It all started because you said the energy in the apartment felt “clogged with unresolved drama.”
And I said, “Could be mold,” but you were already drawing a summoning circle on the rug with glitter, face serious like you were performing surgery.
You lit seventeen tealights, even the ones that smelled like sour milk and sad hotel blankets. You told me to wear the shirt my ex always hated—the one with the cartoon frogs riding motorcycles. I did, for the ritual. For the drama.
Technically, my ex was not dead. She’d just moved to Portland and blocked me on everything.
But you said closure is a sacred act and made a pentagram out of soy sauce packets like a beaver at a dumpster party. You made me turn off the Wi-Fi and put Björk on the old Bluetooth speaker. In the end, the room had a dim, cheap-movie séance vibe. I held your hand. You held an upside-down wine glass over a Ouija board you made out of an Amazon Prime box and a red Sharpie.
I whispered, “Emily, are you there?”
The wine glass didn’t move. But a bird flew into the window and startled us. You said that was definitely her, though you two had never met.
You said, “She’s mad.”
I said, “No shit.”
In no time we started apologizing out loud. You for taking a half-naked picture of me on that business trip to Cancun when she and I were still together. Me for emotionally disappearing for two weeks upon my return because I felt weird about confrontations. We even apologized for my telling her I didn’t believe in horoscopes and that she was a bad cook because of her personality and not because of her Virgo moon.
I promised Emily I would become a better person. I promised her I’d start to recycle better and stop quoting authors I hadn’t actually read. You promised you’d stop dating people who weren’t available. That you were ready to put it all behind you.
You cried a little. I ate two Twizzlers and watched the ceiling fan rotate slowly, trying to find a sign from God between the blades.
Afterward, we made out on the living room floor, knocking over half of your tealights. You laughed into my mouth. The air smelled like burnt sugar and soy sauce. The candles fizzled out one by one while we laid there, not moving except for our breathing and whatever our weird, semi-haunted hearts were doing. You fell asleep as Björk sang about glaciers and feelings that aged like milk.
The next morning the soy sauce had soaked through the carpet and my phone started getting phantom texts that simply read “ok.” No number attached. No sender. Sometimes four or five at a time.
You said it may not seem that way, but it was a sign that Emily or the universe was trying to forgive us. I said maybe it was just T-Mobile being weird again. We argued lightly about it over cereal, then laughed until milk came out of your nose.
When I looked out, the bird was still there. Still on the ground, still judging. Maybe still busy being Emily. The movement of the ceiling fan kept reflecting off the glass door, slow as hell. Like it was trying to tell us something.
