes.
"Just be honest would you? We're clearing the air here. Just let it out. It's all about to come out anyway, every last ugly piece of this. Just let it out. Just let it-"
"I'm not in love with another woman, if that's what you're asking," she says. That wasn't what I was asking at all. "But I just..." She continues. "I noticed that I am seeing them differently."
"Women?"
"Yeah. I look at them now. I never used to look at them. I was looking at one of them, and I just... I realized that I don't think of you the way I think of them."
"Women?"
"Yeah."
I let that sink in. Thunder gets off the bed and walks over to me. Can he sense what's happening? He sits at the door by my feet and looks at Lauren. My heart starts to crack. This might all end in me losing Thunder.
"So what does this mean?" I ask quietly, gently. By saying the words out loud, I have changed our fate. I have set us in motion. I am ripping us out of this comfortable prison once and for all. I am going to solve this problem. I have a lot of other problems, and I know this is going to cause a whole new set of problems, but living with someone I don't like isn't going to be one of them. Not anymore.
Lauren steps towards me, and she holds me. I want it to feel better than it does. Her voice is just as quiet and calm as mine. "This can't be the end, Camila. This is just a rough patch or something."
"But," I say, looking up at her, finally ready to say the last of what had been in my heart for so long, "I can't stand you."
It feels like such a sweet and visceral release, and yet the minute it comes out of my mouth, I wish I never said it. I wish I was the sort of person who doesn't need her pain to be heard. I want to be the type of person who can keep it to herself and spare the feelings of others. But I'm not that person. My anger has to take flight. It has to be set free and allowed to bounce off the walls and into the ears of the person it could hurt the most.
Lauren and I sink to the floor. We rest our backs against the wall, our knees bent in front of us, our arms crossed, our posture perfectly matched. We have spent enough years together to know how to work in sync, even if we don't want to. Thunder sits at my feet, his belly warming them. I want to love Lauren the way I love Thunder. I want to love her and protect her and believe in her and be ready to jump in front of a bus for her, the way I would for my dog. But they are two completely different types of love, aren't they? They shouldn't even have the same name. The kind that Lauren and I had, it runs out.
Eventually, Lauren speaks. "I have no idea what we are going to do," she says, still sitting with me, her back now slouched, her posture truly defeated, her gaze directed firmly at the wayward nail in our hardwood floor.
"Me, neither," I say, looking at her and remembering how much I used to melt when I smelled her. She is so close to me that I quietly sniff the air, seeing if I can inhale her, if I can feel that bliss again. I think maybe if I can breathe deeply enough, her scent will flow through my nose and flood my heart. Maybe it infect me again. Maybe I can be happy again if I just smell hard enough. But it doesn't work. I feel nothing.
Lauren starts laughing. She actually manages to laugh. "I don't know why I'm laughing," she says, as she gains her composure. "This is the saddest moment of my life."
And then her voice breaks, and the tears fall from her eyes, and she truly looks at me for maybe the first time in a year. She repeats herself, slowly and deliberately. "This is the saddest moment of my life.
I think, for a moment, that we might cry together. That this might be the beginning of our healing. But as I go to put my head on her shoulder, Lauren stands up.
"I'm going to call the landlord," she says. "We need hot water."
////
Just remember that Camren is endgame... that's all I'll say.
