He is just asleep enough to know she is awake. Just relaxed enough to feel her tension. His breath is cautious, lingering exhalations, waiting to yield their rhythm to her concerns. Her breath is baited; a bright, dangling lure of passivity masking the barb of rejection. He isn’t biting. It doesn’t matter.

A king-size bed is so fucking vast when you’re lying next to someone you want to touch, but can’t. The chasm between two bodies seems infinite. But on this night, he thinks, the bed is small. Very small. So small, her every movement is an earthquake, her every sound a blaring horn in his ears. He wishes he had a bigger bed. Do they even make bigger beds? No, he wishes she weren’t here, in his bed, insulting him with her silence.

He wishes he had never woken up. The dream was so vivid, so indescribably specific. It had started in a coffee shop, and flitted through restaurants, bars, beaches, and long car rides before lingering in that hazy limbo between sleep and life where they lay with their arms around each other, their legs entwined. It felt like a lifetime. It felt like two years. It felt like thirty seconds. But now he is awake, and he suspects that she has been awake for some time. He is always irritated when she wakes up first, and doesn’t bother to shake him, to play with his ear lobe, to invite him into the morning with her. She always smiles, and says he looks cute when he’s sleeping, and she wants to let him rest. How long has she been awake this time? How much has she already accomplished while he was snuggled under the thick blanket of obliviousness? Now he is awake.

There is something between them, he realizes. Not emotionally, she now shows more fervor in snuggling the wall than she has with him in months. No, there is something physically occupying the space, and that is why the bed is so fucking small. It is a presence, a force; that part of the ether that has crossed over to lie between them and make this night much harder than it has to be. It has no name, no shape, no agenda. It is the ghost of love, the spirit of their past. Or maybe he’s just about to talk to himself for the eighth night in a row.

You still love me, says the ghost.

I have every right to, he mutters indignantly.

Love is not a right. Love is a curse God disguised with a bow. You will learn this in time.

Don’t patronize me. As long as you are here, I will love you.

And her?

She is not you anymore. She is gone.

So am I, very soon.

No, you will stay, long after her. You have to. You are the only proof of our time.

He firmly believes this. He has seen it lately, the degradation of purity. He looks at pictures, and all he sees is his current discomfort. He finds mementos from trips taken, days spent together, and he feels her apathetic distance in their forms. It is inescapable, the idea that things always were as they are at this moment. It is impossible, though his efforts have been limited, to see beyond tonight, and that is why it is true: their past has been infected by the present, and his only salvation is the external incarnation next to him, because he can’t feel it in himself any longer.

He wonders if the idea is weak, or crazy. She always says he is crazy, but in a good way. Oddly enough, tonight is the strongest he’s felt in a long time. No more waiting. Wondering. Guessing. No more avoidance. He isn’t planning a conversation, or a pointed display of indifference. It isn’t necessary. He knows he is right, he sees it in her.

The dormant heartbreak stirs, rolls onto her back, and makes certain (though she is “asleep”) to keep her face towards the wall. He waits for her deceptive, avoidant breath to slow, then tells the ghost to continue.

There is no proof of time. The past leaves, faster than we can forget it. Pictures, memories, they are like footprints on a beach. They tell no true story, and they are wiped clean by the waves of time.

You talk a lot.

I talk as much as you want, I am here as long as you need. But you cannot need me anymore.

When she is gone, I will have you, and I will not die.

That part of you is dead already.

One of you has to leave, but not you. She can go. This bed is too small for the three of us.

This bed is far too big for you and I.

So I’ll get a smaller bed.

But you won’t get a larger one for her?

The irony is palpable. This king-sized emotional wasteland was her idea. Before her, a full size bed was more than enough to accommodate his string of one-night-stands; space isn’t necessary when you don’t spend more than a few awkward moments side by side. He got a bigger bed for her, and look where it ended up. This, to him, is relationships in a nutshell. You make concessions, sacrifices, all for the sake of making room to allow someone into your life. Then, when it all turns to shit, what you’re left with is a void that gets larger and lonelier by the minute as, one by one, your memories and comfortable nostalgia walk out the door.

What was it that had drawn them together? What pivotal moment is he not remembering where he decided she was worth parting with his smaller, safer bed? That is the problem, he realizes. He can’t remember. He can’t think straight. Three hours ago, they came home from Game Night Thursday at her sister’s house. They had sex (the furthest thing from lovemaking so far), and she fell asleep before his breathing had even returned to normal. Not that anything is out of the ordinary. Nothing overt anyway. But for a good month and a half now, he has felt, no, he has known, that it is over. That she no longer loves him, and he hates her for it. He loathes what she has become, the false self-portrait he’s had to paint for her only to find that it is ending regardless. He doesn’t know why he knows it, he just does. It is her fault he feels alone, unloved, unappreciated. It is her denial. Her emotional drift. Her soulful absence that makes talking to an apparition more meaningful, more productive than waking her and simply asking why she doesn’t love him anymore.

He tries to smile when he asks the ghost: Remember that weekend on the Oregon coast? That was great.

I’m still there. You are not.

…And that day in the park, when…

There were many days in many parks, and I am still in each of them. You are not.

You’re a ghost, you’re not supposed to interrupt.

Isn’t that the truth.

What do you want?

I want nothing, what do you want?

To know that some part of this was real.

It was.

That’s not good enough.

It has to be.

Then why is it over?

If it wasn’t real, there would be no end, because there never was a beginning. For something to cease to exist, it must first exist.

None of this is my fault.

Then why are you so sure it’s hers?

Go to sleep. I need to think.

Think all you want, your thoughts don’t matter. Your feelings are irrelevant, your understanding is unnecessary. How you got here isn’t important. You are here.

Don’t you love me?

I am an interpretation, I cannot love you anymore than you feel I do, but that will not help you here. You have to let me leave.

You are my life.

Very soon, I will be your death. I am your past, I cannot be your future. You cannot survive on the vapors of a substantive void. I will watch her leave, and then I will watch you die, and then I will not exist.

He rolls over, carefully so as not to wake her. He thinks she might have an early meeting in the morning, but he isn’t sure, he hasn’t really been listening lately. He’s not entirely sure that she’s been saying anything. Silence has been their mediator for some time now.

He can’t stand that fucking ghost right now. He hates it for staying, and he wishes it would never leave. He hates it, but he envies it. Because tonight, it is the only thing in this bed that is at peace, and because in the morning it will be gone.

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