We started out by lying to each other, we built on that. It was the only way to make it work. The world we built together was so much better than anything either of us had alone. He would vanish for weeks at a time, I would drop by his place in the evening and the windows would be dark, I would call and it would ring forever. He would turn up again one day as if he was never gone, making up elaborate lies to explain his absence. It was not like I asked or even wanted to know why or where really, they were more to please himself like dreaming out loud.

Some people build relationships on trust, and some build them on sex. We never even had a relationship, we never really knew each other. Even after a year how can you become attached when there is no difference between truth and fiction, there was nothing tangible to become attached to. Looking back it is blurry, I cannot distinguish the memories that were real from the ones imagined.

When everything felt so wrong and hopeless, or just not making sense I would go knock on his door at night. There was a bed already warm from him to crawl into instead of a big empty cold one at home. When he felt fucked up or cheated and needed someone to say everything was alright, kiss the wounds clean with lies and say everything was better when it was not, he would call. We spent our nights tucked under the sheets tangled up snuggling, dreaming up new lives for ourselves. Second grade treehouse kisses and family trips to the Soviet Union, he explained books I know he had never read and growing up in thousand acre deep cornfields.

So like that one day wanting to escape I knocked on his door and a new tenant answered. I saw the different living room through the doorway and just stared blinking for a while, then walked away.

I never even knew his name.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.