Who knew that time could move so slowly?

It’s been three minutes, and I swear I thought an hour had gone by. Just me, standing in the middle of this studio apartment. My studio apartment. I live here now.

It’s home but it isn’t, because I’m alone. Alone with the echoes of this empty space. Alone with stacked boxes waiting impatiently to be unpacked, mocking me from dusty corners. Alone with an obnoxious question many have asked before me and will continue to ask well after I’m gone, until the earth gets sucked back into the big, dark, hungry maw of the universe. The question, of course, being: Is home a place or other people? Is it a feeling? Is it happiness? Is it love?

This is the kind of thing we used to talk about over dinner, back at the beginning. Ravi loves a philosophical question. Loves deliberating over some cosmic problem, confronting it head-on. Loves a puzzle. Loves pressing on a bruise to study the feeling. Loves interrogating life’s complexities, sliding everything under a microscope to see the wriggly bits.

Not me.

It’s a waste not to wonder, he’d say.

I hear him now. His voice in my head like he’s there. I mean, I guess he is. He’s part of me. We met young, my bones fortifying in his presence, for so many years my heart beating to the rhythm of us. And now, a void. I think about the life I almost had. I think about people who survive shark attacks. Phantom limbs. I think about loneliness, the dorsal fin circling me as I tread water. Maybe I’m hopelessly self-involved. Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe I’m dramatic. It’s a breakup. It’s not the same thing, losing a leg and losing a fiancé. I’m just grasping. I’m just bored. I’m so bored. There’s so much time. It’s here. It’s there, like the boxes, waiting. Existing. Inescapable.

Four minutes? It’s been only four minutes? Fuck me.