What I learned from living with my ex post-breakup

(Disclaimer for the nosey ones: I write all my pieces after some time has passed so no live updates for you.)

You can stay here.

I can feel the side glances, your shifty discomfort reading the title before proceeding to the first quoted statement. I get it. But you don’t. And I can probably write a single novel attempting to articulate the subtext.

Let’s call him Bartholomew for shits and giggles.

If you know me in real life, you will also know that I come with an unnatural amount of need for space and solitude.. to the point I come off fiercely selfish. I will defend my space to the point of burning bridges. I seem to overcorrect on my faults. If you had met the old version of me, you’d find a girl with zero boundaries. I wanted to win everyone’s approval even if it meant not being my authentic self. I’d be at parties I didn’t want to be at but for the sake of my inability to say no. Fast forward a few years and here I am avoiding everything, everywhere, all at once.

I think it is vital to note that the only other person in the world that I know who needs more space and alone-time than I do is Bartholomew. This is, after all, the reason we broke up to begin with.

So I needed a place to crash for an indefinite but short time. I was having issues at home and it was too short of a notice to realistically go apartment hunting with just two cary-on suitcases. I had been live-updating Bartholomew who, at this point, became a close friend. Maybe the luckless romance we had together was meant for us to become just two human beings strangely and conflictingly close. Well, maybe it was not that strange given the years we had lived together. When you live with somebody, you really get to know all of their quirks and idiosyncrasies— it is a type of closeness you really can’t get without having lived with someone. And when you live with someone through the pandemic… well, you multiply the actual time. Actual length of time x 2 = Perceived length of time… and really, most of what your reality is is what you perceive.