I like it in this room with you.

I am once again coming to you live from my depression nook in the couch.

Ya know, the first time you tell someone this season is tough; I’m feeling really down, they are pretty amenable to the idea. They make room. They make tea. The forty-seventh time, they look at you with a face that says it might be time to consider euthanasia.

Maybe that’s why this mabob has been so painfully difficult to write.

I thought it would be easy. Screenplays are so tightly structured, so ruled by minimalism; short stories are ruthless and unforgiving. But a fieldnote about my most central relationship should be like cutting flowers: Carefully arranged, sure, but ultimately rather effortless and natural.

And yet.

So what can I say?

Connor and I went viral on TikTok recently. That’s something.

It wasn’t by our own doing — we keep an account on the platform for username’s sake only, and rarely post. In fact, cutting shorts is almost certainly the thing we do with the least amount of finesse. But a savvier viewer with an eye for A Moment clipped a segment from an old episode, added a dash of mournful harmonica, and now it’s been viewed two million times. Bada boom.

That’s what I get for re-learning the ukulele during lockdown rather than mastering the App of the Future.

It’s a clip from our Satanic Panic episode, in which I rather offhandedly mentioned that I have zero intention of outliving Connor. We have to die within five hours of each other or else I might blow up a government building or fly off the lips of the Grand Canyon a la Thelma & Louise.

Put in a more Irish way: I refuse to turn back to the cold now that I’ve known the warmth of his doorway.

Connor and I have been together for two years. We were at an Italian restaurant, the one beneath his apartment in Echo Park, when he asked me to be his girlfriend. I knocked the little candle on our table over while saying yes, okay and the building nearly caught on fire. Every time we walked by after that, the waitstaff watched with weary eyes, worried we might strike again.

Our first year together was a slow, sunny afternoon, and slow, sunny afternoons are so easy to write about. We were in love. Everything was different and delightful, and without a storied past to heal from or comb over, all we had to look forward to was our blank, glorious future.

It is markedly harder to write about now, in that blank, glorious future.

Now we are living in South Carolina, near the places Connor used to graffiti when he was an angsty teenager, though they’ve long been painted over. We’ve retained our various freelance jobs, for which we clock in from catty-corner stools we thrifted from the Goodwill down the road. We are also co-producing a documentary, which involves way less sensually crouching in fields than I expected.

It involves, mostly: Emailing people and not hearing anything, calling people and hearing even less, interviewing people and hearing it all, lugging that footage throughout the broader south while slaloming around bi-daily thundershowers, editing it all together in the heat of a 3am fever, and then sending a flurry of messages to federal, state, and private entities begging for a charitable $25 donation so we can keep the laptops whirring.

We do not see friends. We do not go on dates. We want a pet so badly, we’ve taken to talking to the coffee table like it’s a three-legged calico. Our nightly walks have been curt-tailed by the oppressive ocean-heavy heat, so we stay indoors, beneath the heroic sloping roof. We stare out at the river of loblolly pines and southern magnolias that frame our new apartment — a loft, which is really just a room with long legs. We wave at the old lady who walks her old dog, and we cringe-laugh when she doesn’t wave back. We are the folks with the California license plates. And so we are regarded by locals as the reintroduced Irish wolves might be: Cautious, skeptical, blood-hungry.

If ever there was a time to snap apart and commit double homicide, it might be now.

And yet.

I’ve been thinking about Aristophanes, not that there’s an awful lot of time for shit like that (re: the federal entities).

Aristophanes was a comic playwright in Ancient Greece. He got drunk at one of Plato’s dinner parties (a symposium, as they were referred) and posited that people feel “whole” when they fall so deeply in love because we used to be literally connected.

In those longed-for prehistoric days, he says, we were all jumbled together in a sort-of nightmarish two-for-one: Double-faced, double-hearted, four-armed, and spherical. We tumbled around like a bunch of cats from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway smash-hit musical extravaganza. And we were so good at it that we rolled ourselves right up to Mount Olympus, where the coterie of gods kept their penthouse.

Zeus — god of gods — did not appreciate this slight, or the confidence, so he split us all apart. So what used to be one all-enveloping, powerful being was now just a scattered, damaged thing. We are doomed to wander the earth this way in search for our missing half, and only upon finding them can we once again feel whole.

It’s unclear just how seriously Aristophanes took this theory, or if it was even a theory at all. He was a comedian, and the wine had been flowing for hours by the time it was his turn to speak, so he probably farted his way through it and then passed out into a vat of saganaki.

It’s a nice thought — not the clown-tumbling horror show that was our supposed beginning, but this idea that we are physically connected in some way. It’s long been understood that couples who remain together for long periods of time experience bodily synchronicity1. Kidney function, muscle strengthening, cholesterol levels — it all links up over time until one very much mirrors the other. There’s the whole, four-legged being. What a heavenly creature.

Although it would appear I found Connor a year too late. According to a recent study, “when at least one partner had a naturally optimistic outlook, the likelihood of developing arthritis and diabetes was relatively low in both partners”. Where was his fucking optimism in the fall of 2022?!

There is also this romantic idea of knowing each other in a past life. The Korean Buddhist philosophy of Inyeon suggests that if you even brush up against somebody on the train, you must have known them in a previous lifetime. When you marry someone, you’ve experienced inyeon with them over 8,000 lifetimes.

The timeline on that one seems a little screwy to me, but I am rather obsessed with this idea of atoms interacting — across time, in the belly of some distant star. An atom from my eye drove past an atom from his, and that is why, when I look at him all these millennia later, I see everything that we were and everything we have yet to be. It all unfolds like the sky in a petri dish or lens of a telescope.

I love being the person he cooks for. The one he sends pictures of enormous flip-flops to, asking Do you like these? What a question. I love being in the car. Looking at cats in our area. Planning a someday trip to Antarctica. I even like it in this long-legged room.

I could offer platitudes — you know when you know. I could write down every adjective I feel when I envision, as I often do, the myriad of ways we could be violently split apart, Zeus’s lightning bolt notwithstanding. I could dissect my childhood and trace every peculiarity to some non-peculiarity in him, explaining why this one feels so liberating when so many others did not. I could contact my exes and ask what it was about me that eventually sent them packing. We could trade war stories; we can compare notes on dying. I don’t know if those things would help untangle it. Ask any writer how they got their agent, and you’ll get any answer.

I just like it in this room with you. That’s all.

Here are some stand-out memories, for posterity and oversharing’s sake:

• Seeing that blessed agate mine in Utah AKA The Cigarette Butt Dump

• Grabbing late-night fizzy drinks at the Turtle Mart

• FONTAINES DC

• Holding hands with grizzlies in Yosemite

• Rediscovering the magical breakthrough that is Sims 2: Castaway on Wii

• Moving in together

• Falling in love with a naked cat named Mewtwo

• Renting Over the Garden Wall from the library and watching it on the old living room TV

• Seeing Jeff Bridges at a screening of The Big Lebowski

• Working on a TV show together (this is genuinely one of the more hilarious experiences of my life; I wish I could download every single memory onto a USB and ship copies to everyone across the world; wars would dry up in an afternoon)

• Pesto

It got harder. It got better. Not sure how these dichotomous trends could possibly continue.

And yet.