I certainly hadn’t expected it to be this way. She was sitting on the windowsill, waves of hair tossed over one shoulder and a cigarette between those slender fingers, manicured to perfection. She avoided my eyes when her gaze swept across the room littered with empty beer cans and solitary pizza crumbs. Perhaps it was because I was staring directly into hers, studying the reflection of melting candles on the shelf, a pitiful attempt to fill the void where love used to be. And that’s what this was all about, filling her to the brim again, spilling her contents onto the floor – between banks of dirty laundry – and rearranging her correctly. She once told me she didn’t remember a moment when glory shone in her sky, or when a hero rested his eyes upon her worn out face. So maybe I was trying to make her glorious and show her that I was there to save her. If I had succeeded she certainly didn’t tell me. She flicked cigarette lint – that’s what she called it, those chaotic ashes – off her lap and breathed in heavy wisps of smoke. She pretended I wasn’t there anymore.

"I’m only trying to help, you know."

"Mm, and what are you, my psychiatrist? Don’t start with me." I captured a glimpse of those feisty blue eyes as she swung her hair across her back and pressed her head against the window frame.

"Just someone who cares...but never mind."

She pressed the butt of the cigarette against the windowpane as the rain tapped against the other side. I could see her reflection as she leaned her forehead against the glass and fogged up the window with her breath. She seemed ghostly as lightning flickered through the sky. It was an endless array of broken flashes of her eyes wandering the streets below the three-story apartment, dancing against the glass. There was nothing more for her to do than haunt my presence and break the dreams and promises I was trying to give her. She told me she didn’t deserve it. I said I didn’t deserve her.

I slid off the bed, dragging a blanket with me, still warm from the heat escalating through my body. When I joined her at the window she didn’t move, but her pupils flickered in my direction. It was the first acknowledgement of my presence since she’d last spoken, but even then it always seemed that she was talking to someone else, fighting off the bad man in her head. I didn’t want to be that bad man, that glorified villain inside of her that gave reasoning to hate or be hated. She kept trying to mold me into him though, and she drove me to a point in which my insides would fall to pieces.

"You must be cold." My fingers brushed against her shoulder and felt the goose bumps shriveling up her skin. I tossed the blanket over her shoulders, letting my hands just drift there for a moment. I needed to make sure she hadn’t in fact turned into the ghost she’d convinced herself of being. She had always been persuasive.

"I’m fine – don’t, I’m fine." she’d whispered in the process, the same thing she had said many times in the past. But she didn’t pull away.

"Let me in, Liz…just let me in for a minute."

"In what, where? There’s nothing to get into..." She said.

"Yeah, okay. Then what am I doing wrong? Talk to me for a change. Tell me why you don’t want me to touch you, why you don’t want me to help." She was silent. "Give me a sign that you’re still alive…that we’re still alive."

"Jason…"

"Do you want me to go? Do you need me to leave? Just say the word and I will. If I’m not allowed to make you happy, then am I the one making you sad? Please, Liz…" I didn’t know what to say anymore, what line to pull that would reel her into me. And she remained just as silent.

But she hadn’t always been this way. There was a point in time when we’d been the figurehead of couples, the masterpiece that’s created when two people fall in love. There was a time when others envied us so much that I was envious too. We’d been able to sustain ourselves and balance the world between our palms; hand in hand, we could do anything. Now conversation had dried up, saturated into the lives of those who’d once envied us. Dinners were cold and wrapped in plastic, lethargic with the same processed scents because she wouldn’t let me take her places anymore. And making love was fleshy and distant. She’d turn her back to me afterwards, wrapping the blanket around her and separating herself from the rest of the bed.

She didn’t want to curl under my arm anymore and listen to my heartbeat. And this silence between us wasn’t the same as it used to be, because before there could be no words between the two of us. The warmth that crisscrossed from me to her was enough to describe the thoughts and emotions far too invigorating to find words for. It used to feel as though the world had been built around us, constructed for me in my little cocoon with Liz at my side. And I’d heard her say it once before, "I wanted it this way." I’d heard the words and known she’d felt something for me before this vastness had formed across the width of the bed.

I leaned against the wall near the window, towering over her and watching the occasional car pass by beneath sheets of rain. I was trying to focus on whatever it was that she marveled over, curled up on the window pane. My eyes traveled from hers to the world separated by a piece of glass, hovering over the dark moments between the abrupt flashes in the sky. That was when I looked back at Liz, to find her head tilted upward and her eyes upon me.

"It’s beautiful, isn’t it?" she said softly. She raised a brow at me.

"The rain? Yeah. It’s calming…" I said.

"Not the rain. I meant this room. I’ve been watching it through the window’s reflection…" her voice was hollow, but the crispness of her gaze seemed to catch me off guard. I turned my head though, to see the room in hopes of seeing it from her perspective on the window sill. All I saw were crumpled beer cans and burning wicks sitting in masses of red wax, dirty clothes on the floor and a digital clock flashing on and off like the power.

"It’s messy…but I guess it could be beautiful in some artistic vision." I replied.

"That’s not what I mean. This is ours…it’s our mess." She said. "But it’s not a bad mess…it’s one of those cluttered types that feels comfortable…it feels like home."

"That’s good then, right?" I said.

"I guess…if it’s what you want. If you want to be drowning in all of it." She turned her head away from me again, back to her window observations. Her eyes were longing, though for what I can’t say I knew.

"If you’re saying I should clean it, I will. I know I’ve been lazy about it, but I thought we were beyond that. Beyond the superficial stuff."

"You’re not understanding me." She said, lifting herself from the window’s ledge and moving to the dresser. With a blanket wrapped around and consoling her, I watched her wipe dust from the wooden surface. She dipped a slender finger into red molten wax, lifting it and watching it dry. "You never seem to get it anymore."

"Well, you’re not helping me much." I said, fixated on the drying lump of wax on her fingertip. She seemed just as enveloped, silent and carving a face into her finger with the curve of her nail. For a moment I wondered if it was smiling.

"Jason, what am I to you?" she said finally, as her etched masterpiece crumbled between her thumb and index finger. The wax fell to the carpet, disappearing within old stains and cigarette burns, those little things we had always talked about covering up but never did. Like a pimple or a scar, we were never ashamed. We marveled over the tiny imperfections and crevasses within such idealistic things, like love and beauty. We cherished every stretch mark, every wrinkle where time had mingled for too long.

"You’re everything, Liz. You know that." I said simply, because it seemed as simple as that.

"Everything is a lot. Am I the reason you breathe? The reason you eat and drink to stay alive? Do I make things worthwhile?"

"Liz, what are you trying to say - ?"

"Do you need me in order to live? Would you die without me?" she said, her voice becoming louder but shakier with every word, every question.

"Liz…"

"No, Jason. This isn’t right, because that’s the way I feel. When you’re with me I feel complete, but when you’re gone I’m empty. I become no one without you, so what do I have? When I say you’re everything to me, I mean it. I mean that I’m afraid to live without you and that’s not right. That’s not healthy, and I live every waking moment wondering one day if you’re not going to come home. Or one day you’re just going to give up on me, or one day you’re going to have had enough. And it’s sick, Jason. It’s sick that I need you that much." She was pacing across the room, the blanket flowing behind her like a cape as I watched. My throat had gone dry, and I swallowed the build-up of stale air. She sat down at the end of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chest as the blanket fell into a heap on the floor, another pile beneath us. It seemed that the layers that once held us together were peeling off like second skins, revealing the muscles and tissues, the living truths within.

"Jesus, Liz…you know I’m always gonna be here for you. I’m not gonna leave you, or give up on you."

"You don’t know that, and I do. I’m a mess. And sometimes it’s comfortable but sometimes it disgusting. And I’m trying to tell you that it’s time to clean up." She looked up at me, her fiery eyes dim and blurred. I had to blink a couple of times too, and swallow a couple more, before I could see or say anything.

"You mean…" I said, as I knew exactly what she meant.

"I need some time. And so do you, okay? I’m not a person right now, just an attachment, an installment in your life. And while it was great, I’m not a girlfriend – not a person who can hold her own."

"So, you’re gone. Just like that?"

"I’m gone the way I’m meant to go. I want to be able to live without you." She said, standing up and walking towards me. I reached for her, and she seemed so light, so airy like she wasn’t even there anymore. She was gone already, as though all of these words, the tasteless TV dinners and distant spaces between us were all that had kept her here. I held her so tight, so long, and she didn’t move except to wipe her eyes on my shoulder.

"Don’t forget about me, okay?" I said to her, muffled within waves of hair. She pulled back for a moment and smiled weakly, the first I’d seen for days. Outside the rain was coming down in sheets, and the occasional flash of lightning would light up all that we used to call our own. We stood in the middle of the room, above the disaster on the floor and beneath the dead light bulb looming over our heads. Just for a moment, I stared at the contents of the room through the window’s reflection, and told her it was beautiful.