“You cut it really close,” my sister observed. 

All of her entertainment for the three hour train ride – a rose gold iPad, a Delia Owens paperback, and a pair of Airpods – arranged neatly on the table in front of her. The train’s route snaked through unfamiliar and barren territory; distant suburbs and cities swallowed by corn fields that various college classmates originated from, but that held no significance to me. I was eager to play voyeur to the sundried pastures that filled the space between Chicago and Springfield, Illinois. 

The train rolled from the station minutes after Beloved and I were seated, as if to wag a warning finger in our faces. We had left far too late in the afternoon to catch a 5:20 train and hit traffic on Lower Wacker, of course. I white knuckled the handle of my duffle bag all the way to the station, my mind fringed with nerves. Despite our impending, non-negotiable breakup, I invited Beloved to accompany me to my cousin’s wedding, And then he almost made us miss the train. 

“The idea of you meeting my entire family weeks before you break up with me makes me want to die,” I had texted him, in June. “But I also want to go with you.” 

“Whatever you want,” he replied. “I understand.”

It burned me up that he was so nonchalant about all of it. 

One January evening, a few weeks shy of our two year anniversary, he pitched the plan to me. “By the next time I have to go away,” he informed me, “We should break up.” 

Not “I will break up with you,” or “you will break up with me.” An abstract, third thing– “we will break up.” An omnipotent force, a mindless and painless separation that stripped blame from both of us. An act of God or nature, but definitely not either one of us. This is how it would be clean. This is how it would be OK.

It had been seven months since he told me that he didn’t want to break up right away, but that he enjoyed attention from other women. It had been six months since I agreed to stay with him until circumstance stepped in to kill off our love. It had been five months since we celebrated Valentine’s day, and everything felt hollow and wrong, and he used money to soothe me.  It had been four months since I attended his step-sister’s wedding and guests fawned over us, saying we made the most beautiful couple. Holding back tears, I watched him stand beside the wedding party in his custom tuxedo, and I was in love with him and ashamed of myself. It had been three months since we went on a trip to New York and I pretended to be happy as we drifted between vintage stores and lesbian bars. Three months since we fought in his parked car outside of my apartment about how he never wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I lied to my roommate that we were having seasonal allergies to cover up the fact that we had been sobbing minutes before entering the house. It had been two months since he booked a national tour and told me that we “didn’t need to break up for this one,” and a full moon rose and I seriously considered ending things. But I didn’t. I stayed. 

 It had been one month since I collapsed in a drunken, mascara-streaked heap in our friend’s arms after a rained-out pride parade, and unloaded the miserable weight of all of this onto her. 

And now, I was taking him to a family wedding.

Beloved slept, his head in my lap, and I played with his bleached hair. He looked so at peace. I felt uncomplicatedly in love with him then– just a person admiring another person– and I did not shame myself for it. 

Hours later, the train slowed to a stop in Springfield, which was dead and dark before us. The sun had set hours ago, and only a few yellow street lamps lit the empty streets of the city. It was so much smaller than I had anticipated, and the air was hot and thick, even at the late hour, as though we were trapped under a dome. My eyes shifted to Beloved, who was not looking at me, but around at the lack of people, lack of clothing stores, lack of civilization. I often melted for these types of small towns, with their old brick buildings and fringe alternative scenes, but I knew that my lover did not see kitsch or novelty in a groaning, loping city. He only saw the roads that would lead back to something more. 

“Do you think there’s a gay bar here?” I asked with a smile.

We followed my sister and her boyfriend towards the hotel. My bag, full of formalwear, was heavy on my shoulder, and Beloved offered to carry it. I admired his strength, and then I ached. As we walked down a quiet main road, I glimpsed a beam of pink light, the snap of a rainbow flag in light wind. It couldn’t be– but it was. 

The only business on the main street that was teeming with life, like a shining veneer in a mouth of gray teeth, was a gay bar. It was called Clique. Music and lively conversations hovered in the distance like a mirage of sound, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Beloved and I exchanged a surprised look and dissolved into a fit of laughter. As my sister announced that we had actually been walking the wrong way, Beloved and I declared that we would be returning to Clique that same night. 

Hours later, after greeting my parents in the hotel, and a quick change into better clothes, the rains came. It broke open that opaque black sky with a Biblical vengeance. Beloved and I holed up in a dark corner of the gay bar, our backs to the dance floor, which was empty save for a few revelers who jumped between beams of yellow and blue light on the elevated platform. From the rolled-up windows, I saw lightning slice through the sky, and we buried our faces into one another’s shoulders, laughing at a video only we would find funny. It was times like this that I could ignore his mounting disapproval of me, his impatience. Perhaps I was pathetic. Perhaps I was trying to scrape at the bottom of the cup, groveling for our last dregs of sweetness that had gathered there like hardened honey. 

In the humid, dark expanse of Springfield in July, I took what I could get.