How Easy it is to Leave

by Sophia Veltfort

We meet across a beer pong table in the basement of the squash house, where my roommate and his roommate have been hooking up for the last month. We flirt by convenience, proximity. Before my roommate and I go out each night, I stash what matters of myself—my mohair blanket that gleams blue as wet seal skin in the moonlight, my sweatpants, my socks so thick I can step freely amid our floor’s exposed nailheads—I stash her away with the tchotchkes and paperbacks and laundry-day underwear so by the time we reach the squash house I can be no one. 

He seems to sense that I have no skin in this game and to like it. He wants to know what music I listen to. Simon and Garfunkel, my roommate answers for me, her squash player’s arms around her shoulders, her necklace around my throat and her glitter on my eyelids. It astonishes me how little is required to be the pretty friend in a short skirt who listens and smiles. He puts on “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” This isn’t what I like, I don’t tell him. 

He takes me to the movies with his friends, likes that I’m down to watch superheroes, that I’m one of the boys. When he drives me up I-95 to meet his parents, he mentions that his ex never liked to go water-skiing but that he can tell I will, that I will be impressed with his rooster tail, which I gather later that night, thanks to the internet, is a “high arching spray” produced in his wake. When I don’t say I loathe sports, he slides his hand up my thigh and tells me how much he admires my willingness to try new things. I think I could stand being the person he sees, just for a little. 

When we graduate, when we move in together, when he puts my name on his car insurance, I don’t forget the part of me folded away in an old college dorm room, but I don’t retrieve her, either. I think of her when the garbage trucks sing through my window at four in the morning in a city where I know no one but him. I recall the shape of her, the feel of her, as I hug his friends at a neighborhood pizza place the night before we are married at his parents’ house by the lake. She tugs at me, sharp and insistent, a summons. I do not imagine that she could be lost or expired.

Only later, when I love him, does it occur to me that he has done this, too, or that I have done this to him: stolen his alternatives and hidden them away and hoped he will stop longing. For genuine, unbounded levity, for someone who is not always dreaming in counterfactuals. If I hadn’t written my number on his palm with the pen he offered. If I hadn’t taken the job in the city where he was. If I hadn’t begun to see the world refracted through what I guessed of his vision.

I haven’t seen my old roommate in years when she comes through town for a conference. She and her squash player are no longer together. Now she has a long-distance runner and two rescue rabbits, Louisa and Juniper. Our conversation falters. We no longer recall how to talk to each other. We’ve just gotten the check when she says, by the way, you forgot this, left it behind when we graduated. From her bag she pulls a small bundle. I was cleaning out my basement, she says, and remembered it was yours.

The wool is exactly as I recall, grey-striated cerulean, silky but durable, like you could swim long distances in her and not get cold. I slip the fabric over my shoulders and almost feel sorry for how easy it is to leave.

Published March 27th, 2022