When my train pulled into San Mateo station, he was waiting by the car. I spotted him across the platform and raised my hand as I headed toward the crosswalk. He lifted his arm in return. As I approached, I put my book back in the bag and airpods into the case. He gave me a hug, warmly, as always. My face rested against his chest, and I was immediately surrounded by that familiar whiff.

“You smell like you,” I said.

There was no other way to describe it. That mixture of cat litter, the damp, earthy scent of the water in that house, and the air from the tennis court. There were no other things that smelled like that. That was the only way I could name it. A smell that only belonged to him.

“It’s good to see you,” he said, placing the key fob in my hand.

“Am I driving?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He moved toward the front passenger side. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, “Do you want to go to Redwood City?”

“Is that the art supply place?”

“Yeah, let me call them actually.”

We sat in the car side by side while I called the store. During the wait times, we caught up on life. He told me the small, trivial details of his days. In the middle of our chats, the store gave me a quote for the canvas I needed. It was much more expensive than what I could get from the other art supply place. I thanked them and hung up.

“Okay never mind. That was way more than Flax,” I said, giving up on this option. “Where should we go?”

“If you want, we can go to Flax now,” he suggested.

“Right now?” Flax is in the city, and we hadn’t planned to go into the city that day. “Sure. Am I driving?”

We checked Flax’s closing hour first. Once we confirmed that we were heading into the city, I tapped on the touchscreen to change the driver setting. Our first names appeared in small caps in the dropdown menu. It was the way he writes, everything in lowercase. I tapped on my name, and the driver’s seat shifted forward to match my height, while the rearview mirrors adjusted simultaneously. I pulled out and took us towards 101 north. As I turned onto the local streets and passed the traffic lights, “I think you should go a little faster,” he said.

 “I lost all of my confidence.” I said, steering and picking up speed slightly.

We entered the highway and continued to chat about random things. I asked him to play some music. He then switched between a few artists before ending up on Leonard Cohen.

“Oh, I really like him,” I exclaimed. “I named one of my paintings after one of his songs.” I went on: “That one’s sold, which is kind of sad. It’s such a weird space… art business. Sometimes you feel sad when you sell things. And sometimes you want to throw things away, and it’s not about how much time you spent on them.”

“Yeah. I heard that Picasso has produced nearly fifty hundred pieces throughout his lifetime. That’s more than one piece per day.” He affirmed.

We kept driving, and I told him about what had been bothering me recently, that the body of work I’d been working on didn’t feel cohesive. Since we were already talking about art, he added, “I realized an artist I know is in that show you’re in.”

I interrupted, “Oh! Yea, that show has a lot of good artists.”

He mentioned the artist’s name, her works and a show of hers he’d recently attended, then he let it slip: “She’s a friend of Emily and I met her through Emily.”

I stayed with the flow of the conversation. “Yeah, I saw an artist I know at the show as well. Lots of wonderful artists are in it. I’m proud to be in that show.”

We were heading north. The cars around us glided along, and traffic wasn’t too heavy.

“So yeah, we usually hit traffic around this time. This is my way home from work. My office is over there,” he said, pointing to the right, then suggested: “You need to move one lane to the left soon.”

“Do you still go to the office?” I flicked the signal lever down.

“Three days a week. I’m not driving that much.”

“I can tell. Your mileage hasn’t gone up a lot…” I kept driving forward, but finally, let down my guard, lowered my voice and exhaled. “Can you not talk about Emily?” I said quietly.

That was new. It was new that he’d now met one of her friends, and I was tired of having to keep up with the updates. He’d once hinted that he wouldn’t talk about me, or anything related to his dating life, with his ex-wife. Plus, every time I joked about wanting to meet her as a reader, he’d say he wasn’t going to see her with me. Then why couldn’t he have that same level of sensitivity with me, as if I didn’t have feelings…?

Silence filled the car. As we approached San Francisco, mist covered the skies.

I took a breath. “What is going on with this weather?!”

“Yeah, it’s been this shitty the past four, five days.” He said.

We talked about other things, about work and relocation and future. Between chitchat and silence, I asked, “Why do you still want to stay friends with me?”

“Do you not want to stay friends? If one of us is hurting, maybe that’s not a good idea.”

I stayed quiet at first. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, I mumbled, “I just didn’t want to lose you.” I think he heard it.

That has been the reason I didn’t bring any of this up. I knew that if we ever confronted the unspoken thing between us, he might tell me it’s better we don’t stay in touch. Truth is, perhaps, I was asking him a question I should have been asking myself. Do I really have a reason to stay friends with him, except for how much I still need him in life right now, as an immigrant, as someone who is too much in need of an emergency contact, someone who will be there for me?

 “I’m sure you have a lot of people in your life you can lean on,” he said. That was the moment I felt it, that tension that stirred up every unpleasant memory from the past. One of those moments when you realize you’ve truly lost something, when the damage stops feeling abstract and becomes permanent and sharply defined. I held the wheel tighter. With each breath, I felt a tear climbing up my chest.

We took the exit from 101 and entered the city. I kept talking as we passed through the traffic lights, my words spaced out by long silences. He seemed to have picked up that something shifted. Then I started talking about things that signaled my changes against the fundamental problems that we always knew between us, and that underlying signal was precisely a resistant struggle against our failure. “Hmm-huh,” repeatedly, he said, after each of my sentences.

“What are you thinking?” I kept my eyes on the road.

“I’m just listening.” He said.

I inhaled. “Do you think we will be friends forever?” We were moving uphill through the Victorian apartments.

“If you move to New Zealand, it would be difficult to stay in touch.” He dropped a joke, casually and without much feeling.

He was the one who suggested we stay friends when we first ended things. At the time, I stubbornly believed I’d forget about him the next day. But through all the breaks and returns, we’ve ended up here. He’d been providing too much of the help I needed. Losing him would’ve meant losing the support I still depend on. And yet, the more time we spent together, the more it felt like I was being kept around to fill in a blank space. Now that things have become more certain on the other end, has our friendship also become less significant?

I turned to look at him. My eyes met his, and tears dropped instantly. I turned back to look ahead and drove forward, thinking about how funny my tears were. It was not like one of us was dying. The car moved downhill through the city streets. At the exact moment I let out a sniff, he said: “If you want to cry, you can pull over and do that…”

“No. I’m okay,” I responded quickly. “It’s just…”

“No, I don’t want to sit in a car that feels dangerous.”

“Ah.” I hadn’t realized until he pointed it out. I said faintly: “Sorry. I’m sorry…” I started trying to switch lanes and pull to the right. “How do I do this… So, are you going to drive?”

“Maybe.”

After missing one block, I pulled over in a parking lot. We both stepped out of the car to switch seats. Once I settled in, I touched the screen to switch the driver back to his name in the dropdown menu.

He sat in, adjusted the rearview mirror, and said again, “I just didn’t want to be sitting in a car that felt dangerous.”

As he started moving the car, I looked over at him and said: “You are my emergency contact.”

“No way. What about your housemates? Or all those people you keep in touch with around the world?”

“It’s true. You can check it. It’s in my phone.” I pointed to it, resting in the holder clipped to the AC vent.

It was true. I didn’t like bothering friends. And he was the person who was the least a friend in my contact in the area.

We arrived at Fort Mason, and I pointed toward Flax with my hand. “Over there.” The car rolled through the empty parking lot, and he pulled up in front of the store and parked.

“You’re coming?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I jumped out and ran to the door of the art supply store, and he followed behind me as I headed straight to the canvas section and grabbed three twenty-four by thirty canvases. “Do you think I should just grab a whole bunch of them while I am here?”

“If you can carry them on Caltrain.”

“True.”

As I stood there, unsure how many canvases to take, my mind was still stuck on the thing I’d said I didn’t want to talk about. I turned to him and finally let it out. “Lucian, what’s happening between you and Emily?”

“We’re dating,” he said plainly. I looked up at him, in that moment, straight into his eyes, and paused for a second as I stepped closer: “Did I lose you?” I said softly.

“I don’t think it was ever going to happen between us.” His voice was even. “Not in the past. Not now. Not in the future.” He looked at me, paused and softened his voice a little: “I don’t really want to talk about this here… I’m heading back to the car. You can come to the car when you’re done.”

What he said was true. I had no words to resist it. It was not meant to be in the past. Not meant to be now. Not meant to be in the future, perhaps.

After I paid, I carried the canvases to the car, tossed them into the trunk, and then slipped into the front seat. As soon as I sat down, he said, “I don’t want that in the future when we see each other it’s like this. If you want to talk about things, I want us to do it in a mature way, in an environment where we both feel comfortable, instead of having emotions spill out like that in public.”

“You are very right,” I admitted. “I am sorry that I did that. I had no boundaries with my emotions.”

“If you want a closer relationship, it is not going to happen,” he said coldly.

I honestly didn’t know whether my objective was still to win him back or what. I was well aware of our problems, but something was still bugging me. I couldn’t even bring myself to say a prayer for us, because I didn’t know if getting back together would even be a good idea. If he actually wanted to try again, that would mean confronting everything I’d already tried, again and again, to cut ties with.

In that seat, I could smell that mix of earthy water, cat, and everything unnamed. That smell that belonged only to his house, that kept me awake at night whenever I stayed over. That smell that never felt like it included me.

I think I just needed a closure.

We’d stayed too close. Cuddling on Sunday morning while he read. Crashing at his place whenever I was in town. When I couldn’t find my ID the other day, the first place I thought to check was his car. Sometimes, when we saw each other, he still looked into my eyes the same intense way he did when we were together.

“Okay… apparently, we still have a lot to talk about,” he suggested, “but it’s a twenty-minute drive to the Caltrain station. We can talk on the way.”

“Didn’t you still want to do grocery shopping?”

“Right.” He searched the map and pinned a Whole Foods in Nob Hill. “We’ll go this way,” he showed me the route on the map. “And then head to Caltrain this way.”

Lucian rolled the car out of the parking lot. We turned onto Marina Boulevard and started moving uphill, heading south.

“Why do you want me in your life?” I asked.

“I think you’re an interesting person and you’re weird.” He pulled into traffic. It was a different answer from the last time I asked him.

“Huh, ah, ha. Okay…”

“Is that okay?”

“Yeah. That just means you really understand me.”

As we drove through Pacific Heights, I asked again if he’d still be coming to the party at my opening, and whether it was still okay for me to crash at his that night. He said it was fine for me to stay, but he might and might not be coming to the party. I acknowledged it with the assumption that he just thought we should set a different type of boundary now, but then he added, “Emily will be going.”

“Oh…”

“No... She is already going,” he explained: “She belongs to that circle so she’s going to be there no matter what.”

“What…!”

“Is that okay for you?”

I blinked and looked the other direction. “Yeah.” I said, in that kind of default politeness: “It’s actually cool.”

“It’s like,” I added. “I am Gracie Abrams and you are dating Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift is coming to my concert.”

“I’m glad you get that.” He said as the car parked on an uphill slope at a stop sign.

“You should still come. It’s fine.” I said.

“Are you sure you will be okay?”

“Yea. It’s okay,” I let out a laugh. “I’ve already invited enough people to make the group very awkward.”

“Is the guy you are seeing coming?”

“No. He was there on Saturday already.” Saturday was a soft opening.

“I see.”

“But, in this case, I might just invite him then.”

We were getting close to Whole Foods. Waiting at a traffic light, Lucian asked a couple of follow-up questions about the new person’s job and background. I answered honestly.

“So is he madly in love with you?” He asked.

“I don’t know…!” I exclaimed, but then shared a few things about our interactions. “It just seems to be a really good match…” My voice went quieter.

“It seems to be not a good match?” He heard it wrong.

“No,” I clarified. “A really good match.”

“So you are just not feeling right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I told him that for now it was just that I was not over him, but then looked into his eyes with a smile and told him a few nice things about the new person.

Lucian glanced over at me with a faint smile. We turned into the parking structure, circled for a bit, and quickly found a spot. He commented that he’d never been to this Whole Foods before. It was much bigger than the other ones. “This is like that Costco we went to in Santa Clara.” He said.

“That one was in Sunnyvale,” I corrected him. Then, we slipped into the crowd, each with a basket in hand. In the store, we lost each other. Before checking out, I tried to find him and finally spotted him near the registers, looking around. When I called out his name, he said he’d been looking for me too. We then stood in line together, paid separately, and returned to the car.

I checked my phone as soon as I sat down: “The next train is in forty minutes.”

“It takes about twenty minutes to get there,” he uttered.

“Hm… let me see.” I checked my phone again: “Yeah, I think it’s okay that we just get that one, otherwise we’d have to rush.”

The car exited the parking structure. On the way, we talked about writing and some ideas he’d recently come across. He gave me a few suggestions for some art career ideas I can consider after I finish business school, and I praised him for his good senses about how the art world is like. When we got near the station, I asked if he wanted to hang out in the car for a bit. He then started circling around the station to find a place to park.

“So what’s going on?” I asked as he pulled over by the street.

In response, he recounted what had happened over the weekend, told me what was coming up, then mentioned that a new neighbor was moving in upstairs.

“Was Monika the original neighbor?"

“Monika?”

“Isn’t her name Monika?”

“No.” He corrected me and told me the original neighbors' names and their jobs, then teased me, in a way hinting that I must have confused him with someone else, in a plain statement: “That was somebody else.”

I glanced at the clock and said: “Let’s move in… two minutes.”

We were still talking about neighbors, so he kept going: “Downstairs is Doug,” he added.

“Yeah, I met him…”

“When did you meet him?” He asked calmly.

“When I arrived.” I added: “That time when I stayed for the cats.”

At that moment, as the conversation landed there, something caught in my chest. Something I had been carrying for a long time that seemingly was in fact the root of everything.

“You told him that I was the sitter,” I complained.

Lucian grinned, too casually. “I am sure that he could tell that you’re a friend, not someone I paid to catsit.”

I stared at him, and it seemed he sensed that the glance carried a slight weight of intimidation. “Did you want me to tell him that you were a friend?” He asked.

“At least… a friend.” I responded.

“I’m sure that he knew that you weren’t just a cat sitter.”

“No. He actually read ‘sister’,” I said, “So I’m like, I’m not a sister. What the heck?”

“Oh, that’s funny. He’s dyslexic. Sometimes when I send him the code, he’d flip the numbers and keep getting it wrong…” He added: “And he also knows that I have a sister who lives nearby.”

“The reason I knew is because he sent me the entire text you sent him.”

“He sent you what text..?” He didn’t understand what I said.

“He copied and pasted your text and sent it to me.” I rephrased it.

He paused, frowning, “He showed you the text I sent him?” then sniffed: “What a weirdo.”

The two minutes had passed. Lucian was about to start driving, but that thing caught my mind: “I also just really don’t like that…”

Once I started talking, he immediately paused and leaned back slightly, as if giving me space to speak.

“I also just really don’t like that…” I inhaled. “When we started dating, you were the one who was even more sure, but now you are acting as if there were nothing. We had a past and when I am addressing it while you aren’t, it puts me in a really bad place, and that’s also the part that hurts me the most.”

I looked out through the windshield. “I can accept that we choose to be friends right now and that it is a mutual decision, but we still have a past and I’d like that we both acknowledge that.”

And there came a brief silence while he made sure I was done speaking.

“That was very well said,” he uttered softly.

He started driving. We talked about some of our near future plans. As the car was approaching the station, I added, “I am thankful that you called me out about crying in the public. I am sorry that I didn’t have boundaries with my emotions.”

He pulled over, stepped out of the car as I did, and opened the trunk so I could grab my canvases. He gave me a hug, warmly, as always, but slightly more distant than every other time we had parted in the past. We said we’d see each other soon, and I walked toward the train. On the train, I texted:

I think our conversation earlier was very productive.

i agree. glad we got to that conversation. His reply returned promptly.

That night, falling asleep to the thought of the sudden July chill, I remembered a few weeks earlier, when Lucian took me to the DMV in San Mateo. It was sunny that day, but the evening cooled quickly. I thought I needed a jacket when he dropped me off at the station. “I remember you said I left my jacket here, right?” I asked. He immediately turned back to grab it from the backseat and handed it to me.

“It smells like you now,” I grinned, put on the jacket, jumped out of the car, and shut the door behind me.

And for now, that smell still lingers in the corners of my wardrobe. Some of my bags and outerwears still carry traces of it. Sometimes, I feel like I can sense the phantom of it in the air of my bedroom. Sometimes, when I turn over in bed, it’s as if the smell of his bedsheets slips in through a dream. But soon, I’m certain, sometime soon, like any smell no longer connected to its source, it will drift away on the wind.