How it started may be hard to remember, but there’s no forgetting how it ended. When he said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I could have only imagined he meant grocery shopping, what we were doing at the time. But that’s not what he meant at all.

Everything stopped. Because what had just happened was the end of the life I had been building. And where was nothing to rail against. Nothing to fight for. Nothing left. He wasn’t willing to fight anymore and I couldn’t fight for the both of us. In that moment, he pulled everything from under me. What else could I say? “I don’t want to do THIS anymore,” and I dropped the basket filled with our groceries I had been carrying- It suddenly wasn’t our food anymore- I dropped the basket and walked out. He stopped loving me, and there was nothing left to do but walk out.

Of course once you walk out, you better have somewhere to go. I went home home, but it wasn’t my home anymore. I suddenly realized this. The home I had built over the last year wasn’t mine anymore. It was just some place I had been paying rent at, and filling with my things. Were they even my things now that they had been our things? Chosen and placed with love, with a dream for our life to come. But now, there was no life, the dream was over. And I woke up to a reality in which there was now yours and mine, and no ours. In a home which was no longer home.

It took two days to pack and move my clothes, books, dishes, art. Two days, and the only traces left of my being there were a couple pieces of furniture, a mirror, a dog seat in the back of his car. Two days, and he had cleared me out of his house and out of his life.Two days is how long it took to leave a home I had built. Two days and I no longer had a home. I stayed with my parents and I missed home. I missed doing everything in the rhythm we had grown used to. Our own world we lived in. Our world we shared- it took two days.

He changed the locks, and let me know I was no longer welcome in his house. Not that I would have entered that house after those two days. How could I? It was no longer the home we had made. It was just walls and doors and floors and windows. And nothing like the home I knew. There was nothing for me there after two days.

I don’t remember how the end started, but I do know it ended. Once sentence and two days, and a world, a story, a chance was all over.