Vicky [portable] - Living With

The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. Not the gentle kind that patters on rooftops and feels poetic. This was the angry, sideways kind that turned gutters into rivers and made the whole world smell like wet concrete and regret.

Vicky seemed to understand anyway. She reached over and stole the last spring roll off my plate. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll wait.” Last week, I came home from a really bad day. The kind where nothing catastrophic happens, just a thousand small failures stacked on top of each other until you feel like you’re drowning in mediocrity. I walked in the door and Vicky took one look at my face and said, “Get in the car.”

“That’s because I’m really good at pretending.” She took a long sip of her shake. “But sometimes at three in the morning, I lie awake and think about how I’m almost thirty and I work at a job I don’t care about and I’ve never been in love and what if that’s just... it? What if this is all it ever is?” living with vicky

I keep everything inside. Locked up tight. My therapist calls it “emotional constipation,” which is both accurate and humiliating. Vicky calls it “being a stubborn idiot,” which is also accurate.

“That’s why I moved in with you, you know,” she said quietly. “Not just because my apartment had mold. But because I was lonely. And I knew you were too.” The rain hadn’t stopped for three days

“You look like garbage,” she announced, pushing past me with a suitcase in one hand and a paper bag in the other. “I brought dumplings.”

I was standing in my kitchen, staring at a leak under the sink that I’d been ignoring for a week, when the doorbell rang. Vicky seemed to understand anyway

“Where are we going?”