PART V
When Elena and I first decided to share an apartment near the university, neither of us wanted to call it “moving in together,” as if that phrase carried a weight we weren’t ready to acknowledge. Yet from the moment we unlocked the door and stepped onto the threadbare carpet, something in the air felt different—a quiet, fragile harmony taking shape between boxes of books and mismatched cookware.
Our mornings often began in near silence, with the sun peeking through the thin curtains. She’d wake earlier, reading notes for her sociology fieldwork, sometimes scribbling observations in the margins with a pen she held in a loose, thoughtful grip. I’d watch from across the table, coffee in hand, as her face shifted subtly—absorbed, determined, a hint of melancholy at the edges. These small details drew me in with an intensity I couldn’t name.
Evenings brought us back to that tiny living room, a couple of lamps casting pale circles on the walls. We’d cook simple meals—rice, lentils, vegetable stir-fries—often losing track of time in long discussions about everything we’d encountered that day. She had a knack for pulling real stories from the chaos of data: families scraping by on dwindling wages, children finding fragile comfort in run-down community centers. Whenever I spun off into my diatribes about corporate schemes or commodified fantasies, she’d tilt her head, smile faintly, and point out some flicker of kindness she’d witnessed—a neighbor sharing groceries, a teacher guiding a struggling student.
I questioned her insistence that these small mercies amounted to anything in the face of such relentless exploitation. Yet she refused to concede, maintaining that if we dismissed all gestures of care, we would be no different from the systems we condemned. Her words unsettled me, stirring a reluctant sense of hope I was never willing to admit.
Outside our apartment, the university bustled with its usual self-importance: students clambering for internships, administrators hawking leadership seminars, the glossy brochures promising futures none of us truly believed in. But at home—with Elena reading on the couch or debating policy over leftover pasta—there was a hush in my thoughts that felt safer, brighter. A subtle pulse of warmth undercut my usual bitterness.
Neither of us put a name to these feelings. We openly scoffed at popular notions of romance—corporate gifts, sappy greetings, social media declarations. Yet in the half-darkness of our modest living room, words often felt superfluous anyway. A glance from her across the rim of a teacup, or the quick meeting of our eyes when some new thought sparked, carried more than any grandiose confession.
On difficult days, when my anger at the system flared into outright despair, she would rest a hand on my shoulder, reminding me that cynicism alone couldn’t light the way out. In those moments, I allowed myself a fleeting calm I rarely felt elsewhere. I suspect she believed that once empathy was forsaken, we’d be doomed to replicate the very power plays we despised. Each time she said so, something in me softened, though I kept that softness hidden behind dry logic and half-formed retorts.
We lived like that for a while—balancing each other’s extremes, shaping our days around research papers, cheap groceries, and long, impassioned talks. If anyone had asked what bound us together, neither Elena nor I would have given a neat answer. Yet in that cramped apartment, I found a kind of closeness that hovered somewhere between serenity and urgency, always alive in the way she challenged me, and in the hush that followed when all that needed saying was said.
During this period, Igor’s visits grew sporadic. He’d show up for coffee, always on his way to some seminar or business conference. He recounted how corporations used advanced analytics to sway public opinion, sometimes with micro-targeted campaigns. “It’s remarkable what you can do with data,” he remarked once, referencing how marketing teams learn consumers’ moods and vulnerabilities. I asked if these manipulations bothered him. He shrugged, implying that it was simply the new reality, a tool that could be turned beneficial if men of conscience took the reins. “Would you rather it be left in the hands of the unscrupulous?”
Elena sighed, meeting my glance. We recognized this conversation was going nowhere. Igor, who once shared our near-militant wariness of corporate influence, now spoke the language of adaptation and exploitation. We parted ways that evening with forced smiles. I remember thinking how easily time unravels once-close ties, how the plywood scaffolding of childhood friendship might collapse when confronted with adult ambitions.
Not long after my dissertation received its modest academic release, Elena began complaining of sharp pains in her stomach. She blamed stress at first. Her fieldwork had taken her to neglected neighborhoods where she saw, day by day, how corporate interests gnawed at the fragile remains of community life. But the pains deepened, until she conceded to a hospital visit.
The examination room was small and without character, a box of white walls, pale green linoleum flooring, and a paper-covered table where Elena now sat. The doctor stood before us, his face composed into what I imagined was a practiced expression of professional sympathy. When he spoke the words—advanced pancreatic cancer—they seemed to hang suspended in the air between us, not quite reaching us at first, as if the fluorescent lights and antiseptic smell formed a barrier that such terrible news could not immediately penetrate.
I watched Elena's face. Throughout our time together, I had cataloged her expressions with the devotion of a collector: the slight furrow between her brows when she concentrated, the way her mouth would twist to one side when she was skeptical, the rare, luminous smile that transformed her entire countenance when something genuinely delighted her. Now I witnessed something entirely new—a kind of stillness that seemed to come from deep within her. She blinked once, slowly, her dark eyes absorbing the doctor's words without visible reaction. My hand found hers, and I was struck by how cool her fingers felt against my palm, how I could trace the delicate architecture of bones beneath her skin. My own body betrayed me—sweat gathered at my temples and along my hairline, my heart hammered against my ribs with such force that I wondered if the others could hear it. The doctor continued speaking, his voice a distant drone about stages and metastasis and survival rates, but these words seemed to belong to another world entirely, one governed by statistics and probability rather than the simple, devastating fact that Elena was dying.
In the days that followed, we moved through a landscape of sterile corridors and consultation rooms, where different specialists outlined our options with varying degrees of compassion. Chemotherapy, with its uncertain benefits and guaranteed suffering. Surgery, perhaps, though the cancer had already spread beyond the boundaries where a surgeon's knife might make a difference. Clinical trials for which Elena might not qualify. Each possibility was presented with careful phrases that neither promised too much nor extinguished hope entirely. I found myself studying these doctors and nurses as they spoke, noting how they maintained eye contact for precisely the right duration, how they leaned forward just enough to convey engagement without intrusion. I wondered if they practiced these gestures in front of mirrors or if they came naturally after years of delivering such news. Elena listened to them all with the same quiet attention she might give to a lecture or a difficult passage in a book. She asked practical questions in a steady voice while I sat beside her, my anger at the entire medical establishment rising like bile in my throat. Not because they had failed her—though they had, we all had—but because they offered the illusion of choice when in reality there was none. When Elena decided to try the chemotherapy, I drove her to the hospital for the first treatment, watching as they inserted the IV into her arm, the clear liquid flowing into her veins like some colorless poison. That night, as she shivered beneath two blankets, her body rebelling against the chemicals meant to save her, I held her hand and felt, for the first time in my adult life, utterly helpless. No book I had read, no theory I had mastered, no argument I had constructed, offered any defense against the enemy that had taken up residence in her body.
One evening, after a particularly difficult day when the nausea had finally subsided enough for her to sip some broth, Elena woke suddenly from a restless sleep. Her hair, damp with sweat, clung to her forehead, and her eyes, when they found mine, held a clarity that seemed almost supernatural given her physical state. Her lips, cracked and pale, curved into what might have been a smile. "There's something almost poetic about it," she whispered, her voice rough from disuse. "I've spent so long watching systems break down, communities fall apart, institutions fail. Now my body's following the same pattern. It's like I'm living out my own research." She attempted a small laugh, which dissolved into a wince of pain. I reached for the cup of water on the bedside table, held the straw to her lips, watched as she took a careful sip. I wanted to contradict her, to insist that her body was nothing like the broken systems we had studied together, that she was not a metaphor or a case study but a woman I could not bear to lose. But the words wouldn't come. To offer false reassurance would have been a betrayal of everything we had shared, every conversation built on our mutual recognition of hard truths.
Instead, I placed my palm against her forehead, feeling the heat of her skin, the fragile dome of her skull beneath my hand. Her eyes closed at my touch, her breath evening out slightly. The room was quiet except for the soft hum of the machines monitoring her vital signs and the occasional footsteps passing in the hallway beyond. Outside the window, darkness had fallen, transforming the glass into a mirror that reflected our diminished figures: Elena in the narrow bed, her body now a landscape of sharp angles and hollows; myself in the chair pulled close beside her, hunched forward as if physical proximity might somehow bridge the gulf that was widening between us. I had always prided myself on my capacity to see through pretense, to recognize the underlying structures of deception that governed most human interactions. Now that clarity felt like a curse. I could not pretend that Elena would recover, could not wrap her in comforting lies about miracle treatments or statistical outliers. All I could offer was my presence, my hand against her skin, my silent acknowledgment of her pain. And in that moment, it seemed both the least and the most I had ever given anyone.
The weeks that followed took on a dreamlike quality, as if time itself had become elastic. Hospital corridors stretched endlessly before me; the journey from the parking lot to Elena's room felt like crossing a vast desert. The smell of antiseptic no longer registered; it had become as natural to me as the scent of our apartment. I learned the rhythms of the ward—which nurses were generous with pain medication, which doctors spoke plainly rather than hiding behind euphemisms. I became fluent in a new language of blood counts and tumor markers, of palliative versus curative care.
Through it all, Elena maintained a strange serenity that both comforted and unnerved me. She insisted on reading when she had the energy, propped up against pillows, her fingers turning pages with deliberate care. Sometimes she asked me to read to her, and I would recite passages from novels we had discussed in healthier days, my voice steady even as my heart constricted. In those hours, watching the light shift across her face, noting how the illness had sharpened her features into a kind of austere beauty, I understood something that had eluded me before: that love was not an abstraction or a social construct or an evolutionary adaptation, but a specific pain located somewhere beneath the ribs, a physical ache that no amount of intellectual distance could alleviate. And though I never spoke the word aloud—we had both been too wary of such declarations—I felt its weight in every gesture, every small act of care, every moment of silence we shared as the days grew shorter and Elena's strength ebbed like a tide going out.
On the final night, I sat beside Elena's bed in a kind of vigil, my hand wrapped around hers as if this tenuous physical connection might somehow anchor her to the world. The hospital room had become familiar territory—the particular way shadows gathered in the corners, the soft mechanical hum that never ceased, the antiseptic smell that had ceased to register as foreign. Throughout the evening, her breathing had grown increasingly shallow, each inhalation a labor that seemed to require all her remaining strength. I found myself counting the seconds between breaths, as if this vigilance might somehow ward off the inevitable.
Then, sometime after midnight, the rhythm faltered. Her breathing slowed, then paused, then stopped altogether. The monitor beside the bed registered the change with a single, sustained tone that seemed to fill the room entirely. I sat motionless, still clutching her hand, unable to accept what had happened despite having anticipated it for weeks. Nurses appeared in the doorway, then moved around me with practiced efficiency, speaking in hushed tones that suggested respect rather than urgency. One of them touched my shoulder gently, perhaps urging me to release Elena's hand, but I couldn't loosen my grip. It was as if some primitive part of my brain believed that as long as I maintained this connection, she wasn't truly gone.
"Sir," the nurse said, her voice gentle but firm. "Sir, I'm so sorry."
I looked up at her face, composed into an expression of professional sympathy, and felt something break loose inside my chest. A sound escaped me—not quite a sob, not quite a word—a raw, animal noise that seemed to come from somewhere beyond conscious thought. The nurse nodded as if she understood, as if she had heard this sound before from others sitting where I sat now. She didn't rush me or offer platitudes. She simply waited while I struggled to gather myself, to remember how to exist in a world where Elena no longer drew breath.
In the days that followed, I moved through the necessary arrangements as if following a script written by someone else. I chose a simple pine coffin, arranged for a modest service at a non-denominational chapel, selected an unadorned plot in a cemetery on the edge of the city. Elena had always disdained excess, had spoken with particular contempt about the funeral industry's exploitation of grief. I would not betray her values now by surrendering to the commercial apparatus of mourning.
The service itself passed in a blur. A small gathering of colleagues and friends occupied the front rows of the chapel, their faces solemn and uncertain. A few of Elena's research subjects had come—families from the neighborhoods where she had conducted her fieldwork, their presence a testament to the connections she had formed beyond the academic sphere. Someone played a recording of Bach, the spare, mathematical beauty of the music filling the space between awkward eulogies. I sat in the front row, aware of eyes upon me, of expectations that I might stand and speak, might offer some summation of who Elena had been and what she had meant. But I remained silent. Any words I might have offered seemed inadequate, a reduction of her complexity to a series of anecdotes or traits.
At the graveside, I watched as they lowered her coffin into the earth. The sound of soil hitting the lid of the casket was muffled and intimate. Each thud sent a shudder through me, as if I were being struck directly. My throat ached with all that remained unsaid between us—not just in her final days, when words had become precious and rare, but throughout our time together. I had never told her, in so many words, that I loved her. I had shown it in a thousand small ways—in the books I selected for her, in the meals I prepared, in the way I held her when nightmares woke her—but I had never given her the simple gift of that declaration.
Igor sent a brief note from overseas, expressing formal regret at Elena's passing and at his inability to attend the service. The message was typed, not handwritten, and signed with a digital signature that suggested it had been drafted by an assistant. I folded the paper carefully and placed it in a drawer, unable to summon either anger or forgiveness for this final evidence of how far we had drifted apart.
In the weeks that followed, the rhythm of the city became almost unbearable. The ordinary sounds of life continuing—garbage trucks in the alley behind our apartment building, children shouting in the park across the street, the constant drone of traffic—felt like a mockery of my loss. I watched from my window as anonymous figures hurried to work or school or home, their faces illuminated by the blue glow of their phones, and felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were observing a species to which I no longer belonged. The world's indifference to Elena's absence seemed both cruel and incomprehensible. Each morning brought the same routines, the same casual movements of strangers who knew nothing of what had been extinguished, and I found myself increasingly alienated from this callous continuity, this refusal of the universe to acknowledge that something essential had vanished from it.
I tried, once or twice, to return to my academic work. I opened the files on my computer, stared at the familiar paragraphs of critique and analysis, but the words seemed to belong to another man, one whose certainties had not yet been shattered by loss. Every margin note in Elena's handwriting, every underlined passage that had sparked our debates, was now a reminder of her absence. I would find myself staring at her neat script until the letters blurred, then close the file without having accomplished anything.
The apartment itself became both sanctuary and prison. I moved through its rooms like a ghost, touching the objects that had been hers—books with dog-eared pages, a mug with a chip in the handle that she had refused to discard, the woolen scarf she wore on cold mornings. One evening, as I was sorting through a box of her papers, I found a single strand of her hair caught in the weave of that scarf. It was long and dark against the gray wool, unmistakably hers. I held it up to the light, this fragile filament that had once been part of her living body, and something inside me finally gave way.
I sank to the floor, clutching the scarf to my chest, and wept as I had not allowed myself to weep at the hospital or the funeral. These were not the dignified tears of public grieving but something wilder and more primitive—great, heaving sobs that seemed to rise from the very core of my being. I cried until my throat was raw, until my eyes burned, until my body ached with the effort of it. All the intellectual armor I had constructed over years of study, all the careful cynicism I had cultivated as a defense against disappointment, crumbled in the face of this elemental grief.
When at last the tears subsided, I remained on the floor, too exhausted to move. Outside, darkness had fallen, and the windows reflected the faint glow of streetlights and neon signs. In that dim mirror, I caught a glimpse of my own hunched figure and barely recognized myself. My face was swollen, my hair disheveled, my clothes rumpled from days of neglect. But it was more than physical appearance—there was something altered in my very posture, as if grief had reshaped me at some structural level.
In that moment of strange clarity, I understood what I had lost with Elena. She had been the only person who had truly seen me, who had recognized my defenses for what they were without condemning me for them. She had challenged my most sweeping dismissals, had insisted on the value of small mercies in a world I saw as irredeemably corrupt. In her presence, I had felt a kind of thawing, a tentative opening toward possibilities I had long since rejected. And though I had never spoken the words, I had loved her with an intensity that surprised me, that contradicted everything I thought I knew about myself.
I should have told her. The thought circled in my mind like a persistent bird. I should have told her on those quiet mornings when sunlight filtered through the curtains, gilding her skin as she slept beside me. I should have told her on the evenings when we sat across from each other at our small kitchen table, debating some point of theory or policy. I should have told her in the hospital, when each day might have been our last. But I had held back, had maintained a reserve that now seemed like the most profound cowardice.
And so I knelt there on the floor of our apartment, surrounded by the artifacts of our shared life, and confronted the full measure of my failure. I had not just lost Elena; I had failed her in the most fundamental way. I had withheld the truth she deserved to hear, had kept it locked away out of some misguided fear or pride. The realization was a physical pain, a tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe.
As the night deepened around me, I remained motionless, holding the scarf with its single strand of hair, haunted by all that might have been different if I had found the courage to speak. The silence of the apartment pressed against me, a tangible reminder of all that was lost, all that would never be recovered. And in that silence, I made a kind of promise to Elena—not that I would move on or find peace or any of the platitudes offered to the grieving, but that I would acknowledge, at least to myself, the truth I had never spoken to her: that I had loved her, completely and without reservation, in a way that defied all my cynical predictions about human connection.
It was, perhaps, a small and private reckoning, insignificant against the vast fact of her absence. But in that moment, it felt like the only honest thing left to me—this belated recognition of what she had meant, this silent confession that would never reach her ears.
To be continued...
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.