Page 36 of Returned Mail

I laughed. “My what?”

“Your reinvention space. Your glow-up headquarters. The place where you become mysterious and emotionally unavailable.”

“I don't think that's a glow-up.”

“It is after Sebastian.”

I gave her a look.

“What? Too soon?” She was already planning where my couch would go. Which wall needed art. How we'd hang string lights on the balcony for summer nights with wine and terrible reality television.

I could see it too.

That was the problem.

I could see myself in that apartment. Waking up somewhere Sebastian had never slept. Cooking in a kitchen where I wouldn't remember the way he used to come up behind me and steal food from the cutting board. Sitting on a balcony without thinking about the six years I'd spent assuming every future version of me would include him.

For the first time since he left, I could picture something after.

I filled out the application that afternoon. Paid the fee. Uploaded bank statements, employment verification, references. Every document they asked for. Then I checked my email obsessively for three days. On the fourth morning, the answer came.

We regret to inform you that your application has been denied.

That was it. No real explanation. Just a vague line about applicant qualifications and competitive criteria, which is polite language for saying someone else had something you didn't. Better credit. More income. A co-signer. A cleaner life. I sat on my bedroom floor and stared at the email until the words blurred.

Lyann called as soon as I texted her. “Screw them.” I didn't answer, so she continued, “We'll find something better.”

“I don't want something better.” The words came out before I could stop them.

Then, softer. “Mia.”

“I wanted that one.”

“I know, babe.”

That was the part that hurt. The version of me I had already started imagining inside it. I wanted the balcony. The flowers. The clean walls. I wanted the woman who lived there, the one who didn't cry in the shower, who didn't still sleep on the left side of the bed because Sebastian had always slept on the right, who didn't open the closet and catch herself staring at the empty section where his clothes used to hang.

For three days, I had let myself believe I could become her.

Then someone sent me an email and told me no.

The rejection left me with two options.

Stay in the apartment Sebastian and I had shared, where I still had eight months left on the lease. Or break it.

Twenty-five hundred dollars.

That was the early termination fee. Twenty-five hundred dollars I don’t have, not after losing half the household income, not after deposits and bills and all the small financial disasters nobody warns you about when a six-year relationship ends.

People talk about heartbreak like it's emotional. Nobody mentions how expensive it is.

So I stayed.

Eight more months in a place that felt like a museum of my old life. Eight months of walking through the kitchen where we used to cook together. Eight months of sleeping on the left side of the bed out of habit. Eight months of finding pieces of him in places I thought I'd already cleared out: a receipt behind the dresser, one of his socks under the couch, a bottle of hot sauce in the refrigerator I hated but couldn't bring myself to throw away for almost three months.

Time moved, but I didn't.

Lyann called it purgatory.