Greetings—A Woman's Perspective or a Room with a View of Everything but You

The light hesitated briefly before coming fully on. White splashed the room's forgotten corners, and—like a pie to the face—the memory of the night we practiced cart wheels on our knees was the first thing to greet me. I don't know why. Maybe I felt a little inept; a little chopped at the knees. The next thing was his scent. It must have clung for life, that month in solitude, to the inanimate furnishings pushed calculatedly into place to best illustrate to guests how we are visual, how we are wily and deranged.
It must have jumped for joy, the scent, upon being stirred by my presence (because a scent without a nose is like a memory without a heart to break: a useless hanging sort of thing). I hadn't been in here since, strangled by panic, I limped to my parent's front door, silently begging to be taken care of—because taken care of is what people need when they don't know what they need—and that was nearly a month ago.
I talk myself through the story of my life quite frequently this way. Sometimes, I even talk to an imagined version of him. I say, "How dare you?" He says, "It just happened."
I wonder why he never says the things I want him to say. I always make him respond just the way he actually would were he here. What does that say about me?
I finished separating my things from his at about 7pm. I didn't cry once. I accomplished this by removing all emotion from the actions. Instead, I was practicing a technical skill. Like taking apart a lanyard or cable rope, strand by strand. I was a master of deft maneuvers. This could not be done by just anyone. One epileptic seizure is all it would take to blow this whole operation. So I concentrated on not convulsing.
The day after I finished extricating my material possessions from his, I was at the laundromat washing his scent off of my things. The clothes were easy enough to handle, but it was the bed sheets that were my undoing. I lifted a sheet from the basket, and our smell grabbed me right by the nostrils. There was nothing subtle about it. It just came leaping at my face, screaming "You will pay attention to me." So I did.
I looked at the sheets. And right there was our entire story.
There was our hair, tangled and inextricably entwined—an impossible rope no master of deft maneuvers could unbind. Then there were our eye lashes, staked into the fabric like mile markers in a race we knew we couldn't finish. And finally were our stains—of love or misery, of ecstasy or lament—serving to punctuate the story of two people who belonged to each other for just a little while.