This morning it poured my glass of Wild Turkey bourbon on A Farewell to Arms, made a paper airplane from an Appalachian Power bill, subscribed to Glamour magazine against my will. Sometimes it squirts toothpaste across my mustache and draws smiley faces on the mirror. It pinches baby cheeks on city buses, fixes tags on strangers’ t-shirts, texts my ex in the middle of the night.

It’s been three months since Moira packed her bags and moved out. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said. The fighting, the infertility, my drinking—it was more than she could bear. But the affair was what finished us. I’d betrayed her body by giving mine to another. She wanted to forgive me, to move on, and she tried, but something had died between us that we couldn’t get back.

Last Friday it snatched some guy’s falafel at the Tyson’s Corner food court, flicked the left earlobe of a 7-Eleven cashier, chucked a cherry pie across a Harris Teeter grocery aisle. On election day it balled up my ballot and tossed it at an old woman in the voting booth beside me. I avoid art galleries and superglue, cacti and kitchen stoves.

The night before Moira left, we were at her family’s monthly dinner party when she reached for my right hand under the table and squeezed it. Looking back, I’m now convinced that my left hand knew she’d be leaving me, that this was her goodbye, because it suddenly grabbed a fistful of yams and flung them across the table at her gothic sister’s freshly shaven head, dumped my glass of Marsala in her aunt’s lap, and threw a steak knife at the butternut squash casserole, which bounced off the dish and nicked the knuckle of her hemophobic uncle, who, at the sight of blood, passed out and plopped face-first into a bowl of corn pudding.

In the driveway the next morning, Moira leaned toward me with tears running down her face. She opened her arms to hug me, but my left arm refused to move. When I went in for a side hug, my left hand shot up for a high-five. I couldn’t even wave goodbye as she drove away.

A week later, I tried streaming Do the Right Thing on Netflix but kept clicking Weekend at Bernie’s instead. In bed it rips buttons off my pajama shirts and stacks them on my eyelids. It pulls lit cigarettes from my lips and extinguishes them long before I’m finished.

Once or twice a week I take an Uber to Moira’s new apartment downtown where I sit on the curb below her balcony. Maybe she’ll change her mind. But she never comes out. So I go back home and involuntarily over-tip the Uber driver. Just yesterday, while buying a pack of Pall Malls and a case of Heinekens, I dropped four quarters and a nickel in the give-a-penny tray. I’m going to go broke if something doesn’t change.

I think about Moira often, her laugh, her smell, the way she slurped coffee with a spoon. I want to hold her one last time, to feel her skin on mine. But she’s gone. Now intentional touching is what I miss most. To reach out and feel something with purpose, to grab and pat and scratch and push with motive, with power, with will.

But, hey, I’m now a world champion Tetris player, so I can’t complain.

– Ahreeda Ryter