For several minutes, I remained on the sofa with my hands resting on my knees. I could still hear traffic outside and the soft mechanical click of the refrigerator in the kitchen, ordinary sounds that made her absence feel even stranger. Part of me expected her to come back and say the whole conversation had gotten out of control. Another part knew that if she did, we would almost certainly return to the same argument with different words.
I poured a small drink and stepped onto the balcony. The city below was full of people making plans, changing plans, meeting someone new, and going home alone, without knowing that my own life had just split into a before and an after. I felt humiliation, anger, grief, and an embarrassing urge to call Emily and ask why she couldn't understand what she'd done. Instead I opened the email thread with Martin and told him my move was firmly on track.
I didn't sleep much that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I remembered a different version of Emily: the girl laughing at our awful karaoke, the young woman crying after losing her job, the person who once said she loved how safe she felt with me. Those memories didn't disappear because she'd said something cruel, and I didn't think they should. I was beginning to understand that ending a relationship could be the right decision and still feel like losing part of your history.
Around three in the morning, I picked up my phone and opened our message thread. There were thousands of ordinary exchanges about groceries and train times, along with photographs from vacations and notes from difficult days when one of us had needed encouragement. I typed several sentences explaining that I had accepted Amsterdam, deleted them, and set the phone down again. She'd spent the evening telling me I was afraid to change; I didn't need to prove that accusation wrong in the middle of the night.
By dawn, I knew I needed space from the argument rather than another round of it. I muted her contact first, then blocked her personal number after remembering how easily a single accusatory message could pull me back into hours of justification. It wasn't a public punishment, and I didn't announce it to her friends. I just needed to stop reaching for the phone every time I felt the urge to ask her whether she'd meant what she said.
The next morning I made coffee in the same kitchen where we'd eaten hundreds of breakfasts together. Her favorite mug was still beside the sink, and a spare hair tie lay on the counter near the fruit bowl. I put them in a small box with the few other belongings she'd left behind. The gesture seemed almost ceremonial, but it was mainly practical; there would be decisions about the apartment, and I wanted to be able to handle them without inventing another reason to keep in touch.