We agreed to separate on the last Friday in April. I remember because the next day I helped a friend move and brought my own empty travel bag. Before that Friday we had no perfect marriage, but we had a marriage. We discussed summer, argued about dishes, and bought curtains neither particularly liked. When we began seeing each other again four months later, I thought we at least knew where we were trying to start.
We sat in a small restaurant discussing what had changed. Tarik said he had briefly been with another woman during our separation. Hearing it was unpleasant, but we had explicitly given each other that freedom. I asked how long it lasted. He mentioned the weekend before my birthday. My birthday was in early April. Initially I thought he had mistaken the month, so I helped with a question that did not receive the expected answer.
He said we were already practically separated then. His voice contained no confession, only mild impatience that I distinguished things he had long since combined. I asked when he had told me our agreement began. He replied that some things were understood without words. Those same days he had asked where we would holiday and said he loved me before leaving for work. I was not listing evidence of a happy marriage. I was listing what I had lived by.
Tarik insisted our feelings had already ended. I said perhaps his had, but he had not informed me of their ending. He could have left earlier. He could have requested a different agreement. Instead he now wanted me to rearrange April so his actions could receive a more comfortable name. The waiter asked whether we wanted dessert. Tarik declined for both of us. I ordered tea, unwilling to let him decide this conversation's ending in advance as well.
For the first time he used the word cheating. He spoke quietly, then said he had not wanted to destroy our chance of reconciliation. I replied that he had already changed that possibility by trying to make me question our shared agreement. We did not argue loudly enough for other tables to remember. We each paid our share and left. At the crossing he reached toward me from old habit. I did not take his hand.
We no longer meet to reconcile. Sometimes we must discuss remaining shared belongings and stay courteous then. I gave the curtains to the friend I had helped move. She likes them. I kept nothing to prove a date, because I need no such collection. It is enough that I no longer accept his retrospective version of my life as more important than the life I actually lived then.