secondhand heartbreak

xii. morning after

she's still there the morning after.

i expected to find the door to our apartment unlocked. she wouldn't have had a key when she made her inevitable walk of shame in the early hours of the morning, her shadow casted over his motionless form as the moonlight guided her movements.

i expected to find him passed out when i return, sleeping off a hangover on the shitty futon he's had since freshman year, the one i helped him pick out.

i expected to find no traces of the girl he had over the night before, no remnants of the things they did and the secrets they shared except perhaps a trail of clothing forgotten in her mad rush out the door or a note, apologetic or otherwise, left only to be read by the time she's long gone.

but i don't find those things.

because she's still there.

she's still there, and she's only half dressed, but there are no clothes strewn across the floor for me to trip over.

she's still there, and there's no note to deliver the words i expected she would tell him, the words i know he already knows to be lies anyway.

she's perched on the kitchen counter, wearing nothing but his button-down and hiding a smile by taking a sip of coffee from my mug.

(there is not a tight sensation in the pit of my stomach, plucking threateningly at each and every last one of my already fragile heartstrings. there isn't.)

i turn to him, and he's smiling at her.

there really is a first time for everything.

but there's also a last time for everything, you just don't know it's the last time until it's all over—

(until you know she's gone for good this time, until you stop seeing her everywhere you go like a ghost of the life you once lived.)

—and you can look back at everything that happened with nostalgia, with longing, with regret.

because no matter how good or bad your vision is in the moment, your hindsight is always twenty twenty.