Out of habit or maybe because he was finally ready to talk, Robert stopped by again a few days later, only to find that I had moved out. But I wouldn’t know this until my second semester of graduate school. In the middle of a long email, he casually let drop that he had started seeing someone else. Almost immediately, I was on the phone to him. A few weeks after that, I was on a plane back to Berkeley.

“You don’t know what it was like seeing your room so empty,” he said when I saw him again. “After that, I never seemed to be able to get you on the phone. You were always off somewhere else.”

“But…I missed you.” My response was as lame as it was hollow. How could I tell him that I needed my freedom more than I wanted to be with him?

“You never told me.” He paused. “Not that it would have mattered. I was dissatisfied with the way things were going anyway.”

The summer after that first year in graduate school, I went to France, my heart in pieces. When I returned, I received more unwelcomed news. The trunk where I had stored Robert’s sweater had gotten caught in a basement flood at a fellow graduate student’s house. It had survived intact except for one section that, weakened by mold, had begun rotting away. I patched the sweater as well as I could, but the damaged yarn still continued to disintegrate.

I wore the sweater often while I lived in Ann Arbor. Protected as I felt from the cold, its heaviness also reminded me of my inability to accept the ordinary love Robert had offered. In a way, the sweater had become my own personal hair shirt, just like the ones medieval Christian penitents had worn to purge themselves of their sins. The excesses Savitha and Lisa had indulged in now made perfect sense. They hadn’t been crazy at all, no crazier than I was for wallowing in memories of an adolescent relationship.

In 1994, I graduated and returned to Berkeley to wait out one of the worst academic job markets anyone had seen. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, I wrote to Robert hoping to put a definitive end to a chapter that had haunted me through six years of graduate school. We had some great times, he wrote. I won’t forget your friendship. I read his words over and over again until the lines of his email ran together. Stunned by his words, I still could not let go.

And then quite suddenly I did.

Five years later and a few weeks after I moved to Tucson to figure out my life and be closer to my aging father, I wandered into the heat and darkness of my newly organized closet. I took the sweater down from the shelf where I kept it and began running my fingers over the hole that could no longer be repaired; I laughed softly. Shaking my head, I took Robert’s gift and in the bright light of an Arizona summer morning, finally threw it out.

 

M. M. Adjarian has published her creative work in The Provo Canyon Review, The Milo Review, The Baltimore Review, The Prague Revue, Animal, The Eunoia Review, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, Crack the Spine, Vine Leaves, and Poetry Quarterly. Currently, she is working on a family memoir provisionally titled The Beautiful Dreamers.