170 steps today, according to my iPhone. It is taunting me with its fiber glass reflection of my bloated face. I am in his bed, under his duvet cover, its linen white with noticeable stains. On my covered feet are the blotchy stains of a black coffee I spilt on New Years Eve 2022, one hour before I was denied entry into a nightclub. They did COVID rapid tests at the door and I tested positive, only to test negative the next morning. We had our New Year’s kiss on a sidewalk across the street from a Popeye’s. There is no romance to be found across the street from a Popeye’s. No ball drop. Just the cement on my heels dissonantly harmonizing to the echoes of Auld Lang Syne as we walked home. Walking, I cried and mourned the broken promises of a new year. He drank from his flask and asked if he could go back to the nightclub, after I went to sleep in his bed, just for a little bit.

Overtop my navel, lying flat on his bed, is a maroon stain shaped like the country of Cuba, once blood red, from my blood. A paper cut from when I read him a chapter from one of his self-help books collecting dust on his shelf, his head resting on my lap, curled up like a cat. Or a fox. He cried when I read him the part about the author getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and receiving a concussion. This concussion led the author on a best-selling anecdotal journey towards self-love and atomic habits, somehow. I cried when I saw him cry, on his bed.

At the edge of the covers, where the duvet hits my chin, is an aged wad of gum that he has tried again and again to scratch off to no avail. I fell asleep with gum in my mouth the night I read him a poem I wrote after our third date. That date where he asked if we could have a threesome and I said no and so we had sex on his roof instead and I thought it was an intensely poetic gesture and so I went to my iPhone notes about ten minutes after we had sex and wrote about it in a cinematic way. And then I read it to him one night in his bed, two years later. He liked the poem but I am not sure if he understood it. All poems at the end of the day are just about love, I explained to him that night with a yawn and a final clack of a gum bubble. Poems are kisses, I muttered, as I drew closer to sleep and my mouth drew closer to opening and the wad of gum drew closer to its final resting place on his bed.

Today, on our four-year anniversary, I am not leaving his bed. I don’t like leaving his bed. I don’t want to leave his bed. It’s still his bed, not ours. Not yet. Soon hopefully. He said by next year, maybe. When he’s ready. His side of the bed is next to the lamp, he turns off with his eye mask on and back facing me. My side of his bed is next to the window, where I look at the sky and the stars and the moon and then look back at him. His side of his bed is perfectly clean, with no stains in sight. My side is covered in stains. I lie in my stains, in his bed, and fall into a deep and peaceful sleep.