The Wettest Day on Record

A $27 salad ended my 13-year relationship (That's the version people laugh at.) The other version has a parka, an atmospheric river, and a condo my dad still had keys to.

A $27 salad ended a thirteen-year relationship.

I know how that sounds. I’ve told it as a bit before—Sweetgreen, the Chipotle clone with the artisanal grain bowls and the checkout experience that makes you feel like a bad person for wanting ranch—and people laugh, and I let them, because the laugh is easier than the rest of it. The order didn’t come through. There was an argument. And then, the way you sometimes know things before you’re willing to say them out loud, we both knew. September 2021. Thirteen years in Miami, gone.

We lived under the same roof until January 2023.

I didn’t write about those sixteen months. Maybe someday… What I will say is that somewhere in there I started a list—New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle. Royce had just moved to Chicago because it sounded cool and he’d never been there; why couldn’t I do the same? Hell, I spent two days seriously entertaining Nashville, which tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the state of my decision-making at the time.

I had vivid fantasies about my imagined life in various cities for two days. Then, I stopped.

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The condo was technically my dad’s idea. We bought it together in 2004—him and me—a loyalty test disguised as a real estate investment, ten minutes from my parents’ house in Fremont. I rented it to families for eighteen years while I was in Miami, being a person who had left. The tenants were mostly Indian families, and my mom would say, every time she visited, that it smelled like curry, which, okay, Mom. There were crayon scribblings on the patio walls that a Magic Eraser could mostly handle, if you didn’t look too close. There was a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal stuck to the front door that I still haven’t removed, three years later, partly because I don’t own a heat gun, and partly because, at some point, it stopped being their artifact and started being mine out of sheer laziness.

For years, I would associate this place with what my dad had left behind in the years before—entire mattresses propped against the wall, furniture he’d use the condo as a staging area for before finding his own place when he separated from Mom. He had keys. He read my mail, just in case the 風波 of 1993 happened again. One summer he found my 1994 Senior Ball photo—me and Christine Kamphaus, very heterosexual, very formal—and taped it to my bathroom mirror. As a reminder to, you know, not be gay. His version of the sweet notes white moms leave in lunchboxes, except I got self-loathing instead of Lunchables. That was the last summer I lived there before I rented a room from a friend in San Francisco and never moved back.

Until, you know, right now.

So when my two-day city list collapsed and I defaulted to the condo, I understood exactly what I was signing up for.

I chose it because if I didn’t, no one was going to advocate for my mom to get my dad into assisted living. No one was going to be there if my sister Angela showed up again — Angela who can speak English, who can act calm for the cops while my mom screams in Chinese and they side with Angela every time. I knew I could technically not go back. I knew I could ignore the calls. And I knew, with the certainty of someone who has been through enough cycles of this specific machinery, exactly what would happen if I did.

My dad sat on the garage floor with his arms folded the day they came to transport his things. Threw a full tantrum. Ninety-one years old, refusing to move, arms crossed like a toddler who’d been told no more iPad.

So yeah. I punished myself with it, a little. But I’ve been asking myself for three years what the alternative actually was, and I keep not coming up with one.

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January 2023. The wettest day on record in the Bay Area at the time due to something called an “atmospheric river,” a detail the universe did not need to include but went ahead and included anyway. The fact that my water heater was broken didn’t help.

I’d hired a TaskRabbit to assemble the office furniture before I arrived. That part mattered. The mattress could wait — I could figure out sleeping later — but the desk and the chair had to be there, because my job didn’t skip a beat moving cross country and I needed to be functional by morning. I was working for a company called Strategio, running something called Enterprise Simulator sessions: thirteen-week courses teaching people enterprise software concepts, Java applets, the software development lifecycle, all of it, fast-tracked, so financial companies could satisfy their diversity hiring quotas and the people in my Zoom square could get hired.

My first session started at 7:30am. 7:30am, Florida time.

Except I was in California. I was up at 3:45.

I sat in my assembled office chair in the middle of an empty living room in a parka — an actual parka, because it was that cold, because the wettest day in recent memory doesn’t care about your timeline — and I opened my laptop and I waited for the call to start. There were no boxes unpacked. There was no mattress. There was a chair someone else had built and a screen full of people who needed to learn how enterprise software worked so they could get a job at a bank.

I taught the class.

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Kareem was my executive function.

I mean that literally. When the terrible things were happening I would just — stop. Stare at a wall. Check out in the middle of a meeting, or at 4am when I was supposed to be asleep, or in the middle of a sentence I’d started out loud and then couldn’t finish. The grief and the anger would stack up and I’d go somewhere else entirely, and Kareem would find me there and hand me a plate of food. Just: here. Eat this. He’d figured out a whole sleep routine for me — NyQuil, weed, soft music, AC cranked so cold the room felt like a different season. He found legal resources for my mom four months before we broke up. Four months. I’m only now sitting with what that means, what it cost him, why he did it anyway.

He didn’t have answers. He just knew how to do the next thing.

What I didn’t clock at the time — what I’m only really understanding now, writing this — is that the last year or so before the salad, he was basically running two households. His own life, his theater work, and then this: my parents’ paperwork, my sleep schedule, my plate of food. The life I was mentally blanking out on.

Sitting in that parka at 4am, running through my Strategio slides — that was me doing his job. The mattress could wait because I needed the chair, because I needed to be functional, because something had been installed in me over thirteen years about how you survive: you do the next thing, and then the thing after that.

When class began, a voice shot out in the silence. “Why is Ernie wearing a puffy jacket?” And in the glare of the ring light, I shot back, “Because I’m chatting to you from Antarctica.”

The joke didn’t land, 50 or so faces in boxes staring back at me in silence instead. It’s okay, a thought shot out to myself. We move forward. I’d internalized the solve mode. I just had to run it alone now.

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Somewhere in Miami, Kareem is continuing his life.

We’re still amicable. We still have a house to split up, financially — Miami property moves slow and complicated, especially when neither of you is in any rush to make it real. I still do the occasional project for the theater he founded. So it’s not like I’ve lost the signal entirely. I just get the public version now — the things you’d find on Google, a press release, what made it into someone else’s recap. There’s a boyfriend. They have photos on Facebook — the kind that just appear, the algorithm deciding you needed to know this today, while you’re eating cereal or waiting for a Zoom to start. They’re good photos. They look happy.

In most of them, he’s forty pounds lighter.

Good for him — I mean that, genuinely, healthwise. But it’s a version of him I don’t recognize, which is its own specific thing to sit with. He became someone different after. I don’t know if that’s about me leaving or just about time, and I’m not sure the distinction matters.

The wettest day on record, a parka, an assembled chair, a Zoom call at 4:30am, me alone in a freezing condo full of other people’s crayon marks and a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal I still haven’t taken down. Somewhere in Miami, a person who used to hand me a plate of food when I forgot to eat doesn’t look like the person I remember anymore.

That’s what thirteen years becomes.

I’m still not sure what to do with that.