At first, it seemed like no big deal, but then…

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She dismissed the small rift the way she would with salsa several days past the sell-by date (whipping out the tub onto her serving tray with the rest of her seasoning accoutrements). It was so small, and still, and lifeless. More, frayed edges with the beginnings of an opening. As law of entropy goes, over the days and weeks, it widened into a hole. But, she had holes in the throw pillow that she used more for tucking against the side of her growing belly at night, than for show unlike her specially purchased ones from Etsy boutique sellers. There were holes — large spaces of self-doubt and self-loathing she was now watering with a different kind of nourishment than her earlier drinking and white stuff formula. There was the wholeness of a hole in her diamond ring that, even at size 3, still swung loose on her finger, days she did not feel so swollen.

He had surprised her, coming back one night to her apartment on the premise he had left his storehouse keys behind. “Check the coffee table, will you?” came his shout, muffled as he dug around a box in the other room. It was one of those flex-foldable 5 buckaroo boxes from Ikea; she had designated one as his — glad he needed space much smaller than a closet. He left only a few change of clothes and a notebook. Of course, he had placed the ring box on the table and he came out in time to watch her expression change.

The rift became a hole that became a yawning pit, a widening space, a gulf. She sees it, feels it best when she’s left the office and is driving home at night — when she has time to let her mind travel its own veins, on roads more tenuous yet harder than asphalt. It has gone from something she’d put on the same level of urgency as two day old salsa to something with lifelike menace within days that he first put the distance behind him and between them, when he left, telling her he would be back in an hour. With each night she passes, she’s aware of it now on a visceral level — driving head long into an abyss. The end point has vanished. This large empty space has the power to constrict her as if it were too a sinuous, fat boa. She’s swallowed up in dark space and straining against ligature marks.

It grows and grows. When he comes back. When he leaves. When his family hurts. When she hurts. When she tells him she needs to leave. When she spies his small box in her room.

The hole has changed the world irrevocably. Like, someone above had wiggled large god-like fingers around the water and land-masses — some sinking, others roiling up into new formations until you no longer knew where you were on the map, and there’s no going back to the way things were. It was a fray you’d once find lending character to a thoughtfully decorated room — maybe, a stray feathery almost pretty fray at which you’d smile and absentmindedly pick, from the plumed throw pillow from which it first broke loose. It’s a new world and a new map.