Finale

We'd said we'd watch it together. Even after. Even when the boxes were in the hall and his half of the bookshelf was a row of dust marks. "We'll still do the finale," he said, and I said yes, because we'd started the show together on a sofa in a different flat six years ago and it felt like the sort of thing you finish. Then the night came round and I texted him and he didn't reply, and I sat with the remote in my hand for forty minutes, and then I pressed play. The flat was strange. I'd only been alone in it for three weeks. The sofa was mine, he'd never liked it, but the TV was one we'd bought together and the stand it was on was his brother's and the blanket was from his mum. I'd not worked out yet which things were going to get sent on and which I was going to keep out of spite. The episode started with the theme, the full version, the one they only do for premieres and finales. I've heard it maybe two hundred times. It went through me like a draught. For the first twenty minutes I kept turning to say things. That's the thing about watching with someone for six years. You've got a whole language. A look that means "he's lying". A noise that means "she's going to die". The way he used to grab my knee in the tense bits without looking, like a reflex. There was a tense bit about twenty-five minutes in and I actually felt my knee waiting. Nobody grabbed it. And then, somewhere in the middle, something changed. I stopped turning. I stopped narrating in my head. I just watched. I noticed things I'd never have noticed with him there, because with him there half of my attention was always on him, on what he was thinking, on whether we were watching the same show. There's a scene near the end where the two main characters, who've been circling each other for five seasons, finally sit down on a bench, and one says to the other, "We did it wrong, didn't we," and the other says, "We did it the only way we could," and I burst out laughing. Actually laughing. Alone in my half-empty flat at ten past ten on a Sunday night. Because it was so on the nose, and because it was also true, and because he wasn't there to see me laugh and I found that I didn't mind.

The ending was fine. It wasn't the one I'd have written. Nothing ever is. He texted at half eleven. "Sorry, work thing. Watch it tomorrow?" I looked at it for a bit. Then I typed: "Already watched it. It's good. You'll like the bench." I didn't explain. He'll get to the bench and he'll either understand or he won't. Either way I've folded the blanket from his mum and put it in a box in the hall, and I've moved the TV stand to the other wall, where I always thought it should go, and where it looks, honestly, much better.