After You

From the outside, two people climbed into the trunk of a car in a driveway and closed it from the inside. It was a new car, a blue Saturn coupe with a fancy key fob and a blown head gasket on day three of ownership. On day one of its post-repair life, she drove it to her ex-boyfriend's house to pick him up for their casual gym date.

The Saturn Lemon, he called it. He met her in the driveway. She didn't go inside the house that day.

It was going okay. They would chat while she drove, separate and do their own thing at the gym, then hook back up afterward. They'd grab a quick whatever on the way home. Pizza and lemonade. French fries and Cokes. Stop by Eric’s for this or that.

"If you can," he'd ask, and of course, she could. They stretched time together like a delicate dough. It was the restart. A common ground. It was carefully built time. Two people going to the gym, rewriting a decade of collapse.

The trunk was just the right size to hold it.

She pulled into his parents' driveway and shut off the engine. They circled the car, commenting on design choices and what other features could fail next. When they got to the trunk, she popped it with the key fob. It was as empty as it would ever be in there. She pointed out the glow-in-the-dark trunk release handle and raised her eyebrows suspiciously.

"After you," she joked, holding out her hand to escort him inside. But he took it, grabbed right on, fingers gripped, and climbed inside, not letting go.

She followed him in and pulled the trunk shut.

The glowing release handle was an upgraded safety feature. They laid squished there, taking turns pretending to pull the release. Things were good. Right then at that moment. It's only right now that she is grateful it was their goodbye. Then, when it was good, it felt like nothing.

It was the physically closest they had been since their official restart. Also the darkest and most confined.

"You know," it came out on its own, "this is the only place we make sense." She hadn't planned on saying that.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean this is about as big as our world has ever been."

She didn't say that. She thought that, much later, but she didn't say it.

What she said was, "I met someone else and I'm moving away."

He popped the trunk.

"You know this is over, right?" He climbed out. "You'll never see me again."

She didn't know that. She didn't even really consider whether it was true.

Two days later, she saw him at the gym. It was his 25th birthday, and she smiled at him and waved. His eyes had already glossed over any indication of her existence, and he looked right past her. Through her. Through where she used to be.

It didn't hurt. It couldn't.

But she still didn't believe him. And she texted him later, what became her last words.

Happy quarter century.

He nothing, and that was it.

Can you imagine? Still wanting the thing that hurt you the most?

She saw him in dreams, a knight in green and gold armor, coming to reclaim her. She saw him in pictures online and in the photographs she threw away. She saw him get married. Become a father. Move away. She looked for him in every crowd. Tried to conjure the moment where he'd walk by and their wedding rings would clink together as their hands touched again for the last time.

He’d die first. And then she’d see him again, his ghost pleading for forgiveness, returning the last bits of her he had held onto since the trunk.