My Sweet Annie

2

Standing in Gran's small shower, I closed my eyes and lifted my head, allowing the water to massage my face and shoulders. I had never been so tired in my life. It was the compilation of everything: Gran's death; worry about my mother and how she was coping; the cross-country road trip, all by myself; the momentous task ahead of dealing with Gran's estate; and the thing I hadn't let myself think about: the end of my relationship with Colson.

It was just shitty timing.

Colson and I had formally called things off the day of Mom's call over our morning coffee. Well, over his morning coffee. I had been too hung over to put anything in my stomach.

"I think this has been coming for a while now," he said.

"We'll be happier apart," I said.

"I just want you to be happy," he said.

"You can keep the apartment," I said.

I didn't tell him about Gran. I didn't want to put him in that position. He'd said cruel things in the heat of the moment, but Colson wasn't an asshole; I couldn't see him just turning his back on his grieving girlfriend. He would have been kind and rational. "Let's put this on pause. We'll get through the funeral and then we'll figure out where we're going. Okay?"

I didn't want that—not his sympathy or his steadiness or his help. I've always been a person who would rather rip the Band-Aid off if I know something hard is coming, and I didn't want to trap Colson in a relationship that neither of us wanted because he felt bad for me. It really had been coming for a while, after all. We'd just been going through the motions out of habit.

Still, although I didn't regret ending things, I missed him. Had I done something wrong? Was there some failure point in our relationship that had led to this outcome? Colson and I had been together for five years. Five years is a long time. It's long enough to date somebody, get engaged, buy a house, get married, have babies. It's long enough to start a life together.

"There's nothing here for me any more, Colson. Do you even care about me? About this relationship? You feel more like my roommate than my boyfriend. It's been five years. What are we doing?"

"So you think this is a waste of time?"

"I didn't say that, I—"

"Take a look in the fucking mirror, babe. Maybe if you actually tried to do something with your life, you wouldn't feel this way! You feel like we're stagnant because you're stagnant!"

Some things get better with age. Some things run their course. Wear out. And that's what happened with me and Colson: we just wore out. We didn't interest each other any more, let alone excite each other. We hardly spent time together any more and when we did, there was no connection.

I knew I would be grateful someday that I hadn't forced the issue by pushing to get married instead of splitting up. Some people do that: they think that exchanging rings will breathe life into what's dying. And while Colson was the first serious relationship I'd ever had, I knew that breaking up with him—a mutual thing—was a mark of maturity in both of us.

That didn't mean it didn't hurt. It was bitter. I knew we were not going to be friends, and I'm not sure either of us wanted to be, and that just made it worse. Colson had become such a large part of my life that I felt his absence as if I had lost a part of myself.

Maybe I had.

I stood in the shower for far too long, until the water ran so cold that I shivered. Granny would have had a fit. That was one thing we had always bickered about: the bathroom. When I'd been a little girl, I had never wanted to bathe, and when I'd gotten older, she could never get me out of the shower.