Photo: Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2006

You see the Adriatic Sea and the sky above in matching twilight blue.

You see me sitting on the white stucco balcony of the apartment we rented for the week in Dubrovnik. I’m wearing a short yet demure skirt, seasonally appropriate camisole, these lime-and-white tweed flats from Old Navy that I thought made me look like a “creative professional” at the job I had that supported us both. I’m dressed for an evening in the straight-out-of-a-travel-magazine Old City, which looks as if the whole thing were carved out of limestone that glows at night. I’ll get gelato again, maybe at the place with the tall ponytailed girl who seemed disdainful toward me at the time but who, given the region’s recent history, the bullet holes and walls pocked by mortar shells, the benefit CDs organized by Pearl Jam, had probably just lived through hell.

You see the photo album I post online. It looks like a great trip. A tour bus into Bosnia & Hercegovina, to see the UNESCO World Heritage Site town of Mostar, a jewel-box mosque, a place where young men jump off an old bridge to impress the girls. Another tour-bus trip through the newly separated Montenegro, up a vertiginous road called the Serpentine to a farming village for ham-and-cheese sandwiches with hyper-local ingredients (including the pigs) and honey wine, the national drink. We took a ferry to a haunted island called Lokrum, site of an abandoned Napoleon-era monastery, olive groves, and peacocks; once the last ferry leaves for the night, there are no people there, on account of the haunting.

I regurgitate the trip for people in these photo captions when I get home. I parrot the well-worn phrases.

You don’t see the separate beds he and I slept in at the apartment, a mirror of how we were back home, where I would go to bed at a normal time to get up for my 9-to-5 job, and he kept lunatic unemployed hours, crashing onto the couch just as I was rising for the day, waking when I returned from work.

You don’t see that he and I are at the end of our decade together, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. We are about eight years past when we should have broken up. You don’t see that we had this trip planned and budgeted months in advance, so I cynically decided to go ahead with it, with him, rather than do the harder, more complicated thing.

You don’t see that he told me, only after we were back home: “I wanted to hold your hand in Croatia.” I didn’t touch him in Croatia, or any of the other countries. I am not a cold person.

You see this photo, Adriatic Sea, twilight blue.