Promises

I promised you everything, didn’t I. With the boldness and certainty of youth, I promised you the world.

Things will be different, I said.

I remember the apartment well.

The cramped walls, the pitching carpet, the one window that let in the bark of dogs and random shouts of strangers, and the wash of tires over the street. The window that looked out onto a single lamp, glowing in adagio, bristling sounds coming from the transformer.

I remember it well because I was always looking out the window.

I lived outside that window then, in the future, where everything would be not as it was.

That future never came, but that’s not the reason we didn’t.

In those moments, you were happy and content. And I wasn’t.