Growing Apart

Sometimes the relapse dreams are so real that I need a few minutes to remember I’m sober. I wake up convinced that I’ve been lying to everyone, that I’ve been smoking weed off and on, that I’m hiding a secret.
 
Becky’s wearing the covers like a red-carpet evening gown, her leg exposed up to her hip. It’s so damn sexy.
 
“Go back to bed.”
 
“Sorry.”

I’m out the door before sunrise, hitting a 12-step meeting before work. I miss the wake-and-bakes in the apartment. Ripping bong hits, feeling that rush, that tingle. Coffee and cigarettes in bed. There was comfort at the bottom, once I stopped caring and let myself go.
 
I used to deliver it back then. All the bike messengers did. Weaving through traffic with a pound of weed in my bag. The buyers who knew me tipped with joints. Now I shuttle papers from one law firm to the next. No tips. We’re almost invisible to them actually, somehow, even to the receptionists. Same pay as us, but different clothes and so a different caste. They’re fine, I’m just too sensitive lately.

Becky is smoking a cigarette on the fire escape when I get home. She’d been spray-painting and the windows are wide open. She’s flipping through our photo album.
 
“Do you remember that time you lit the chair on fire?” she asks.
 
How could I forget. Another mixed-media art project gone horribly wrong. I left a candle too close to it and the whole thing—a skeleton in a straight jacket that we mummified with gauze—went up in a bright orange blaze. Becky turned it in anyway and got a ‘B’ on the charred remains of her sculpture. We laugh for a minute and it feels good.
 
We’re lying in bed now, facing each other, ashtray between us.
 
“It isn’t fair,” she says. “I never used it like you.”
 
“I know. I’m sorry.” There isn’t much to say now. We’re on the last few words of our relationship and we know it.
 
“Why’d you always have to take things too far?”
 
“I don’t know. Honestly…it just always seemed like the feeling I wanted was right around the corner. Just a little bit away.”
 
She’s crying now, just a few tears. “I don’t want to change. I liked who we were. We just clicked. I miss us.”
 
It’s happening. We’re breaking up. The lease is up in a few weeks. I can’t be around marijuana anymore, even just the smell is too much. She lights my cigarette.
 
“You’ll have to write me when you’re famous,” I tell her.
 
“Shut up.”
 
She pushes me onto my back. I’m looking up at the ceiling. If only these moments could last. But she’s made her choice, and I mine. She goes to the bathroom and turns on the fan. In a few moments she’ll be somewhere else.