“Should we still go to the store?” Freddy asks. He’s sitting on the other end of the couch with his feet stretched out on a tiny stool while I hog up the entire ottoman. I know where he is going with this. He doesn’t want to go anymore. He’s changing his mind. 

“Yes,” I say, always being the one to push him to follow through. I get up from my spot. “We should go get those things.”

And then we’re off to the grocery store just around the corner for what is probably the hundred-thousandth time. It’s chillier than I had expected outside, and my jacket is not that heavy. So I’m walking faster than I realize because I am cold. Freddy says, “Kassie, slow down, relax,” like he always does when I do that. I push him to keep going. He tells me when to slow down. In this way, we help each other.

A wave of warm air hits us as we walk through the sliding glass door. I say, “You know it’s cold outside when this grocery store starts to feel warm.” It’s an inside joke because in the summer this store is like the inside of a walk-in freezer. Everything comes out ice cold.

Freddy stops at the bottom of a shelf, and I watch while he scans the selection and lands on a can of Pringles. As we pass the flowers, I think about buying a bouquet, think about becoming the type of person who buys fresh flowers for the apartment every week. Freddy is muttering to himself, “What did I need, what did I need…”

I grab two rolls of toilet paper and follow Freddy up and down the aisles while he tries to remember the things he’s forgotten. I am swinging my arms back and forth, whacking the rolls into each other, rambling on about what it says on the front packaging. “Do you think one roll will really last a week?” I don’t really expect an answer. I am just talking.

“Who knows,” says Freddy, scooping up his favorite brand of oat milk.

We head to the self-checkout, but one of the cashiers is trying to get us to go through her lane. “The discount doesn’t work over there,” she says.

“What discount?” Freddy asks.

She’s referring to the Pratt student discount—mistaking us for art school kids. 

“Oh, we’re not students, but that’s nice y’all offer that!” He says this with the note of a genuine exclamation mark at the end. He likes nice things. He is maybe one of the nicest people I know.

He turns back towards me and there’s a brief, awkward moment where neither of us seem to know what to do. Freddy starts, “Should we—” but I interrupt him.

“We can just check out separately,” I say, stepping over to a scanner nearby. It’s the first time we check out separately in a grocery store, I believe ever, since the first day we met. I finish before him and watch for a split second while he struggles between the tote bag and trying to pay. He is trying to put his stuff back in the bag while doing both things at once.

“Here,” I grab his tote bag, which is technically one of my tote bags, “I’ll pack up your stuff. You pay.”

We turn to leave, but the cashier stops us again. “Who is on your shirt?” She asks me, casually, like she’s looking for a reason to talk. It is a slow night at the store.

I look down and realize I’m wearing one of Freddy’s shirts, again. All our stuff has gotten mixed up from being together for so many years. It’s “my” tote bag he is carrying. It’s “his” shirt I am wearing.

I am always wearing one of Freddy’s shirts. They are worn in perfectly and covered with jazz players on the front or artists that older people always recognize—artists I don’t really know anything about. “I don’t know,” I say, “It’s his,” pointing at Freddy, like I always do, kind of proudly, proud of his good taste in everything.

Freddy makes a face, his sort-of-shy face. We’ve reenacted this scene so many times. Once it was on the train, I was wearing his Miles Davis shirt, and a man and his wife both nodded in approval from their adjacent seats. Another time, it was a man who stopped us on the street to tell us about the time he saw Bad Brains perform in D.C. That guy had talked for so long, Freddy had said he needed to retire that shirt.

“It’s George Clinton,” says Freddy, “from—”

“Funkadelic,” Freddy and the cashier both say at the same time. She smiles. We all smile. Freddy and I tell her goodnight before going back to the apartment.

While we walk, I think about this woman I do not really know and who she might think we are. Are we a couple that is young and in love? Are we living on an air mattress while settling into new lives in a new city?

Or could we be a couple in our thirties? Could this be a milestone moment, marking the beginning of a separation? Could this really be the final time we’d be visiting this neighborhood grocery store, together?

I’d like to imagine that most people in the store would find that hard to believe, by the way we move seamlessly through the aisles, the way we move as a unit—anywhere we are together. Not from habit, just because it feels right.

I’d like to imagine most people would see us in the store, venturing off on a mission to find the right snack or getting caught up looking at a funny tomato—losing each other for a minute, but finding each other on the endcaps, casually joining the other’s side. A gesture that says, “Hey, I found you,” or “I’m ready to go home,” without ever needing to say it with words.

We get back to the apartment, and Freddy finishes packing up all the little things he’s got left. A suitcase full of his toiletries and knick-knacks, a trash bag full of pillows.

“I forgot about this guitar stand.” He holds the lonesome guitar stand up towards me. “You want it?”

I am leaning up against the kitchen counter, eating the Pringles he bought from the store. “What am I going to do with that?”

“I dunno, stand stuff.” He is still holding the guitar stand up in the air, smiling, looking at me with the same eager face. He pushes the legs down, so I can see how it stands, like a salesman on an infomercial.

I try to think of something I could use it for but can’t. I shake my head. “No,” I say, “I don’t need it.”

He looks like he is a little disappointed. Maybe he’s upset that I didn’t make a joke back. Maybe he is just sad about moving out. Maybe that statement felt a little too real to be talking about just a guitar stand.

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask, even though he’s the one who dumped me.

“I think so,” he says. “It kinda feels like what we were talking about the other night—you know—how it felt when you were a kid at a sleepover at someone else’s house.” He pauses for a moment. He’s not even looking at me. He’s staring off at the empty wall behind the TV. It reminds me of the first time he said, “I love you.” He made me look the other way because it was too hard for him to say the words out loud. Sometimes it’s hard to look these things straight in the face.

He keeps going, “You wanted to go to the sleepover initially. But when you finally got ready for bed and settled in, it just didn’t feel like home. And then you’d have to go wake up their parents and be like, ‘Can you call my parents to come get me?’”

“You don’t want to go?” I ask, even though I know the answer, even though I know it’ll make me want to cry.

“Not really,” he says, and he puts the guitar stand in the last little pile of things he’s taking to his new place.

My eyes are kind of burning, and I think about telling him he doesn’t have to go. Or even telling him to please, please just stay.

But he needs it. He needs something over on aisle three, another can of Pringles, since I ate most of this one, or that funny-looking tomato, I don’t know. And neither does he—probably doesn’t remember, still. And I need something from some other aisle. Maybe it’s fresh flowers. Maybe I don’t even need to be in the store, at least not right now. So instead I just say, “I know, but it will get better.”

And some part of me hopes that we will find each other on the endcaps, again.