It was just her and me again on a beautiful summer Saturday like so many we had shared before, but on this Saturday, that familiar look in her eyes was gone. That look that greeted me on so many mornings and said good night on so many evenings. That look that said I was her man, her hero, and she loved me. That look that I thought would always be mine now was replaced with rage. Her voice, the same one that used to say I love you, was now spewing anger and venom in my direction. To be clear, I was no angel in this encounter; my words back at her were filled with just as much hate and anger as hers. And what had brought us to this ugly place? What was this argument, our last argument, about? A couch, a stupid couch, who gets to keep the stupid couch? There I was standing in front of and yelling about a stupid couch to the woman who all I ever wanted to do from the moment I first saw her was take her in my arms, hold her tight, look into her eyes and tell her I loved her. Looking back, it’s pretty clear now what that Saturday afternoon was all about for me; I won’t pretend to say what it was about for her, and it wasn’t about a couch. It was about us, and my words of anger that day were, in reality, cries of desperation.

Desperation to hold on to something I loved. Desperation not to see it come to an end. We were something I had put everything emotionally into; she wasn’t just some chick I had hooked up with. She was the woman I pushed all my chips to the center of the table and went all-in on. She was the woman I unequivocally surrendered my heart to. She was the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with. Together we were what no one could tell me wasn’t meant to be. Then it all fell apart, and everything I had imagined, the happily ever after, was no more. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t true, but the look in her eyes said to me that it was. In the end, love is crazy like that; it can still hold your heart even when the only thing left is to decide who gets to keep the couch.