I am approaching an anniversary of sorts. The anniversary of a season of cracking, of fissures. Of buying rolls of duct tape to wind around my ribs, to keep me upright, to keep the hemorrhaging in my chest contained. Of walking through an actual blizzard to get the news, stomping down the snow quieted streets with grim and stupid determination, to receive what I knew was coming. It would take me months to write this, and even longer to release it. And so, here.

It is the end of this relationship. Not the final weeks or days, but the final minutes, the final seconds. And so I ask the question: “What do I look like to you?” And I see the panic and confusion on his face, I have seen him look trapped like that before. “It’s not a trick question,” I say “I’ll just never be able to ask it again.”

His head is thrown back against the chair. He is exhausted. He has given up. He is unshaven, there are purple marks from sleep loss under his eyes. His clothing is disheveled. He looks like shit. He looks like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

And I watch him talk, watch him give me the adjectives for what I look like to him. And it’s true, I did not mean it to be a test. But in all of what he did say, there is the thing he did not, and the absence of that is a profound mortifying grounding gut wrench. He did not say, “You are beautiful.”

And so there is only one thing left to do. I leave.