water stains on the ceiling

short autofiction about frontal lobes and letting things accumulate

artwork by Jess Allen

They say when you turn twenty-five, your frontal lobe completes itself. The synapses click into place and suddenly you’re supposed to know better, officially equipped with the judgment of a real adult. But no one ever talks about the purgatory of the years that precede this milestone, how you make decisions with a conscience that knows it’s still permitted to be reckless. About how many genuinely bad decisions we make that feel logical in the moments of making them, as if our brains know we’re running out of time to do it without a somewhat valid excuse. I assume this is the turmoil my psychological wiring had been experiencing throughout the entirety of my labeled relationship with Leo. The arbitrary nature of it is funny to me in a way that isn’t actually funny at all—how we’re taught that we’re supposed to wake up one morning just neurologically armed to make sound choices. He told me once that he thought the whole concept was essentially a cop-out. I remember thinking he was probably right while also knowing I would use it as a reason to leave him later.

We began like all modern relationships do: undefined, shapeless, the situationship that stretched longer than it should have because we were too aware of how wrong we were for each other. We treated each other like we were in a committed relationship without the label of such. And when we decided to bite the bullet and finally started to officially call each other boyfriend and girlfriend, most days, our partnership was sustained off of a honeymoon phase that felt both right and wrong simultaneously, if that’s even possible. By actively not acknowledging the weight of what we were doing, we mutually and implicitly agreed that this somehow made it a lighter burden to carry. I watched myself send the morning texts and schedule our plans for the weekends and make the social media posts that reminded everyone we were in love. It felt easier that way, reducing everything to gestures and routines. And during moments when high of love wore off, as it did for me a few times throughout our time together, I found myself frustrated at the logistics and overall status of our relationship.

These arrived from time to time without warning, and came with a certain taste of clarity that I think we both found uncomfortable. The fundamental incompatibilities we’d ignored on purpose would rise to the surface. We’d see them. Acknowledge them with a quick glance. And look away. He was better at this than I was, at practiced ignorance. I knew we were only deferring problems for our future selves, but it didn’t matter—we were in love, or at least experiencing the conviction of love that feels absolute at twenty-two.

Leo and I spoke the language of absolutes fluently then, tossing out words like forever and never with total conviction, even while I privately catalogued his flaws and shortcomings and habits that annoyed me with a carefulness that, in hindsight, makes me think I had been aware on some level that this phrasing was temporary, and so were we. But the cognitive dissonance didn’t bother me, not in the moment at least. It was just another thing I’d kept filed and stored away in the growing archive of contradictions I maintained about our relationship. We were playing the parts of a young couple in love despite the odds, and doing it well at that, but this knowledge didn’t make my feelings any less real in the moment. If anything, it seemed to add another layer to them. The idea that we were choosing this narrative somehow made it feel more real, as if the very act of ignoring all the reasons we shouldn’t be together was proof that we should.

When your brain hovers in that almost-but-not-quite-developed state, you recognize your patterns but feel an unwillingness to break them—a specific kind of powerlessness that comes from choice rather than force. We existed in perpetual almost-ending, between the precipice of breaking up and conversations that made separation impossible, at least temporarily. The impermanence itself became our only constant. Sometimes I’d watch him sleeping and imagine a future version of myself who might see him differently, one with wisdom I didn’t have yet. But that future felt distant, like it was happening to someone else I didn’t need to worry about.

I took note of sensations: the particular blue light from his phone lighting up the sharp, angular planes of his face in the dark. The weight of his head against my shoulder, solid and entitled, like it was his God-given right to be there. The way the air conditioner stutters slightly every few minutes, wheezing against July heat. These details matter because I’m trying to remember the exact moment I stopped loving him, or at least stopped acting like I did.

Wisdom arrived on a Tuesday in July—well, the first installment of it did. There was no huge revelation, just a subtle shift in perception. I was sprawled on his couch, watching him scroll through his phone while some show I had no interest in played on his laptop. His apartment was small but acceptable—the kind young people occupied in cities like this one. I had been there for five days.

“Did you want to go somewhere tomorrow?” I said.

Without looking up from his phone, he said: “Like where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. I’m leaving on Thursday.”

“We could order from that one place again.”

I remember saying nothing. The silence grew between us like a physical thing. In it, I counted flights: six to see him, the gradual depletion of my savings account, the readings I’d fallen behind on for my graduate seminars. His single visit to me—not even really to me, but to a friend’s wedding an hour from me. The careful way my mom had learned to ask about him without asking if he’d ever actually visit.

He rolled onto his side and placed his hand on my leg. I guessed that this was how affection worked between us now, these casual touches that required little to no effort. I looked at his hand. It was a normal hand. There was nothing special about it.

“What?” he said. I could tell he was genuinely asking.

“Nothing.”

“You’re being weird.”

I was already rehearsing the script I would use with friends. We wanted different things, I would tell them. The distance was just too hard. Nobody did anything wrong. All the bland, sanitized vocabulary of breakups that reveal nothing of the actual wound, that I had been willing to bend and contort myself into painful shapes to make this work, while he remained perfectly, infuriatingly straight.

“No, I’m not,” I said, but in that moment I could feel something shifting, like tectonic plates inside my chest.

But I was being weird, I guess, if weird meant finally seeing something clearly. I had constructed an elaborate set of reasons why this arrangement made sense, why it was temporary, why it was actually fine. They had been useful to me, these reasons. But now they seemed flimsy and almost pathetic.

I thought about Thursday morning. The early alarm. The solo train ride to the airport because he had a meeting he couldn't miss, though I knew for a fact that these meetings could always be rescheduled when it was something he actually wanted to do. The downloaded episodes of sitcoms I’d watch on the plane, and Gemma picking me up to drive me back to my place. And then I would do it all again in six weeks, or eight, or whenever we managed to align our schedules, which always seemed to involve me shifting mine rather than him shifting his.

“I’m just tired,” I added, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

“We can sleep,” he said, as if this solved something.

In my mind, I was already gone. Already on the plane, already explaining to Gemma and my other friends and my family what happened. Already practicing the way I would say his name without flinching. He wasn’t a bad person—that much was true, I’d thought at the time. I didn’t leave him just yet then, but I would eventually. For some reason this decision had been logical, most of which can be attributed to my aversion to returning home single, like I went all that way only to come back empty-handed, even though at that point in the relationship, it might as well have been the case regardless of the path I chose. But in my defense, I wasn’t twenty-five years old yet. I could blame all of it—both my delay in leaving and the fact I had been with him at all—on an underdeveloped frontal lobe.

But I just looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain in the corner that was shaped like a continent. I had been staring at it all week. I wondered if he ever noticed it.