Who You Know by Theresa Alan

him, so I turned to watch the people waiting in line to order their food. The caustic colors, the vinyl seats, the plastic silverware, and Styrofoam plates seemed to mock me. After a long moment, I managed to ask if there was someone else.
    â€œNo. No.”
    â€œWhy this sudden change then?” I said, my voice shaky. “Is it someone from work?”
    â€œThere is no one else. I swear. It’s . . .You and I never laugh together. I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I ever really loved you.”
    Â 
    Â 
    F or the next several weeks, those words seared through my mind a thousand times a day.
    I don’t know if I ever really loved you.
    I don’t know if I ever really loved you.
    I don’t know if I ever really loved you.
    It didn’t seem as though divorce should be so easy. But since we didn’t have any kids and didn’t own much, it was just a matter of signing some papers. I agreed to let him keep the apartment because I couldn’t afford the rent on my own. I found a new apartment a few weeks after we decided to separate, and I moved out a couple of weeks after that. I hadn’t wanted to live so close to Gideon, but I fell in love with this apartment, and I could actually afford the rent, no easy feat in Boulder.
    There were downsides to living alone. Never having enough whites to justify a load of laundry, for example. Every creak and noise took on new significance when there was no one to blame them on. Every night I came home from work and flung open the shower curtain, half expecting to find an armed maniac hiding in the bathtub.
    After a couple of weeks, I brought an eight-week-old kitten home from the animal shelter.
    I named her Martha. All she did was eat, sleep, and play. Watching her luxuriate in endless naps reminded me not to take life quite so seriously.
    Martha liked chewing on everything from books to cords, and she liked to sharpen her nails on everything except the scratching post I’d shelled out fifteen bucks for. It was, however, impossible not to love her.
    She seemed to grow every day, jumping up to higher and higher places in the apartment. I could throw anything across the room—a hair scrunchy, a pencil, a stuffed mouse—and Martha would bound across the room with a charging warrior meow and leap on the object with a Jackie Chan tumble, only to utterly lose interest in the item a moment later, abandoning it entirely.
    I reviewed with her the basic concept of the game catch, but she inevitably fell asleep before I finished my tutorial. We played with her toy mouse, and though I tried to encourage her to bring the mouse back to me to throw again, she was only interested in the mouse while it was in transit, and after a while she was too tired to even muster enthusiasm for that. After a few minutes of play, she’d lie down and bat at it halfheartedly and half-asleep.
    Martha spent most of her day dazed in a light sleep. Her stupor was occasionally interrupted by short bursts of energy in which she bounded around the house in crazed loops. She paused long enough to eat a few kibbles of food before collapsing again in fatigue.
    Her goal was to let no surface go unadorned by cat hair. In the first few weeks I had her, she couldn’t leap up to the counter, but soon she was surveying the apartment from the top of the fridge and the highest bookshelves (knocking several books over each time).
    She often got these bursts of energy at three or four o’clock in the morning. She liked to turn over the garbage and wrestle noisily with paper or plastic that spilled onto the floor, ripping and growling at it as if it were a menacing burglar. She would race over my sleeping body, and, though she was light, anything that leaps on you from the dresser while you’re deep in sleep is as jarring to wake to as a bucket of ice-cold water or the sound of a lawnmower being revved up right outside your window.
    I would fall back asleep, only to