Carrie hugged me and apologized for the “kiss like a girl” comment. “That was mean,” she said.

I accepted her apology. She wanted to watch Miss Representation, the feminist documentary I recommended. That evening, while I drove to a bookstore an hour north to be part of a literary reading, she watched the film and rested and tried to ward off a cough and cold.

“I see your point,” she said. “I never noticed how blatantly sexist the world is.” She looked up the filmmaker and found out she would be in town in a couple weeks to screen a new film. She bought tickets. “Too bad you won’t be here to go with me,” she said.

The next day, Carrie asked me to stay with her while she did paperwork: billing, follow-ups, etc. “I just can’t get it together,” she said. She had to run to a few appointments and gave me her key. “Take Fred for a walk if you want,” she said.

We went out for pizza and watched a movie and held each other, and because she started sniffling, kissing was off-limits. No pressure for physical intimacy. While she worked, I picked up cold medicine, cough drops, and lunch.

She texted, “I miss you in a way I don’t fully understand.” We settled into each other in a bickering-old-married-couple kind of way.

She told her sister about me. “She thought I was crazy,” Carrie said, “for giving you my keys.”

“We’re both crazy,” I said. “Did you tell her we talked for a month before I got here?”

“She told me to ‘slow it down,’” Carrie said.

On my fifth night in Seattle, I stayed with my friend. While she drank and argued with her boyfriend, I Skyped with Carrie.

The next day, Carrie and I went out for pizza. She became more pale and sneezy. “If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn’t share a bed with me.” But I did, figuring I had a robust immune system. It would catch up with me after I left.

On our last night, we ate Mexican food and drank margaritas, and she held my hand. We danced, and she looked me in the eye, and I figured this was the best she could do. After I packed up my car, we hugged.

“I’m sorry I was sick,” she said.

I said, “Don’t be sorry,” and she said maybe we could meet up in the Midwest—where I’d be reading in a week, or on the East Coast when she visited her family. Both of us cried. She said, “See, I can be a sap too.”

I started up my car and rolled the window down.

She leaned in. “If you lived here, I’d want to date you.”

She later texted I miss you. Call me! She was in a grocery store and said, “Please stay on the phone, I do better with someone with me.” She ordered a rib-eye steak from the meat counter. The next day she left a message: she wanted me to help organize her day, but when I called back, she didn’t pick up. Eight hours later, I texted: Are you all right? She was fine. When we talked, she said, “Sometimes I don’t feel like talking or texting.”

The last time we talked, she was in a laundromat down the street from her apartment. The laundromat in her complex was filthy and moldy, she said, and the one down the street was clean and had brand new front loaders, and by the way, she was using liquid detergent, not powder, because you could pre-treat stains by pouring the liquid directly onto clothes, and powder doesn’t dissolve well and could leave residue and–,”

“–What do you think,” I said, breaking into her detergent ramble, “about us?”

“I don’t think much about us,” she said. “You think more about us.”

I thanked her for letting me know and got off the phone. I emailed her. I need to take a break, no contact. A day and a half later she texted, Is the silent period over? She wanted to talk. I said, okay, when was a good time. No response. Two days went by, and that was that.

I said, “Do not contact me. I’ll get in touch when I’m ready. Please respect my wishes.”

Although, like Carrie, I didn’t fully understand our connection, I did understand that connections could have a short shelf life. Besides, why would I want to engage with, let alone have a romance with someone who argued passionately about the benefits of liquid soap over bar soap?

In truth, there’s scientific evidence that liquid soap is no more effective than bar soap in killing bacteria, and liquid soap has a 25% larger ecological footprint, leaving behind plastic bottles and pump dispensers, unlike bar soap, which gets smaller and smaller, like the image of Carrie in my rear-view mirror after I drove away. She held her dog and stood stone-faced until she disappeared, like a tiny remnant of soap slipping from my grip and washing down the drain, leaving no trace behind.

Lori Horvitz’s personal essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Epiphany, Redivider, Chattahoochee Review, The Guardian, South Dakota Review, Southeast Review, Entropy, and Hotel Amerika. Professor of English at UNC Asheville, Horvitz is the author of the memoir-essay collection, The Girls of Usually (Truman State UP).