Skin Slip

Our ending was boring and predictable: he had another girl, another city—far away from the matchbox apartment where we burned up days fighting about where I hid his drugs and who he was with last night. “At least I have friends,” he said in the kitchen before he left, “unlike you.”

I put the kettle on. “That’s not true.” But it wasn’t not true. I hadn’t made friends in Toronto because I hadn’t planned on staying. I was a college dropout trying to save enough to travel to Fez, Cappadocia, the Forest of Knives. Places I knew about only because I ripped pictures of them from library copies of National Geographic. I didn’t care where I went. I just had to believe I’d fit in better somewhere else.