He Lived Next to Me and Never Asked a Real Question

The first time I understood something was wrong, I was crying on the kitchen floor somewhere deep into a Tuesday over a phone call with my mother — the cheap off-white tile that shows every scuff, the cold soaking through my leggings.

He walked through the room to get a glass of water. He did not stop. He did not look down. He filled the glass at the sink, drank about half of it standing there, the sound of his throat working in the dark, and walked back to bed. I sat there listening to the refrigerator click on and off, watching the little green light on the coffee maker that I kept meaning to cover with tape. When I came to bed he was already asleep with his mouth slightly open, one sock on, one sock off, and I thought: okay. So this is it.

He was not cruel. Cruel people know they are cruel. What he did was stranger. He lived next to me for three years. He could find the takeout menus without looking. He knew I hid the spare key under the fake rock that the fake rock company swears nobody can spot. He knew my Spotify password. He knew I liked the blue mug. He did not know me, and he had not, in all that time, ever once tried to.

It took me a while to admit this, because he was so good at the gestures. The gestures were his whole thing.

Last spring my friend was driving north on the 405 in that stop-start purgatory when the Escalade in front of her braked too hard and she rear-ended it going maybe twelve miles an hour. Her name doesn't matter but her face does, that pinched thing her mouth does when she's trying not to cry in the carpool lane at Trader Joe's. She called him because he was the person she called when her hands were shaking. He picked up on the second ring. She told him what happened. There was a pause she later described as "weird, like he was already annoyed I'd called before I'd even said anything." Then he said, "Well, did you call the insurance yet?" She said no, she was still sitting in the car with the engine running. He said, "Then why are you calling me? Call Geico. What do you want me to do about it from Sacramento?"

She sat in that car for a long time after she hung up. Long enough for the gas light to come on and the AC to push warm air that smelled faintly like someone else's cigarette. The twenty-six hundred dollar body shop quote and a rental she handled alone. I said the thing we say. "That's so messed up." What I meant was: I knew from the first month. Because the night I was crying on the tile he walked past me to get water, and a person who would ask if you were okay does not walk past you to get water.

It doesn't feel like being unloved. It feels like being loved by someone staring at a photograph of you instead of at you; the photograph is slightly blurry, and he's never once thought to adjust the lens.

He never asked about my mother — my mom whose dementia was quietly disassembling her week by week in Bakersfield. He knew she existed. He knew she lived in Bakersfield. He knew her first name was Margaret and that she used to make lemon bars at Christmas. That was the entire Margaret file: lemon bars at Christmas. When I would start in with "My mom used to say," he would do this thing with his jaw. A tightening, almost imperceptible, the way a person braces before they step on a floorboard they already know is going to creak. He did not want the creak.

So I stopped offering. I kept my sentences short and decorative. "Mom's okay." "Work is fine." He would nod, the exact same nod, always, and something in my chest would do this contracting thing, like a fist closing around a coin it can't spend.

When we broke up, which was a long gray dissolving, more like a piece of bread going soggy in a cup of coffee you forgot about, my friend said something I can't get out of my head. "You weren't in a relationship. You were in a waiting room." Knowing the name for it didn't help much.

He didn't ask about my friends either. He knew their names. He knew that Priya did something with law and James was married to a nice guy named Craig. He couldn't have told you what they meant to me, or what it meant that I had kept them across two cross-country moves and a whole year I couldn't leave the apartment. He had never, not once, asked.

When I came home from dinner with one of them, laughing so hard my ribs hurt, the kind of laughing I forgot my body could do when I was around him, he would be on the couch. He would look up from his phone and say, "Good time?" I would say yes. Then we would go back to being two people in a living room watching separate screens, the blue light of his phone on one side of the couch and the blue light of mine on the other, and the dead space between us full of nothing in particular.

"Good time?" Two words. The most exhausted question, asked like he'd already forgotten it by the time I started to answer.

There is a version of this where I am the villain. Where I built the fortress and stood on the ramparts yelling that no one could see inside. I have lain awake at three in the morning going over it again and again in the dark. I have never been able to produce a version where he asked me a single real question.

The hardest part is not the loneliness. You stop noticing it after a while, the way you stop noticing a stain on the counter you've seen every morning for years. The hardest part is the slow, ugly realization that you are becoming incurious too. That you have started to forget the shape of what you were about to say because no one has been asking you to say it. That when someone finally does ask, you discover you can't answer.

That's the thing I cannot get over. What his not-asking did to me. What it did to the way I see myself.

There's a small cut on my thumb from a can of tomatoes I opened wrong, a sweater that still smells like his laundry detergent even though I have washed it four times, and a cup of cold coffee sweating a ring into the cup holder.