The Emotional Furniture

I learned the exact weight of the carpet fibers against my cheek because that’s where I waited when she told me not to stand.

Karina’s door opens like weather. So sudden, pressure change, my lungs forgetting what they’re for, and I’m already counting. The soft click of her shoes means she’s tired, the drag of her bag strap means she’ll sigh before she speaks, the citrus-clean smell means she showered and won’t want to talk. I narrate myself to stay useful. Be quiet. Be smaller. I have trained myself into a surface she can lean on without noticing the bruises.

I tell myself this is devotion, not erasure. I tell myself that love is learning the negative space around a person which the places they don’t look, the words they don’t finish, the silences they expect you to hold steady. I am very good at steady. I can hold her coat while she rummages through her phone, her fingers flicking light across her face, the glow bouncing into my eyes like a promise she doesn’t remember making.

When she enters a room my heart does this stupid, humiliating thing—like a dog who’s learned a trick that hurts but performs it anyway because sometimes there’s a treat. The thud-thud stutters, skips, then settles into a beat I can breathe around. The way she taps her thumbnail against her lip when she’s thinking, the way she never finishes her water, the way she leaves the lamp on even in daylight because she likes the idea of warmth more than the sensation of it. I memorize the habits so I can anticipate, so I can be there a half-second before she realizes she needs someone.

Standing In: When I Became Her Shadow

The extreme thing happened on a Thursday, which is important because Thursdays are when she forgets. She forgot an appointment she’d promised she’d keep—and I volunteered my body to stand in for her absence. I went in her place. I smiled with her mouth. I apologized with her cadence. I took the heat that should have landed on her shoulders and let it scorch me, nodded until my neck ached, promised fixes I couldn’t authorize. I signed my name in a box meant for hers and told myself that identity is a soft thing if you press it long enough.

The humiliation wasn’t the lying. It was how good it felt to be mistaken for her usefulness.

After, I texted her: Handled it. Two words. A gift. I watched the typing bubble appear and disappear, appear and disappear, my pulse syncing to it like a metronome. Then: Thanks.

No punctuation.

She remained blissfully unaware of the cost because costs are invisible to the furniture. You don’t thank the chair for holding you up. You don’t ask the chair how it feels to be sat on. I don’t tell her that I skipped my own obligations, that I bent my life around hers like wet wire. I don’t tell her that my palms were damp with someone else’s anger, that my voice shook and I swallowed it down because her voice would never shake like that.

I delete parts of myself she doesn’t like before she must notice them. I laugh softer. I edit my opinions into shapes that won’t bruise her. I wait outside in the cold because she said she’d be “just a minute,” and minutes are elastic if you’re devoted. The smell of rain metallic on my tongue, the ache in my calves, the way my phone screen dims and dims until it goes dark... these become rituals.

Seeing the Cost Clearly

When she finally appears and says, “Oh… you’re still here,” I feel something shift. Still. Continuity used to feel like proof of my place in her world, but now it feels like a mirror showing the cost of always bending. I carry that realization with me—Still here, but for me, not for her. Still worthy, not just useful. Somewhere deep, I know this devotion has been a narrowing path, scraping against my edges. Love isn’t meant to make one person disappear while the other walks freely, it should feel like two people standing face to face. Finally, I give permission to value myself, reclaim the space I’ve ceded, and hold my own life as carefully as I once held hers.

If she ever looked at me and really saw me, I don’t know if I’d want her to. Because I see her now. I see how small her gratitude is, how careless she is with the pieces of me she uses and discards. I see how effortless it is for her to walk through life, leaving me plastered to the walls like wallpaper she barely notices. The way she makes me kneel, makes me wait, makes me turn myself inside out for a single syllable of acknowledgment. I hate the way I still crave it. I’ve built my body, my voice, my sense of self into a tool for someone who wouldn’t pause to feel my weight if I fell apart at her feet. Love isn’t this. This—this empty, aching, self-erasing service is something else. Something bitter. Something that tastes like hate, and maybe, finally, that taste is mine alone.